Face The Sun: Let There Be Light.

To Stand on Jericho's Walls and Face the Sun.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

1:00 on a Tuesday, and I standing outside of an embassy killing time before the meeting I arrived half an hour too early for. Two guys, early twenties, passed by wearing shorts and t-shirts. "My first year of Chinese," the one guy said, "really focused on -- I mean, the primary thing that we focused on, I guess, was..."

"I can't tell you," his friend interrupted, "how little I care."

Posted by Dakota on 11:10 AM link |

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Normally the smog in Beijing is a thick grey haze that makes the city look out of focus, like the problem is perhaps caused by your eyes and not by the thousands of coal-fired power plants that ring the city. This morning, though, the sunrise light is catching the pollution in just the right way, and it's making the entire view out my bedroom window glow red, like an orange filter has been placed over the sun. It can't be healthy. It's kind of oddly nice, though.

Posted by Dakota on 5:39 PM link |

Thursday, April 02, 2009

I'm packing to leave China. That is, I'm doing the pre-pack sweep to begin finally ridding myself of some of the years of crap accumulated through an unrelenting packratism. The fact that the US Government will happily cart around some 7,000 pounds of stuff on my behalf provides no incentive to throw things out, and I'm ankle deep in crap that I barely recognize.

I just found a cache of notebooks, an item I'm particularly horrified at throwing away. One of them was scrawled with grammatical notes on Swedish; a few pages in it switches to Hungarian. I had to read a different notebook almost in its entirety before I figured out what language the 20-some pages were referring to. Animate feminine nouns are derived from animate masculine nouns through an internal vowel shift, routinely a or u to i, with the final vowel (either a or i) unpredictable. Are you kidding me? No chance. Ignore this rule. Turns out it was Sinhala, one of the Sri Lankan languages.

I've got notebooks -- multiple -- full of a nearly verbatim transcript from A-100, our Intro To Bureaucracy training class. I can't bear to re-read them (yawn), but can't throw them away.

There are a fistful of other notebooks with scrawlings from college, not of class notes, but of fragments of conversations I wanted to remember. Some of them are from traveling and seem priceless, even though I've long since written about the trips themselves. Once contained only the sentence, Brussels is eerily quiet.. Others have just a few sentences out of context. For example:

-- 15 March 2003: Anti-War Protests on the Mall. "What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? NOW!" "Hey idiots: we're AT peace. You want peace LATER."

-- He just thinks he's Kermitt the Frog. He's not weird.

-- Not since the third grade have I had a teacher refer to the numerator as "upstairs."

-- He had a heart attack? I didn't know he had a heart.

-- Do you ever get the feeling that the person giving the eulogy would rather be in the box?

-- The world bank protests have been CANCELLED?! But, what are we going to do about all this asymmetrical discretionary fiscal spending? It hurts us ALL!

Posted by Dakota on 1:20 AM link |

Friday, February 27, 2009

I prefer the term "punch it out," but Obama uses "fist bump," so that's what I went with. "Madame Secretary, can we fist bump?" "Oh YEAH!" she responded, with great enthusiasm.

And the rest was history.

Posted by Dakota on 6:19 AM link |

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Last night I met up with some people from the Polish Embassy for drinks. There was a Cypriot and a fistful of Greeks there as well. About halfway through our time together, one of the Poles excitedly asked -- do you know who you remind me of?

"Matt Damon?" I responded hopefully.

"No, no no no," she said. "You are JUST like that squirrel from Ice Age -- the one who is crazy about getting acorn!"

The Greeks and Cypriot didn't hesitate before vocalizing their agreement: just like the squirrel.

"It's not bad thing," she said. "He is cute squirrel."

Fan. Tastic.

Edited to add this side-by-side comparison, brought to you by Quixote:

Posted by Dakota on 2:57 AM link |

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

In preparation for my grand return to the United States in a scant six months, I've begun updating my internet dating portfolio. Doing so naturally involves a lot of "research," which itself involves obsessively reading other people's portfolios and then whining to my friends that I'm not attractive enough. But with six months to hammer away on the portfolio, I'm hoping I can make it brilliant enough to snare at least a few people before they realize that my body type isn't actually "athletic and toned" as I've selected, but rather is "lumpy," which wasn't a choice on the match.com menu.

In researching other people's portfolios, I stumbled across one that included the following lines, which are brilliant but which I probably can't steal outright, since we'll be on the same internet dating website.

I'm particularly fond of parenthetical statements and stage directions.

When given the choice between cheese or chocolate, I tend to have an aneurysm.

I think Venn diagrams are astounding graphical representations and should be used whenever possible.

That's the sort of brilliance I'm looking for. Six months: we can do this, people.

Posted by Dakota on 8:29 AM link |

Monday, February 09, 2009

A quick post, on the off chance there's any concern, to say that the massive, enormous fire (described to me as "seriously like 9/11") currently taking place at the Mandarin Oriental is a full 4 kilometers south of me, and I am thus not affected by it.

Posted by Dakota on 9:47 AM link |

Friday, February 06, 2009

A skippable linguistics sidenote piggybacking off that last post: on the off chance you're wondering where all the extra R's come from -- it stems from British English and their ridiculous spelling habits. Educated British English ("received pronunciation," if you will) is technically non-rhotic; that is, r's aren't pronounced unless they come before a vowel. Think of the British pronunciation of "four" or "New York" or "park" or any other word with a non-initial R -- the r's are dropped. Where the R used to be, the vowel is lengthened, and the same thing is true in their romanization systems that scatter r's willy nilly where there aren't any -- it's Myanmaa, not Myanmar or even Myanma: the last vowel is held, and the Brits back in the day flagged that with an R.

The same ridiculousness appears to have been applied to the semi-standard Thai romanization system in decently widespread use -- Khao Sarn road, for example, should be Khao Saan. But the Brits didn't have a hand in Thailand back when she was still coasting as Siam, so I don't know where they got it.

Excitingly, Koreans appear to have inflicted the system on themselves for no apparent reason. Thus, while a huge number of Koreans have the surname "Pak," they romanize it as "Park." The nuts and bolts of Korean romanization baffle me, though, and it's still unclear why millions of people with the surname "Yi" in Korean go by "Lee" when they're in the States.

Posted by Dakota on 11:28 PM link |

Here's something unexpected: the Burmese language lacks the letter R. Odd, since it seems to crop up all the time in place names like Burma and Myanmar and the Irriwady delta and Rangoon. But no, no R to speak of. Burma is actually Bamaa (so named for the Bamaa majority -- the name fails to take into account the other ethnic minorities who live there) while Myanmar is really Myanmaa -- the dodgy national airline is Myanma air. The Irriwady river, which cuts straight through the country, all the way to the coast that was devastated by Cyclone Nargis, is actually called the Ayeyawady, which locals pronounce just as Iyyewady.

Rangoon was re-romanized to Yangon (the Y is actually closer to a soft zh -- something like a light Zh'angon) in the same brush stroke that turned Burma into Myanmar back in 1989. The ruling body that made the changes was the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or the SLORC -- which, in my book, holds the all time record for Most Awesomely Evil Sounding Dictatorship Name ever. They're still in power, but on the advice of an American PR firm changed their name to something disappointingly less evil sounding: the State Peace and Development Council, or SPDC.

So Rangoon (she'll always be Rangoon to me -- call me old fashioned): a pleasant little town on the banks of the Irrawady. It's a bit dusty, but leafy green and full of broad avenues and narrow side streets.

First impression: Burma smells incredible. The whole of Rangoon smells like frying onions and street snacks. It's like everyone decided simultaneously to make pakoras. Everywhere you turn, there's an old woman selling something delicious -- cumin-studded fried dough, samosas stuffed with a citrusy onion-potato mixture, fried coconut-filled sandwichy-type things.

And there's curry everywhere. The Burmese are big on roadside eating, sitting on those tiny ridiculous Vietnam-style stools anywhere they can fit a table. They prefer Indian-style curry, thick and oily and served with rice, and if you still have rice left when your curry bowl is empty, they'll give you more gravy for free. My boss declared that Burma, sandwiched between the culinary wonderlands of both India and Thailand, had somehow managed to come up with the worst food in all of Asia. I think he's crazy: Burmese food is mostly Indian with just a hint of a Thai accent, a tinge of citrus to lighten things up. I can't get enough. (Also, so long as Mongolia continues to exist, there can be no competition for "worst food in Asia." The title's been won, hands down).

The only food I've hated thus far was Burmese hot sauce. It's blazingly spicy, which I love, but the base ingredient is river shrimp pounded into a smooth paste and then left to ferment. It tastes like spicy, rotting seafood. It's revolting.

My hotel was just off a two thousand year old pagoda, and just off said pagoda is a line of freelance astrologers and palm readers, all of them with signs and hand-lettered charts of palms and constellations and what have you. Having already established the awesome power of the Burmese astrologists -- recall that they arranged to have the capital city moved to a more auspicious location -- there was no way I was turning down a Burmese palm reading. There was a woman with a lazy eye who looked downright mystical and could almost undoubtedly see the future, but she had a line of people waiting for her and it wasn't clear from her sign that she spoke English.

I picked a a short largely-bald and semi-mustachioed gentleman named Gainonigyiton (or some such incomprehensible thing). According to Gainigyiton, my palm reads as follows:

1. Apparently, my palm shows an affinity with Venus, which by extension means that I have a tendency to easily weather problems, am generally outgoing in social situations and am comfortable at public speaking. So far so good, Mr Palm Reader.

2. I have a tendency to spend and not save, and I have a predilection for visiting other countries. (Half right: I save like a beast, and I feel like the whole "you like going to other countries" thing was kind of a gimme, all things considered).

3. I will be unlucky in love. Many women love me, but I have a tendency not to love them back. (Nailed it out of the park, Gainonigyiton!)

4. Having established that I will be unlucky in love, I can expect to be married twice -- once to a woman younger than me, and once to a woman my age. (Don't hold your breath there, Palmy).

5. Despite being unlucky in love, I can expect to have a lover by the end of this year. He didn't specifically mention Match.com, but I'm pretty sure it was implied.

6. My life line is optimistically long but poops out short of spectacular. I should plan on dying at age 87. I should expect good health until I'm 42, but then high blood pressure will kick in, but as long as I can hold on until I'm 55, I'll come into some money. Until then, I need to work on saving more. Thanks, life coach.

7. My fortune line is -- and I quote -- "short and weak." This means that I have bad luck and can generally expect to be poor. Fortunately, for a scant 2000 kyats, he was willing to sell me an amulet candle that I could burn at a pagoda to increase my fortune. I didn't realize I had to decline this option before he started carving things into it specifically for me, which then resulted in a sort had-to-purchase type situation. He carved a cross into it, because he assumed I'm Christian (all white people are Christian, was the thought). I told him that I'm not Christian, that I don't have a religion, and he told me: "no, you are Christian." Maybe it was in my palm somewhere.

So I took the candle to the biggest pagoda in all of Rangoon, the Shwedagon pagoda, and duly lit it in the same place that other people were lighting amulet-looking candles. It was put out twice by the wind and once by the flapping wings of a pigeon that had just burned off several of it's feathers by attempting to eat the wick out of a still-flaming oil lamp. I'm not sure what that means for my fortune line and future prosperity, but I have a feeling that it can't be good.

Posted by Dakota on 11:14 PM link |

The Burmese Embassy in Beijing rejected my visa application because I had no Chinese visa in my tourist passport, and as such they couldn't be sure I'd come back. They offered me a tourist visa in my diplomatic passport, but required a diplomatic note (which is a pain in the tail) and four days processing time, which I didn't have to spare.

On my Burmese visa application in Bangkok, I listed my profession as "diplomat," because I figured that if I wrote something else and they found out, I'd be tossed into a Burmese prison -- which might be fun for a little while, if I spoke Burmese (I've never been to prison anywhere, and I have no doubt that my fellow prisoners would have good stories). But aside from a mangled 'thank you', I don't speak Burmese, so diplomat on the application form it was.

They put my application on indefinite hold while they cabled back to Rangoon for approval. I wrote Burma off as dead figuring I'd try again in May, and began debating whether to take a bus to northern Laos or a flight to Bangladesh. I had my sights on Dhaka when the Burmese Embassy called and said my visa was approved. 24 hours later I had my visa in hand. 36 hours later, I was on a flight to Rangoon.

The flight into Rangoon is directly over rice paddies. The airport itself is only about five kilometers from downtown, but Burma is an impossible rural country -- some 80 percent of the population is involved in agriculture. There was a brief kerfuffle at customs about my profession (quoth my seatmate on the plane, a 60 ish year old British woman of Finnish decent: "why, in god's name, were you honest? ANYTHING is better than that. Make something up -- cleaner, bus driver, McDonalds manager, anything but that"), and despite having a visa, I was braced for a quick deportation. They waved me through without issue.

Some initial thoughts on Burma:

This above all: I had no idea Burma would feel like a South Asian nation. It's deeply Buddhist, shares its longest border with Thailand and is firmly a member of ASEAN. It never occured to me that the colonial British past might give it a flavor more like India than like Thailand.

It does feel an awful lot like India, though, albeit in a Buddhist pagoda-flavored sort of way. The way everyone wants to be helpful, the way they approach you on the street and just start talking, the food and the street-snacks, and just the general air of the place: it's got British colony written all over it. It's totally subcontinent.

I love it here.

Here's the other thing, though: in 2003, the Burmese banking sector collapsed. That same year, Western nations imposed sanctions on Burma that caused all the international banks to pack up shop and head elsewhere. This means that there is no functioning banking sector whatsoever in the entire nation of Burma. That fact particularly sucks for Burmese people and businesses, all of whom are crippled by a lack of easy capital. But it also sucks for travellers on the ground: aside from the cash you're carrying, there is absolutely no recourse to additional funds. There are no ATMs, no credit card advances, no places to cash a check or wire yourself money. If you run out of cash, you're completely screwed, period.

I tend to spend very little money when I travel. I like the five-dollar fleabag hotels, have no problems on long-haul buses without air conditioning and love street food more than anything in the universe. But I also tend not to think about money at all -- at the end of the day, I don't care how much money I spend. Travelling is what I save for.

The guidebook recommended 400 bucks for a two week trip on the cheap. I came into Burma with 300 bucks in US dollars and about forty bucks in Thai Baht. The baht are snake oil: no one wants them. That left 300 bucks for 8 days, or $37.50 a day. On my first day, I spent nearly 60 bucks. On the second day, I spent 45 dollars.

Panic ensued.

I started hastily setting aside money in various places -- 10 bucks sequestered in my passport for the mandatory airport tax, 20 bucks in a side pocket of my bag for the bus ticket back to Rangoon at the end of the trip. I sketched out back of the envelope calculations, over and over, debating if I could afford a samosa, a second bottle of water, a taxi ride.

I'm now back on budgetary track, having passed most major expenses in the trip and still in possession of enough cash to keep me in hotels and chapati for the next few days. But money has been an unexpectedly major preoccupation of this trip. It's particularly hard since in a place as poor as Burma, I'm incapable of turning down beggars: I've given at least something to every single one that's approached me, but every time I do, I panic a little bit that I'll get stuck on the outskirts of Mandalay with absolutely no means of getting back to Rangoon -- much less on to Bangkok.

And here's the other thing about money: I am wracked with guilt that part of the money I'm spending here is getting back to the Burmese Government. I'm keeping an obsessive running tally of hotel costs (there's a 10 percent tax on hotels), entrance fees to major sites and pagodas, and anything else that may accrue money to the Junta. (I just typed a long paragraph spelling out point blank my feelings on the junta, but disclaimer at the top of the blog or otherwise, I think it best to keep it to myself).

I am only staying in small, family-run hotels, eating at roadside stands and tiny restaurants at which grandma is clearly doing the cooking, mom and dad are taking orders and the kids are serving and clearing plates. I'm handing money over wholesale to the Burmese people whenever possible, and avoiding anything that the Government has a hand in -- I'm not drinking beer (Myanma Beer Company is a joint venture government enterprise), for example, or taking trains or other forms of public transportation, all of which, down to the local city buses, benefit the junta, 5 measly kyats at a time.

I am still wracked with guilt. The fact that the Burmese clearly want tourists to come doesn't matter to me: I had to fork over 810 Thai baht -- 23 bucks -- to the Burmese Government for a visa, and that money is haunting me. The fact that [an unnamed foreign government] hands over well over 600 million dollars per year to the Burmese for natural gas doesn't lessen my guilt at handing them 23 bucks and change for a visa: it's more than they would've gotten if I hadn't come.

When all is said and done, I plan to give double what I give to the Burmese Government to a reputable charity that works inside Burma. Does that make it ok? I don't know: still wracked with guilt.

Posted by Dakota on 3:20 AM link |

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Unexpectedly, the Burmese Embassy called and gave me the all clear: my visa was approved by MOFA HQ back in Burma, and I could come in and pick it up any time: off tomorrow for a week-long furlough in the Union of Myanmar, a country so overwhelmingly interesting that I don't even know where to begin.

This is a nation run by a consortium of military leaders who decided in late 2005 -- on the advice of an astrologer -- to move their capital city from Rangoon (which they renamed Yangon, in keeping with the Burmese language) to an undisclosed location some 300 kilometers north, beginning at the lucky hour of 6:37 in the morning on a particularly auspicious day in early November, and then reinforcing the luckiness of the move by capitalizing on the power of the number 11, moving 11 government ministries and 11 battalions of soldiers in 11 hundred vehicles beginning at 11 o'clock on the 11th day of the 11th month of the year.

It took almost five more months before the Burmese Government unveiled the capital city to the world, hosting a massive military parade in March of 2006 to mark Burmese Armed Forces Day, an appropriate holiday given that the nation is run by a military junta. They call the new capital Naypyidaw, meaning the Abode of Kings and while it's an auspicious place, it sadly lacks enough schools and infrastructure to adequately host the entire Burmese Government: such logistics are not the purview of astrologers.

I'm panting in excitement that they're going to let me go: you can't make stuff like this up.

Posted by Dakota on 8:19 AM link |

Thursday, January 22, 2009

My visa to Burma is now on indefinite hold, with a potential answer maybe coming -- maybe -- sometime next week. My hell/high water plan was to attempt to make my way to East Timor in the event that everything with Burma went pear shaped. That said, having now done the research on plane tickets (Bangkok -- Bali -- Dili, in Timor, and then back), I can say that East Timor would be an additional 600 bucks on top of an already expensive trip. Worth it?

I'm leaning no. Pear shaped, indeed.

Posted by Dakota on 12:31 AM link |

Sometimes I think I can still swing it as part of the grungy backpacker scene, that despite my luxury 3-bedroom in the swank part of Beijing, I can still hack it in 4 dollar hotels and on long and miserable bus rides with livestock as seatmates. I still think of grungy backpacker types as my people, even though the Embassy is largely tasked with taking care of that subset of the population when they lose a passport, or get busted for possession, or run across the law in some other disastrous and unpleasant way: still my people.

But now I'm standing in the visa line at the Burmese Embassy in Bangkok. The guy in front of me has a half-inch thick chunket of ivory -- it's fang-shaped -- through his pierced left ear, and I overheard him debate with his fellow traveller if, on the visa application under 'purpose of travel,' they should just be honest and write 'hashish.'

I feel so old.

Posted by Dakota on 12:23 AM link |

Monday, January 19, 2009

This much I know is true: I am a wretched photographer. I have a nice enough camera, the digital SLR that I bought used a few months ago, and I make up for my lack of skill by the sheer volume of photographs that I take. This makes my photographs almost impossibly boring to look through, with hundreds of photos of wide open spaces, and I (packrat to the stars) for the most part unwilling to delete any of them. I'm also unwilling to put them on to a publicly accessible website (flickr or picasa), because then the world will know that I'm an overwhelmingly boring photographer.

I went on the three big trips since the blog went silent. Three big trips without a lick of blogging to me indicated that the blog was dead and I should kill it once and for all, but I get too much of a kick out of my old travelogues to do that. I think the camera is what hurt me most: I normally take notes while I travel, writing down random chunkets of what I'm seeing, as I see it. Nothing makes the blog except what I note. But with a camera, my first impulse is to snap pictures rather than to write things down. And since I'm a wretched photographer, the last three trips were largely unrecorded.

I don't want to turn this blog into a photoblog. I'll keep the pen handy on the next trip.

So, to recap in brief, and in chronological order with just a few photographs to indulge my wretched photography habits:

1. Mongolia
Mongolia was beautiful beyond any speaking of it. It was also cold beyond any speaking of it, with the temperatures in late September already firmly in the low 20s at night. Mongolians sleep in open-topped yurts, and once the fire in the middle burns out, it's ridiculously cold.

I remain committed to traveling solo, but in Mongolia it's largely impractical: the things that one goes to do to Monglia are either prohibitively expensive or outright lame if done alone: horse trekking, hiking, camel tours, what have you. But Mongolia is studded with Tibetan Buddhist temples, and since getting there is half the challenge in Mongolia (guidebooks give GPS coordinates -- useless to me, as I lacked both transportation and a GPS device), set off for a few of the more remote monasteries with just the goal of getting there.

I started in Ulaan Bataar, a pleasant enough but largely unremarkable town where everything is named Genghis Khan.


This isn't Genghis himself, but he's pretty much everywhere else.

I snagged a bus to Darkhan, the second largest town in Mongolia, but the country so lacks infrastructure that even the road linking the capital with the second largest city is half unpaved. I stood in a parking lot where cows were grazing in calf-high trash, and hired a car and driver via pantomime who took me to Amarbayasgalant Khiid, a monastery 150 kilometers from nowhere and 30 kilometers off anything resembling a road. I invariably have ridiculous luck with temples, and they were having a temple fair for no apparent reason that I could figure out.

Nice horns.

Nice mask.

Nice hat.

Nice... head.

The gentleman above wandered around and passed out candy to all the Mongolian kids who were wandering around the temple grounds. I still have no idea what the fair was about, what holiday (if any) they were celebrating or what point in Buddhist theology they were trying to drive home. I speak no Mongolian, and what limited Russian I speak is certainly nowhere near good enough to grasp religion. But god knows it was pleasant to look at.

Darkhan. Ulaan Bataar. On to Kharkhorin, to see the Erdene Zuu Khiid, the first monastery founded in Mongolia at the time of Tibetan expansion in 1586.

Does it look cold? My god it was cold.

I stood on the outskirts of Kharkhorin for about three hours with my thumb out, hoping to catch a ride to somewhere near Tovkhon Suum, a monastery and pilgrimage point tucked in the mountains somewhere near the town of Khujirt. I got picked up by an amiable Russian-speaking used car salesman from Ulaan Bataar who was out to find a spot in the forest to bury his parents' ashes. He let me tag along.

We started with vodka at 10:00, moved to fermented, lightly-alcoholic horse milk at noon, and found a suitable spot at around 1:00. His wife made instant noodles while he tied prayer flags around nearby trees and I, on his instructions, dug a hole. He chanted, burned incense over the hole, and built a pile of cookies for the birds. We toasted his parents and his wife and life in general, and lay in the late autumn sunlight in the Mongolian forest. The mood was upbeat, almost exuberant. My lack of talent for photography does the event no justice.


Amiable, that's for sure.

We spent the afternoon driving from yurt to yurt on the open Mongolian steppe, stopping at nearly every yurt we passed. He knew everyone. At least it appeared that way: I have no idea what they were talking about. I love the sound of Mongolian -- vowels come in not just long and short, as you'd expect, but also in 'whispered' or 'breathy,' so Mongolians appear to stop speaking halfway through a word and start whispering. It's hypnotic; I'm convinced it sounds like hoofbeats. But hypnotic or otherwise, I understand not a single word of it, and it was unclear to me if he was stopping at strangers homes to chat or if he actually knew the inhabitants.

At every home, there was fermented horse milk -- airag, in Mongolian -- and it's the only Mongolian food product I developed a taste for. Well-fermented airag tastes lightly carbonated, and it has a sweet, almost candy-like undertone. The fresher stuff isn't so good, with a distinctly horsey undertone that follows you around once you're done drinking. Mongolians drink from communal bowls, and you have to blow away grit and crust from the top of the airag before you can drink it, but it's the primary source of nutrients in the Mongolian diet and I actualy enjoyed it.

The rest of Mongolian food is so ungodly bad that I lost 14 pounds in 10 days. At every stop, there's horse cheese. It comes in a small variety of textures -- there's soft, creamy horse cheese that feels like cream cheese and has a layer of horse cream on the bottom, and there are dried chunkets of cheese that are so hard they have to be gnawed on. At every stop, I choked down one bite to be polite and then stuffed the rest into my pockets. Dogs started follow the smell of my pants. I only got caught once, but they thought I liked the cheese so much I was saving it for later, and thrust more into my hand as a parting gesture. Mongolians were infinitely giving and hospitable; the unfortunate part is how truly awful what they had on offer was. I'm still convinced that I'm carrying a vaguely mare's milky smell with me.

I had largely forgotten about the monastery by mid afternoon and, slightly buzzed and vaguely nauseated by all the airag, I didn't really care. I wasn't sure where we were headed when we passed by a couple of hitch hiking teenage monks, picked them up, and drove 10 kilometers straight uphill through the forest to the monastery, perched on a peak in the middle of nowhere. "We'll sleep here tonight," they said.


Could be a lot worse.

The monks put us up for the night, made us a meal of mutton soup, and chanted for a safe onward trip. The ranking monk was a scant 21 years old, and the other three were really just kids. They clowned around for the camera and then looked through my photographs from the other monasteries and pointed out their friends: apparently the community of monks in Mongolia is ridiculously small. The next morning we hiked the nearby forest, and took the pilgrim's walk through the temple. Sunrise was glorious, both because of the view and because it meant that heat and feeling would be returning to my limbs.

Prayer flags under the deep blue sky.

Monks. The monastery is the green-roofed building tucked in the mountain behind them.

So that was Mongolia: wide open spaces that take forever to cross, bone-numbing cold, and miles and miles of steppe, livestock, yurts and forests. The people are ridiculously friendly, and I wouldn't hesitate to go back, but I'd want at least a month, and I'd only go again in summer, that's for damn sure.

The Mongolia blog went a lot longer than expected, but if I don't keep going, I'm finished forever.

2. Kyoto
Kyoto is lovely beyond any speaking of it. It's probably the nicest city in Asia, and certainly the most romantic place I've been in a long time. It largely escaped World War II, and is so packed with temples that you can't help but wonder if they really need that many.

I went for Thanksgiving. I skipped turkey and had katsudon, which I love, and I topped it off with sushi from the sushi-go-round, which I hit twice in four days. I deserved it, frankly.

I again failed to take adequate notes. The city was blanketed with red leaves (I briefly understood the New England fascination with autumn), and went to dozens of temples and took hundreds of mediocre photographs.


I've got thousands that look like this.

The temple above is Fushimi-Inari, the temple of the temple-gate, dedicated to the Fox God. They sell onigiri -- rice and seaweed packets -- which are the favorite snack of the fox gods, and you can munch on them while you hike around the temple. You're supposed to pray to the fox gods (ring the bell, make a wish, clap twice) to have your wish will come true.

"Don't pray to the fox gods," my buddy told me. "I prayed before my Chinese test, and I failed. In fact, take one of those rice packets and shove it in that fucking fox's mouth," she said. (I prayed. No luck on the wish just yet: foxes are damn close to worthless).

3. Cambodia
Cambodia: the Angkor Wat half marathon. I've lost my will to keep blogging for the evening, so I'll just say that the Angkor half marathon, on a tree-lined street that leads through the temples at Angkor -- you actually pass through victory gate, and it's glorious beyond any speaking of it -- is possibly the best run I've ever done. Hundreds of Cambodian kids line the streets to cheer you on, as do monks (monks!), and the whole thing raises money for charity to buy artificial limbs for landmine victims. Greatest. Run. Ever.

Posted by Dakota on 7:50 AM link |

Friday, January 16, 2009

After toying with the idea of killing this blog once and for all, I realized that I like the sound of my own voice far too much to actually do that. Where else can I wax poetic about grammar? Where would people go except my page when using the search query "typical Romanian woman" or "female escorts in bandar sari begawan" or "hooker bars in muscat"?

Other nonsexual queries which won't be answered by this blog but I'm still pleased brought people here include "How to say I feel your pain in Chuukese" and "light from the sun how long ago did it leave the sun" and "songs in switzerdeutch."

So we're still a go here at Face The Sun, and as such I think it's high time for a quick recap of the last few months of 2008. The blog of course fell silent and I have little patience for detailed review after the fact, so I'll see if I can make this as brief as possible in an easy to read power point-esque bullet format. Actually, since I lack follow-through and generally like fragmentedness, I'll probably break this into multiple posts. And while we're being completely honest, I'll also go ahead and predict that I'll stop one shy of actually finishing and then let the blog languish until March or so.

In the mean time:
1. The Rest of the Olympics, Gallopingly/Chronologically:

Athletics: Racewalking finals, mens. A ridiculous sport, and one that makes my hips bleed just thinking about it. This much I know is true: Racewalkers are some of the very few Olympic athletes I wouldn't want to see naked. Or maybe would want to see naked just once.

Trampoline Gymnastics: Throwing yourself 40 feet in the air while flipping crazily makes for an unsurprisingly good spectator sport. As a bonus, Australian Trampoline Gymnast Ben Wilden was hanging out in the stands after his disappointing 6th-place-ish routine, and he was mobbed by Chinese girls and Dakota. I didn't dress like him on purpose, but retrospectively I'm kind of glad I did.

Two trampoline athletes: one real, one fictitious.
Ben Wilden became a recurring theme in my Olympics experience -- we're now Facebook Friends, making our association valid and blessed by the internet -- and it almost because awkward how often I ran into him in bars. It kept happening: "hey, you're trampoline gymnast Ben Wilden!" I think it's safe to say that I was the only one celebrity-spotting him, if we can call it that.

Rowing: Beautiful venue, gorgeous athletes, hideously boring sport. I was pretty excited to see the other twins on the US Olympic team; Paul and Morgan Hamm having ditched out on gymnastics, I was left with second-choice twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, on the men's rowing team. But they were so thoroughly destroyed in their race, coming in so far in dead last that the other boats were practically out of the water by the time they crossed the finish line, that they didn't stick around so I (general stalker posing as a rowing fan) could talk to them afterwards.

Beijing is a gigantic city with a glorious small town feel where everyone seems to know everyone. So my colleague's significant other, a former Yale rower and current Beijing University visiting fellow, was able to say with confidence that the Winklevoss twins are assholes, and not particularly good rowers to boot, and I didn't miss much by not talking to them. Phew.

Beach Volleyball: mens, and basically everything I'd hoped for, but I attended with a Marine from the Embassy who was game for neither ogling nor gambling; what, I ask, is the point? I perhaps should've been more upfront about the gender of the players.

Triathlon: Stroke of dumb luck: a guy at work's wife has a brother who happens to be an agent for a small fistful of Olympics athletes. Amongst his stable is not only Troy Dumais (a diver -- he referred to him casually just as Troy, and when it dawned on me who was talking about, I got all awkward and stuttery and asked if he could introduce me; he said he would but never did), but also Hunter Kemper, the favored US athlete in the triathlon. So I and another friend (the inimitable Bernie, who left Beijing to become a professional triathlete himself) hitched a ride with them to get our triathlon on.

The course wrapped around the Ming Tombs (I made sure to show off my flashy knowledge of the dates of the Ming Dynasty -- 1366 to 1644 -- at least once an hour), and was designed for spectators more than athletes; the swim was entirely visible, and the run and bike were both on a short course that lapped by the spectator stands multiple times. I had assumed that the race itself would be pretty boring, but it was ridiculously exciting to watch. It finished with a glorious four-way tie coming down the final run stretch -- four guys running, three medals to be distributed -- and was edge-of-seat exciting, certainly one of the best events I saw at the Olympics.

Kemper was the highest-ranked US athlete, placing 7th over, and as we walked away from the venue (I, hooting encouragement at the triathletes I recognized -- I had studied the participant list in advance) Kemper's agent asked -- hey, do you want to have lunch with Hunter?

Yes, I did want to have lunch with Hunter.

So we waited for him to show up (he was tagged for a random drug test immediately after the event, and it delayed him a bit), and the hotel where he was staying suddenly filled up with triathletes: all three of the US team members were staying there. So I gushingly met Matty "Boom-Boom" Reed (a US immigrant -- his brother is a professional triathlete on the New Zealand team), and admired his bike and asked for a photo while he was still wearing his gear.

The reason they call him "Boom-Boom remains unclear to me."
And then Jarrod Shoemaker strolled in and similar things happened. I had chatted with his parents about consular services and passed them my card; he emailed not to ask about passports or visas, but to see if I wanted to get a drink. He never followed through, even though I of course leaped at the opportunity. "He's worthless in a non-draft-legal triathlon," the agent had informed me, but I still would've been happy to get a beer with him.

Yes, I'd still like to get a drink if you're available.
And then came Hunter Kemper, who plunked himself down at the table with a grin on his face and said he wanted McDonalds immediately: he'd earned it. We had Chinese food instead, and he ran through the race and gave Bernie, the triathlete-to-be, advice on the best way to draft, and to position oneself when entering or exiting the various portions of the race, and it was, in general, glorious beyond any speaking of it. He and his wife (also a former Olympic athlete, on the US women's volleyball team) were ridiculously nice people, and strikingly normal to boot: they were just people.

I kept my athlete worship relatively in check for most of the meal. Relatively.
Really fast moving people, both in the water and on land. Cool.

Table Tennis: You'd think that table tennis would be the crown jewel of Olympics tickets in China.

With form like this, I can't believe I didn't make the US team.
You're be wrong.

Here's the deal: there are a billion tables playing at once, so it's hard to focus. Obviously, you're betting like a madman with the guy next to you, but that can only carry you so far.

No, really: a lot of tables.
The real problem, of course, is that the Chinese are just too damn good at table tennis and they've got a lock on the entire sport, throughout the world, period. So the placards indicate that Hungary is playing Australia, but the athletes are named Hu Weizhong and Sun Xiaoli and what have you. They've got different passports, but for the most part, the entire sport is dedicated to figuring out which Chinese person is the best in the world. Ultimately, it was decided that Chinese Chinese people are the best in the world -- and the second best, and the third best as well, having edged out Sweden in the Bronze medal match and played against each other for silver and gold.

Baseball: Man, baseball sucks. Major League Baseball sucks, but Olympic baseball really sucks. I suppose it was vaguely cool in a sort of theoretical way that I got to see the USA win over Japan for the bronze medal in the second-to-last Olympic baseball game ever, but once you get past the theory of it, it's really just a dumb game in the hot sun.

Mountain Biking: Almost as bad as baseball. You hike out to the middle of nowhere, stand in the woods with a few other stalwart biking fans, and then wait. Every few minutes there's a flash of color as a couple bikers go by, and that's it. There's no means of knowing who's winning or how many laps they've done or when they're going to finish. Occasionally people would try to sneak across the course and several of them almost got mauled by incoming bikes, but aside from that the whole thing was pretty lame.

Yawn.

Men's Beach Volleyball, Redux: by some miracle and stroke of good luck, I was chosen as a "site officer" for Men's Beach Volleyball for the closing ceremony delegation. Site officer means you're the fall guy -- you're there in case anything goes tragically wrong and they need someone to blame. You're also there to speak Chinese if need be (there's never a need) and generally to make sure that the principals involved are ok.

The principals: your Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao (Zhao Xiaolan in Mandarin, which means "Little Orchid Zhao" and which I considered addressing her as before deciding that "madam secretary" was probably more appropriate), and your Secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael O. Leavitt (who does not, to my knowledge, have a Chinese name, and would likely not respond to the name "Big Orchid.")

Also present was your Ambassador at Large for Public Diplomacy, the inimitable Michelle Kwan. Let me repeat that so the importance of it can sink in: your US Ambassador at Large for Public Diplomacy, Michelle Kwan.

It goes without saying that I can't tell a triple axle from a triple lutz (not even wikipedia is helpful on figure skating -- but it did teach me that the correct spelling of "sowcow" is in fact salchow), but that doesn't mean that I won't forever think of our time at gold medal men's volleyball as our first date.

First this: the sky was gloriously blue, and it was 10 in the morning on a work day and I was sitting in the VIP section of an outdoor venue and watching the US kick Brazil's tail to win the gold medal in an awesome game of beach volleyball, and I couldn't help but think that this -- THIS -- is why I'm so lucky to have the job I do. My god the Olympics were glorious.

Anyhow, so the game finished up (triumph!) and the Olympics coordinator who was there asked the Secretaries and Michelle Kwan if they wanted to meet the athletes, and they did, so I got to tag along and shake hands with two enormous volleyball-playing beasts (one of our guys, Phil Dalhausser, is 6'9; the other is a scant 6'2; I felt tiny).

I don't have the patience to photoshop myself in here; pretend that I'm there.

Post game, Secretaries Chao and Leavitt had some official function of some sort or another and had to bolt. I was never able to ask the Secretary of Health and Human Services exactly what in god's name a "human service" is, which makes me think that the world will never know. In the mean time, Michelle Kwan asked if I wanted to go to lunch. I can't turn down dumplings.

I also can't turn down ambassadors at large for public diplomacy or professional figure skaters, so it was basically a confluence of all of my favorite things. I'd like to pretend that the atmosphere was romantic and datelike and it was just the two of us rocking the xiaolongbao and shaomai at the Din Tai Feng, but in reality we were chaperoned by some 10 other people there as well. In fact, Michelle Kwan might not have asked me if I wanted to go to lunch so much as I in fact just stayed on the bus with her until it took us to a restaurant, at which point I followed her inside. Whatever.

The Ambassador's wife was one of the ten hangers-on sitting at the table with us, and she pulled me aside later to whisper urgently that Michelle Kwan is a LEGEND, and as such everyone is terrified of her, terrified! and so no one's willing to ask her out, because they're all too intimidated, so you, Dakota, you have to ask her out. Offer to buy her dinner!

I chickened out, of course. She's an Ambassador at Large! She outranks me by like 600 rungs on the totem pole! And she's a LEGEND! She's so intimidating!

Also, she's really into the sweet red bean-filled dessert dumplings, and as far as I'm concerned that makes her undateable.

So that was the rest of my Olympics experience. I'm guessing that if you've made it this far, you're probably wishing that I had in fact killed the blog as I was originally considering.

Posted by Dakota on 10:13 PM link |

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Lest I lose it, never to be found again within the interwebs, I'm posting here a link to my new favorite website, ever: Forvo.

Native speakers pronouncing words. No definitions, no dead weight -- just pure, awesome phonology. Holy cow.

Posted by Dakota on 1:29 AM link |

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

I was coming in to the embassy from a lunchtime reception, and my pal who was next to me was wearing a gigantic and somewhat ridiculous red-white-blue felt top hat that caught one of the guards eyes. She asked -- "who won?"

A person three steps ahead of us whirled around and without missing a beat responded: "America did." He's right, I think.

Posted by Dakota on 1:59 AM link |

Saturday, September 20, 2008

I have additional Olympics posts that I was racing to get onto the blog before next Friday, when I leave for Mongolia -- but after the bombing in Islamabad, posting Olympics nonsense feels shallow and worthless. I read the news reports, and then I started looking at pictures and had to stop: I'd spent too much time there. I have yet to see any lists of people killed, and I'm dreading looking through them: it's just too likely I'll know someone. One couple whom I know still in Islamabad confirmed they're ok, but still: too likely.

There really aren't any words for this.

Posted by Dakota on 11:34 PM link |

Thursday, September 18, 2008

After badminton, I dropped by a friend's place. Her parents were in town, and she'd promised the dazzling combination of Thai food and dessert if I could keep myself out past sunset to meet her mom and dad. I was in her living room making small talk while shoveling curry down my gullet when a mutual friend of ours, a journalist who seems to know everyone in the universe, mentioned in passing that she'd run into Nadia Comeneci earlier in the day. After ascertaining that she wasn't pulling my leg, I freaked out a bit: "Nadia Comeneci, of perfect ten fame?" I asked. Indeed: of perfect ten fame. And then she dropped the bomb:

"Oh hey, I'm meeting up with John Roethlisberger tonight. Do you wanna go?"

This offer made me hyperventilate for half an hour or so while loose ends were wrapped up and we made our way to the door. John Roethlisberger. Three time Olympian, world champion competitor like 86 times, Roethlisberger. Current coach, former hero, Roethlisberger.

An hour later we still hadn't left and I was visibly agitated: what if we missed him? Someone gave me a pen in case it occurred to me to have him write his name on something, and I mourned my lack of camera. Finally, after midnight and well past my bedtime we made our way to the cab stand and proceeded to the crappy bar area around houhai lake.

We went to the bar where they were supposed to be; no sign. Panic. Calls were made, a club was named and we proceeded that way. And then, directly in front of a speaker blaring wretched techno, I met him: Roethlisberger. Shook his hand, introduced myself, stuttered. The intimidation factor was high, and I was quite disappointed to find that I, at 6'1, didn't tower over his 5'7 like I was hoping to: so much for the height advantage. We all went outside to get away from the thumping bass.

It wasn't just Roethlisberger. It was former Stanford gymnast and current gymnastics journalist (who knew that was an occupation? Certainly not me. Apparantly "Inside Gymnastics" hires them) Dan Gill. And it was Team USA Alternate David Durante. And it was all of their girlfriends too, but that was unimportant. What was important was insider gossip from the world of Gymnastics. I loved every second of it.

"The Hamm twins," I asked. "Still in Beijing?" The answer, spoken with disgust and shaking heads, was that the first Hamm, Paul, hadn't come in the first place, and the second Hamm, Morgan, had taken great pains and gone to great lengths to get out of Beijing in advance of the team competition. They made it clear: you'd have to be a true asshole to abandon your team before the biggest event of their lives, particularly when you were already in country.

"Second Alternate Sasha Artemev: he's explosively powerful and it looks incredible to watch. Is he as much of a pommel horse genius as he appears to my untrained eye?" The short answer: genius to a greater degree than you'll ever understand.

And then came the more pressing question, which I posed to Roethlisberger: "Let's be hypothetical and say I were rocketing towards 30, and had no gymnastics background
whatsoever. Let's also say that I'm neither strong nor flexible. (Dan Gill, charming and poised: "now I KNOW we're not talking about YOU, man!"). What's it going to take for me to be able to build up to Thomas flares?"

Quoth Roethlisberger: "One, just call them flares." "Ok, what's it going to take for me to flare?" I asked. "No," he said, "you need a verb -- to do flares." This wasn't going well. "Roethlisberger, you're killing me. To do flares. Is there any hope?"

The answer: "it's possible. It's going to take a long time and it's going to be extremely painful, but if that's ok, you can do it." Perfect. "To start with, you'll need to wake up tomorrow morning and start your day with about 500 pushups." (I: "That's only 492 more than I currently do!"). "Then, if possible, you're going to need to stretch yourself out on the rack for a while." (I assume that's some sort of gymnastics equipment). "Once you're strong enough an flexible enough, things will pretty much fall into place." (I'm not sure that I believe that, but it doesn't matter: I've started doing pushups in my cubicle, in between paragraphs I write, to build up to 500 eventually).

And that was pretty much it. Durante said he didn't think there was a big chance that he, the third alternate (after Raj Bhavsar and Alexander Artemev) would be pulled for the team. He asked about 24 hour restaurants, and I applauded that even gymnasts get the late night munchies. It was approaching two in the morning.

We went our separate ways. I didn't get a number nor give any of them mine, but I kept hoping they'd call back and want to hang out: we've all got our dreams, I guess.

Posted by Dakota on 9:38 AM link |

Monday, September 08, 2008

Next event, chronologically: badminton.

Here's the brief synopsis: I have decided to become an Olympic badminton player.

I recognize that there are a lot of obstacles to this task. For example, I do not own a badminton racquet. I still chuckle at the word shuttlecock. I have, technically speaking, never played badminton, and most people don't break into Olympic sports they've never played when they're rocketing towards 30 years of age.

To quote Obama: we know the road ahead will be long and full of obstacles. But no matter how many things stand in our way, nothing can get in the way of a million voices screaming for [Dakota to become an Olympic badminton player].

Badminton, like handball, was unexpectedly awesome. It's a blitzkrieg sport, lightningly faced paced and truly awesome for spectators. And it's all about reflexes, split second reactions to the incoming birdie and whether or not you can get your racket under it in time. Asians dominate the sport, but I've got decent reflexes, honed by a childhood well spent playing nintendo and not exercising, and I think I'm next in line for the badminton crown. All three of the Americans who made the Olympics in badminton were Asian-American. I think it's time we caucasians were represented.

The take home message: the next time you're in a place with international tournament level badminton on display, get yourself a ticket immediately. It's captivating enough that I'm planning to attempt to join in. Also: there's enough beauty on the badminton court that I think I could enjoy myself on the circuit, which is a nice bonus. Shuttlecock, ho!

Posted by Dakota on 8:34 AM link |

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

The vast majority of countries participating in the games had a hospitality house for their athletes and visiting VIPs. The majority restricted entrance to citizens of the home nation; some, like the USA house, restricted access to athletes and their immediate family members, whom the athletes had to escort. (The USA house gift shop was accessible to the Embassy community, and the stuff on sale was very cool, but tragically expensive -- I, powerless in the face of athletic apparel, never allowed myself to go).

The Dutch hospitality house -- the Holland House -- was sponsored by Heineken, and was open to everyone. And it was awesome beyond any speaking of it.

One, they had Heineken on sale, which despite being not free is still approximately 45 times better than Budweiser.

Two, they had croquettes. Croquettes are basically the gravy part of biscuits and gravy, rolled in bread crumbs and deep fried. I don't fully understand the logistics of how one deep fries gravy, but the Dutch have figured it out on our behalf. The result is the most delicious nuclear-hot lava-like gravy on the planet, and it's the single greatest thing you'll ever eat -- particularly if you've already thrown back a few Heinekins.

If croquettes weren't enough to win Holland House the honorary title of most wonderfully cholesterol-soaked hospitality house, they also served fries with mayo. This pushed my happiness meter to somewhere near 'bliss.'

Three, the place was packed out with Dutch people. It's no secret that I love the Dutch (I always have!) and the Holland House featured hundreds of patriotic Dutch people decked out in Orange, the color of the Dutch royal family, the House of Orange. The Dutch have a lot going for them: hyperfluency in English (nearly 80 percent of Dutch people speak English. 80!), the tenth highest GDP per capita in the world, and one of the highest rates of overall satisfaction with life -- put simply, the Dutch are happier than most people on the planet

Also, the shortest amongst them stand 6'3. I, a paltry 6'1, have never felt so consistently short.

A few short months ago, I was tasked with writing a briefing paper on the Netherlands, and as such was able to start conversations with such exciting factoids as "did you know that the Netherlands produces 33 percent of the EU's tomatoes, and 25 percent of its green peppers?" And of course, since well over ten percent of the Netherlands was reclaimed from the sea by Dutch engineers, I made sure to liberally throw around the line "God created the Earth -- but the DUTCH created the Netherlands."

The atmosphere a club bud was stuffy exclusivity. At the Holland House, it was open and friendly, albeit in a distinctly pro-Netherlands kind of way. Even the athletes, with their impressive physiques and intimidating ID badges, seemed accessible. So I started talking to them.

"Hey man, what's your sport?" It's remarkable how far that line will get you when you're surrounded by Olympic athletes. These people have done nothing but eat, sleep and breath their events for years. It's not just that they want to talk about their sport, although that is clearly the case. It's that they don't actually have much else to talk about. Their sport: it's all they've done.

"Hey man, what's your sport?" "I'm a rower." Oh, that explains your physique.

"Hey man, what's your sport?" "Air pistol." Oh, that explains YOUR physique as well. More fries with mayo?

"Hey man, what's your sport?" "Kayaking." Really! How'd it go? "Not so great, but my teammate won silver, so we're celebrating." Really! Is your teammate around? I've never met a silver medal winner. "She'll be here soon."

And then, ten minutes later, he tapped me on the shoulder, addressed me as mate and introduced me to his teammate. I shook her hand, congratulated her, and said -- rumor runs you won a silver medal today. She smiled, thanked me, and held up the medal -- she had been wearing it around her neck the whole time, and I hadn't even noticed.

I, slightly buzzed and very excited on her behalf, immediately got gushy. "Holy s---! That's an olympic medal! That's a f---ing silver medal! You're the second best kayaker in the whole WORLD! Can I touch it?" She let me, and I remarked on how heavy it was. "Does it hurt your neck?" I asked. "I can handle the weight," she grinned.

I didn't think it could get much better than that, but then I was hanging out outside near the fry stand, when sudenly the crowd started buzzing about someone who was in line to get a croquette. I craned my neck. "Is that... Holy cow, is that -- " A dutch person next to me confirmed it:



"Yeah, it's him. Willem-Alexander, the Crown Prince of the Netherlands."

I moved in to attempt to shake his hand, but his security people were very effective at keeping me and dozens of Dutch people at bay. Nonetheless, I will forever think of the Olympics as that time when the Crown Prince and I were hanging out at the Holland House, eating croquettes. You know: like you do.

Posted by Dakota on 9:46 AM link |

Monday, September 01, 2008

Judo: my god what an awful spectator sport. Honestly.

Judo -- the "gentle way" -- is incomprehensible. Seriously. I slogged my way through 18 pages of wikipedia, only to arrive and not have a clue what was going on. There are apparently 4 different types of moves, ranging from instant victory to one-point minor thumps. There's no telling what those moves actually are, particularly once a match is underway.

If you pin someone for 25 seconds, you theoretically win. But it seemed like the majority of the time someone would pin, the ref would come break it up well before 25 seconds. Matches last for five minutes, and 3 minutes would go by with no score and then suddenly one of the fighters would be up 141 to nil, inexplicably.

Our seats sucked (high above the two judo mats on which bouts ran simultaneously). We sat next to a woman from the Netherlands who expressed surprise that we had bothered to come to an event we didn't understand. There was a gold medal match (won by Georgia who, semi-excitingly, had previously taken down Russia), which passed just as inexplicably as the previous matches.

A second gold medal, for one of the women's weight classes, was won by Japan. There's a shocker: Japan's good at judo.

Posted by Dakota on 3:51 AM link |

After more or less years of wanting one, I finally broke down and made the purchase I've been drooling after:



A digital SLR camera. Some people would say that I'm an idiot for waiting until AFTER the Olympics to purchase this. They're probably right. That said, I had no idea how affordable SLR cameras are until a friend of mine purchased one, opening the floodgates for me. And here we are.

In addition to the camera, I finally bought an SD card reader, allowing me to take pictures off of my other camera (which also technically belongs to the same friend), which thus allows me to upload the following picture from Chinese New Year, when I shaved my head in the bathroom of a cheap hotel room in central Guam. Razor burn and all:



And now, back to our regularly scheduled Olympics hullaballoo.

Posted by Dakota on 3:07 AM link |

Sunday, August 31, 2008

I bought Olympics tickets shotgun-style. I tried to get something for more or less every night of the competition (aiming for evenings so as to avoid time off during the work day). I had high hopes for some events (gymnastics, beach volleyball, table tennis), and low expectations for others. Handball assuredly fell into the latter category.

I was thus pleasantly surprised when it blew my mind.

Here's what I didn't know about handball: it's unexpectedly violent. I had heard it was like soccer, only with hands instead of feet; wikipedia didn't mention that it's closer to hockey, played by enormous dudes on a field the size of a basketball court, with full body checks, violent takedowns, and a level of aggression on par with the NHL. Like in rugby, the players don't wear pads, and the level of physicality makes it intense. The games are high scoring, to boot: 30 points per side is the norm rather than the excpetion, which gives an air of berserkness lacking in lower scoring sports.

Our seats were four rows off the court and we were surrounded by dozens -- if not hundreds -- of raving Danes, all whom had painted faces, flag capes and viking hats. I had decided in advance to root for Denmark in the first game, and being surrounded by Danes sealed the deal.

Denmark vs Korea: handball is awesomely faced paced, and the speed of the game hyped up the crowd. The general level of excitement in the stadium was being further fueled by massive quantities of beer, the price of which the Chinese Government inflated only slightly for the Olympics -- cans for 5 kuai, bottles for 8, or 70 cents and a buck ten respectively. Handball turned out to be the only Olympic event at which I drank: the atmosphere just screamed out for a beer.

The Danes were enormous, lanky men, almost universally blond and averaging somewhere around 6'5. Their playing style seemed to revolve around brute force, driving hard towards the circle that rings the goal that players aside from the goalie can't enter. The Koreans were nearly equally as large as the Danes, but played a more wiley game, placing shots carefully and depending less on driving in to the goal. The star player on the Korean team was short, comparatively -- perhaps not even six feet tall -- but he nailed it every time he went for a goal.

The Danes, bolstered by crowd support and a slight size advantage, held a slight lead over the Koreans the majority of the game. I found myself screaming bolsa! (clap clap clap) bolsa! along with everyone else, only to later be filled in on the meaning: defense, apparently. Danish enthusiasm is infectious.

When the Koreans snuck the ball into the corner of the goal in the final minute of play, bringing them to an insurmountable 31 to 30 advntage over the Danes to ultimately win the game, I was devastated. I kept gasping out no! in disbelief, and looking at the people around me, like they could make it better. I dejectedly munched on the chicken nuggets I had smuggled into the stadium.

Iceland played Germany and the second game. I had planned to continue supporting Scandinavia (go Ísland!) but the Germans were out in force and my one-man cheering effort seemed overpowered. I found myself cheering for both sides, secretly hoping that the final winner would be Denmark rather than one of the two teams playing. I can't remember who took the second game.

So handball: in short, awesome beyond any speaking of it, despite a devastating and unexpected loss to Korea at the last minute. Becoming a professional handball player is probably outside of the realm of possibility, but the game definitely further cemented my resolve to become Danish.

Posted by Dakota on 4:49 AM link |

Friday, August 29, 2008

This is supposed to be a chronicle, but I feel I've already talked to much about gymnastics (and there's plenty more where that came from), so I'll just mention in passing that Sunday night we hit up women's gymnastics quals, and our seats were 5 rows off the field of competition, and indeed, it completely rocked. Overall awesomeness factor: high to very high.

Posted by Dakota on 7:58 AM link |

In related news, I got called out of town just after the Olympics ended, to the Land of No Internet Access. I kept faithfully blogging, emailing things to myself from my blackberry, and I'll now go back and add them in one at a time over the next week or two. The first is below; apologies for the absence. Responses to emails: likewise coming.

Posted by Dakota on 7:55 AM link |

Shortly before gymnastics, a buddy of mine called and asked if I had plans for the evening. "I'm going to men's gymnastics," I told him. "Will it last all night?" he asked. "Hopefully," I responded.

"Ok," he said. "So -- you don't want to go to the MTv red carpet event at Club Bud, then?"

Wild horses couldn't have made me pass up the opportunity. The degree to which I'm not into clubs cannot be understated: we Dakotas do not dance, and because I am 10,000 years old I find loud bars to be counterproductive to social interaction and generally not in any way fun. I'm also so not Red Carpet -- I can't recognize celebrities to save my life (pop culture, who?), and even if I were to recognize someone, what would I say to them? Hey man -- great work in that film you were in, which I didn't see but heard was great, I think.

But it's the Olympics and there are athletes afoot, and when else am I going to get to hit up a red carpet event? It was a right-place-right-time invitation, and so: wild horses.

Panic set in immediately: what do I wear to a red carpet event? I put on jeans and took them off, did the same for khakis and pondered going pants-free before finally settling on black pants, pinstripe, slightly formal but fashionable.: Beijing is packed with Europeans and I was hoping to convey the concept of, if not necessarily Mediterranean, perhaps Mediterranean-friendly.

Once my pants crisis was averted, I headed to gymnastics. When I was en route, my buddy called to say that I should just google pictures from other MTv red carpet events and see what people wear. He'd be in jeans, he said. Back to panic, although by that point it was too late to do anything about it.

I took the sweet new Subway line from gymnastics to Nongzhan'guan, the sight of Club Bud. Nongzhan'guan is the Agricultural Exhibition Center, which I've passed a million times but have never been inside. I was pretty stoked at the idea of agricultural exhibition: in a country known for it's (say) eggplants, I'd be pretty excited to see some exhibition-quality eggplants on display. Couple it with a few beers and it's almost too much for a single evening.

I got off the metro with five dozen Dutch people, all dressed in identical orange polos and chattering to one another in a casual mixture of Dutch and English indicating complete bilingual fluency in both. I love the Dutch, always have, and was pretty excited about going to a swank party with hordes of northern Europeans. "So, are you guys Dutch athletes?" I asked excitedly. They looked at me strangely. "We're just Dutch, man. But we're FANS," they told me. I followed them.

They went to a different bar. Blast.

Club Bud: the door was guarded by cocky bouncer types, and they were turning people away left and right – lot's of HE's on the list but you're not so you'll have to get someone from inside to bring you in. People were walking away disappointed. I was dazzled by the lights, and assumed I'd be turned away too. I was welcomed as a VIP; I think they thought I was Secret Service, rather than a professional Xerox unjammer.

Here's the thing I wasn't expecting about the Red Carpet event: it was awkward. Not awkward in a "you people are beautiful and I'm struggling to make conversation" kind of way. It was awkwardly empty. All those people they were turning away would've added more atmosphere than the three-quarters empty dance floor was providing. The DJ even sounded awkwardly unsure of himself. "We're uhh, kicking it old school? Yeah. Kicking it."

I had a beer (budweiser was free, and the only thing available). I danced, briefly and against my will to Bust a Move (we were kicking it old school). I went back to the sidelines and had another beer.

A lean, muscular guy walked up to me and asked if I live in Beijing. I replied in the affirmative and asked him the same question. He responded: "I'm here for... the Olympics?" His tone implied I might perhaps not have heard of the Olympics before.

He turned out to be an Olympic road cyclist, representing New Zealand. Once pleasantries were over, he cut right to the heart of the matter: "so since you live here" he asked, "do you know where I can buy some extacy?" This caught me off guard. "Don't they test you guys?" I asked. "Mate," he reponded, "road cycling was this morning. We lost."

Awkward

After informing him that I know of no conduits to any illegal substances, I tried to make small talk. I make small talk for a living. It's a huge part of my life -- cocktail parties, meetings, receptions, lunches, casual chitchat. It's what I do.

I was completely incapable of making small talk with the cyclists. Examples fragments of abortive would-be conversation topics:

-- So, what do you do back in New Zealand aside from cycling? ("I'm a professional cyclist; it's what I do for a living.")

-- How's the Olympic experience been? Is it the red carpet party it seems like it would be? ("I just got here two days ago, and all I've done is my event. Which we lost.")

-- Right, but I mean the whole package, living in the village, surrounded by other athletes, racing -- has it been a good time? ("Mate, I told you -- we lost. The racing wasn't good.")

-- So, does team New Zealand hang out? ("Some, yeah -- we're a team.")

-- Was this your first Olympics? ("Yeah.")

-- Aside from cycling, what do you do for fun? ("You mean aside from drugs?")

-- So, just the one event and now you can hang out for the rest of the Olympics? That's gotta be cool? ("Not quite as cool as a medal.")

I finally went with the following last-ditch question: so, are there any other athletes around here? ("Yeah. Come with me and I'll introduce you.").

Jackpot.

He introduced me to another New Zealander, who wandered off shortly thereafter, and an American, who turned out to be an Olympic sailor. His father in law, in his mid-fifties, is also on the Olympic sailing team, making him possibly the oldest athlete in the 2008 Olympics. Cool.

The sailor was friendly and (mercifully) easy to talk to. He was optimistic on Team USA's chances for a medal. Shortly thereafter he apologized, said he'd been on his feet all day and had to sit down. He sank into a plush chair far too low to continue having a normal conversation, and I had to walk away.

Thus far, I was feeling that Red Carpet Events are poorly attended festivals of awkwardness, and that everything you've ever seen on MTv is a crock. But there was a gigantic check in the box labelled "meet Olympic Athletes," so at least that was taken care of. And at that moment, in strolled one of the Secret Service agents with whom I'd been in the back room, hanging out with Bush.

He turned out not to be a Secret Service agent, but rather the personal assistant to Bush 41, the former president Bush. And he was so normal! This was unexpected: he was just a normal human being, who happened to work for the landscaping company that did Bush 41's house in New England, which put him into close enough contact with the guy that he eventually hired him as a personal assistant. (I: "so, you mowed Bush's lawn, and THAT landed you a job as his personal assistant?" He: "no, man -- I never mowed his lawn. I did everything else -- I weeded and planted and spread pinestraw and the whole deal, but I never once cut his lawn.")

I was promised minor celebrities -- B list, if you will -- and was feeling somewhat disappointed that the only celebrities present were Chinese (and thus unrecognizeable to me). The day was saved when, just before I went home, a buddy of mine grabbed my arm and pointed out the B-est of B List celebrities, so ubiquitous that even I, Captain I Hate Pop Culture, could recognize him: David Schwimmer, better known as Ross from Friends.

So then: athletes met: two. Minor celebrities spotted: one. Free beers consumed: a fistful. Overall satisfaction level: mid-range. I remain baffled by all the fuss around these fancy pants red carpet events: sure, the beer was free but for all it's exclusivity, it wasn't really anything to write home about.

Posted by Dakota on 7:22 AM link |

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Saturday, August 9, 8 pm: men's gymnastics. My first event of the Olympics.

Some people would perhaps say that my first event was the first tranche of men's gymnastics, which was shown at noon and included team USA, and which I watched with great enthusiasm by myself on my couch. But the first event I saw live was the third tranche, which included teams from Belarus, Germany, Romania and South Korea. But men's quals was the first event I saw live and was also the event to which I was most looking forward to.

It didn't disappoint: men's gymnastics is awesome. I'm not a sports writer and I can't do it justice and I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to gymnastics -- but come on. They defy gravity.

Men's quals is a blur, and it's hard to follow -- all six apparati get going at once, and it's sensory overload. Floor and vault, high bar and rings, parallel bars and pommel horse. They're constantly announcing new athletes, people applaud dismounts seemingly every eight seconds, and there are awws at falls and audible expressions of nervousness every time someone looks shaky or does something risky, and it constantly feels like your missing something. It's also too awesome for words.

My obsession with men's gymnastics in general and the US National Team in particular have led several of my coworkers to question if I, in a past life, might maybe have been a gymnast. I wasn't -- in addition to being six foot one (the tallest member of the US team, Justin Spring, stands a full half foot shorter than me at 5'7), I'm neither strong nor graceful. But this time -- like every other time I've watched men's gymnastics -- I've decided it's time I get serious enough about strength training and flexibility to build to where I can pull of Thomas Flares at will. (Take another look at this video from a few posts ago; Thomas flares show up from 0:35 to 0:50).

The gymnast in that video is a Bulgarian named Jordan Jovtchev, and he's a legend: 34 years old and still going strong, silver medalist on the rings in Athens and competing now in this, his record-breaking 5th Olympics. I didn't think he was coming to Beijing, so I when they announced his name as he was mounting the rings, I basically freaked out. The Bulgarian Embassy is next door to ours, and I'm not sure what it's going to take for me to meet Jovtchev, but surely our proximity to them will, if nothing else, aid my stalking.

Sitting a few rows in front of us was a guy with a Team Britain backpack still wearing the spandex outfit of an Olympian. (His physique was also something of a tell). We struck up a conversation with him after the meet and found out that he's Louis Smith, a competitor on the pommel horse from the UK. He had no intel on where gymnasts go to hang out in their spare time, or where I could go to better search for the Hamm twins on the off chance they came to Beijing despite injury.

Subsequent googling done by my coworker with whom I watched the event turned up a BBC article about the guy. I feel like I've had a brush with greatness.

Posted by Dakota on 10:42 AM link |

Monday, August 11, 2008

I watched the opening ceremonies at a rooftop bar with a projection TV. We watched it on South African television, which was the only English language live broadcast available -- CCTV was Chinese only, and NBC was delayed by 12 hours.

If there's one thing I can recommend, it's that you watch the Procession of Athletes broadcast by a nation that has absolutely no sense of political correctness. God knows it's much better than the Chinese broadcast, and while I didn't watch the NBC coverage, I think lacking any sense of social grace is much better than otherwise.

Specifically:

Ah, Luxembourg. The longest attending nation without a boycott, and they've never won a medal -- not one, can you imagine? I don't know why they keep coming back, but they do.

Now, here comes Zimbabwe -- god knows they're amongst the poorest athletes at these games.

Now, you'll note that the teams are in a bizarre order. Really and truly bizarre -- it's because they're organized by the MANDARIN alphabet. And god only knows how they came up with it, really.

Here comes East Timor -- a brand new nation. They haven't got a CHANCE at a medal, god bless 'em.

Iran -- that's one of those nations where you can really expect there won't be a lot of women. Well, a couple, I see but really not many.

I failed to bring a notepad to accurately take notes, something for which I've been kicking myself ever since.

Posted by Dakota on 8:46 AM link |

One final sidenote on the President before I move on with my life. While I was working on the recording with the WHCA guy, I was asking questions about the President and his habit of assigning nicknames. The President and the current Ambassador have known each other for years -- they were fraternity brothers -- and I'm dying to know what the President calls our Ambassador.

The WHCA guy didn't know (he had arrived in country some 48 hours before, so I'm not surprised). He mentioned in passing, though, that a very few people within a very select circle can get away with addressing the Bush with a nickname, a nickname that he knows but claimed he'd never tell. "The President loves fat-free hotdogs. That's all I'll say: fat-free hotdogs."

I have been PONDERING this since that conversation. Skinny Weiner? Could it possibly be? Are there some other options that I'm overlooking?

Posted by Dakota on 8:45 AM link |

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Aside from recording the intro for the President, my primary task at the ribbon cutting was to push people through the courtyard. People coming in would pass through the central gate into a large open space at the front of the embassy, and the organizers were worried that the gigantic US Seal and lovely Zen garden atmosphere would make people stroll at too leisurely of a pace, thereby delaying the security screening.

The day of the event was blazingly hot and unpleasantly hazy, and the line for security stretched a long way through the courtyard, and no one was lingering. My job morphed from pushing through the courtyard to dignitary escorting, picking out VIPs flagged at the gate and escorting them to the front. The Vice Minister of Commerce; the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs; the Chinese Ambassador to the United States.

And then, unexpectedly, a colleague and I found ourselves shaking hands with an extremely short VIP with a thick German accent. He introduced his family, grandkids, what have you. "Thank you so much for coming!" I gushed. I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I led him through security and then headed back to the gate.

My colleague maintains a healthy sense of childlike wonder when it comes to meeting major historic figures and was basically overwhelmed with glee. "We just shook hands with Henry Kissinger!" he said. "Henry fucking Kissinger!"

Cool.

In to the event. I was tagged to sit in a back holding room with the WHCA sound guy and a microphone, ready to go live in the event the recordings to introduce the President didn't work. The holding room was just off the stage and wasn't really a room -- the walls were made out of sheets. Just past the sheets, a drum band some ten people strong was ready to go berserk. Two secret service agents joined us shortly after I arrived.

A sidenote on Secret Service: one of their primary functions appears to be looking great -- standing cross-armed at 6 foot 5, looking intimidating. It was a leitmotif of the ribbon cutting, and not one with which I was displeased.

The WHCA guy hit the intro button that kicked things off. It had taken me and two of the Chinese people I work with (both of whom are hyper fluent in English) a good chunk of time to translate the intro into Chinese. "Please rise for the posting of the colors, and remain standing for the singing of our national anthem." ("Posting?" they asked me. "Is that like raising the flag up the pole?" "No, it's like -- I dunno, like walking the flag in and tilting it. Or something."*)

Enter State Councilor Dai Bingguo. Ten seconds later, the President enters.

The walls of the holding room were made of sheets, and directly on the opposite side the drum band was going berserk, giving the crowd something to listen to while waiting. The drums were massive traditional chinese kettle drums, and the sound was deep enough that you could feel it in your stomach. So the President came in, felt the drums, and started doing a little dance to the beat of the music.

I would've killed for a video camera.

So the President is shuffling around doing a little dance, and it's just me and him, the sound guy, two secret service agents and the State Councilor. He sees me staring at him doing his little dance -- I was grinning like an idiot -- and he can tell I'm kinda chuckling at him and his dance, and we make eye contact. And he winks at me.

I got winked at by the President. And I kind of loved it.

And then his father, George H.W. Bush strolls in behind him, and feels the drums and starts doing the exact same dance.

The kept me in the holding room throughout the ceremony, which I watched via closed circuit TV. Secret service briefly gave me the third degree to find out why I was there, but eventually gave me a pin that silently informed other Secret Service agents not to shoot me. The Ambo spoke. Bush 41 spoke at length, and spent quite a bit of time reminiscing about learning Chinese when he was Ambassador to China. El Presidente spoke, and used the word "fabulous" a surprisingly large number of times for a straight guy. "My dad," he said, "was a fabulous president. And he was a fabulous dad, too."

I remained in the holding room until the President and his party had left, which means I was present for the casual strolling by of Laura Bush (I wanted to remind her that I was her dedicated note taker in Pakistan, but since she didn't remember me on the day that I actually took notes for her, I was thinking maybe I should just let it go. Also, Secret Service was totally boxing me in to ensure that I didn't do so). Laura Bush was followed by Barbara Bush, of Bush Twin fame. (Jenna did not, to my knowledge, come on this trip). I had questions for her too -- "wanna come to taco night?" probably would've been right up there -- but Secret Service was again all up in my grill, ruining my game.

The President left, Secret Service eased up and everything was ok. As if the joy of meeting the president and standing three feet away from him weren't enough, the guests hasn't finished all the food, which meant all the breakfast tacos I could shovel down my gullet. Jackpot.

*Finally conclusion on this was "xiang guoqi zhiyi, zou guoge" -- roughly 'face the flag as it's held high.' Note also, excitingly, that the verb for the national anthem is zou -- in Chinese, you don't listen to the singing of the national anthem, you listen as it's "walked out."

Posted by Dakota on 10:45 AM link |

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Jordan Jovtchev! Jordan Jovtchev!!

More tomorrow.

Posted by Dakota on 1:14 PM link |

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Dateline: Thursday, August 7

We've got a new recording on the main number when you call into the Embassy. It's a pretty standard message: You have reached the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China... and then the same again in Chinese. It's a step up from the old recording because the guy who did it has great Chinese -- certainly better than the last recording, which left a bit to be desired. But he recorded it in an odd radio announcer voice, and the vowels are distorted like we're back in the 1920s, and it drives me batshit insane.

The worst part: the guy who recorded it used a deep announcer-type voice. A lot of people know that I had a radio show back in the day (This is English Corner -- on Radio Jiangsu), and everyone has been accusing me of having been the one to record it.

I was at a site survey at the new embassy today, and the officer in charge of the event we ere surveying for came up to me and said "hey! that's you on the Embassy recording, isn't it?" I promptly responded in the negative ("no no no no no no no"), begrudgingly pointed at the guy who did in fact do the recording, and voiced my opposition to distorted vowels. I also mentioned that I've been begging to be the guy on the recording for over a year now, but to no avail.

She responded: "Well -- do you want to be the voice of this event? We need someone to announce the guests of honor."

And so I spent two hours in a back room at in the new Embassy, alone with a microphone and a sound technician, working through the following sentence:

"Ladies and Gentlemen -- the President of the United States."

Tomorrow is a ribbon cutting for the new embassy. Keeping in mind that the luckiest number in China is eight, a homophone for "wealth," we'll be kicking it off at 8:08 in the morning on 08/08/08. The ribbon will be cut by the President; it'll be my voice that brings him into the room.

Posted by Dakota on 6:24 PM link |

I was planning to attempt a post every day of the Olympics starting from yesterday and going to the bitter end, even on mundane days when I don't do much or see anything. I've got tickets to 13 events, so that in and of itself should be enough fodder. But what happened today can't be posted until tomorrow, which wrecks the entire concept of post-a-day, since it means tomorrow I'll be posting a day behind. But I guess mentioning this today technically counts as a post, so maybe we're ok and I'm just frontloading.

Usually when I try this sort of thing, it precipitates three to four months of silence, and I wouldn't be overly surprised if that were the case again. But there are enough athletes afoot and activists in the wings that I should be able to scrape up enough stories to keep something on the blog, I think. Anyhow, we'll see.

Posted by Dakota on 6:30 AM link |

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Last night I had a dream that I ran into Team USA Gymnast and high-bar genius Jonathan Horton on the street near Worker's Stadium, about three kilometers from my house. I said to him: Hey, you're Jonathan Horton, Legendary High Bar Athlete. And he replied: uh... who are you are? And it was SO. AWKWARD. And then I woke up, and I felt HORRIBLE for the rest of the day because I had just blown my chance to have a casual conversation with Jonathan Horton, legendary high bar athlete.

I feel that this scenario is bound to repeat itself over the course of the next two weeks. It was only a dream. I'm still unsettled.

In related news, some obstinate members of the press are calling it the No Fun Olympics, a name which I totally don't support. But Beijing today isn't the same place it was two weeks ago. Sidewalk tables at bars and restaurants are no more, and they apparently won't be allowed back again until the end of September. They say that bars are now closing at 2 in the morning instead of staying open all night, although god knows I don't stay up late enough to notice. There's always been riot fencing across the center of some streets to prevent jaywalking, but now it seems like it's EVERY street, and long Chinese blocks mean that even crossing the street can be a chore.

There're patdowns and bag checks to get on the subway, liquids have been totally outlawed on flights and a park I visited the other day had a shiny new sign prohibiting explosives, crossbows and other items forbidden by Chinese law. I'm not complaining, though: a successful Olympics will be a secure Olympics.

Half the cars are off the road (even license plates drive on even numbered days; odd plates on odd), but it's still hazy. The weekend was blazingly hot but with gloriously blue skies, and we all all rejoiced that the Olympics had finally cleaned up the air. But from Monday through today we were back to status quo: everything's fuzzy at a distance. I'm not worried about it, though. The China Daily had a front-page article to remind us all that hazy air isn't necessarily a sign of poor air quality.

There's a lot more to be said, but I think I've said all I can for now. I'd suggest you fill your time by watching clips of legendary high barrist Jonathan Horton. That's right: he is capable of a triple twisting double somersault.

Posted by Dakota on 7:12 AM link |

Friday, June 27, 2008

A few notes on my onward assignment:

I'm now tenured, which means I'm "mid level." That is to say, in order to get my onward assignment, I had to lobby for it and convince the people making the assignment that I'm great to work with, bracingly competent and happy-go-lucky to boot. We all know that I'm none of those things. The whole process has been nervewracking beyond any speaking of it.

The process of lobbying in essence turns the State Department into something of a high-school popularity contest in which you have to convince a panel of people whom you've never met that you'll be a great guy to work with. It in essence allows embassies to pick and choose their employees, and in so doing weed out jerkfaces in advance whenever possible. You have to get supervisors to vouch for you, pull strings behind the scenes and bank on few people wanting the job that you want. Ince every few years, you in essence have to find a new job, despite the fact that you in essence cannot get fired.

The whole thing is pretty much a gigantic drag, and I was much happier getting an email that just told me where I was going. But yesterday it all paid off, and I was offered a position to which I said yes immediately and have been excited beyond any speaking of it ever since.

My onward:



Farah Province, Southwest Afghanistan

God Willing/Creek Not Rising, I'm going to a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT, if you will) in Southwest Afghanistan, in Farah Province. It's lucky number 7 on the map below, on the Iranian border just above Nimroz province. I hadn't heard of it until I started researching jobs in Afghanistan.



It'll be me, two other civilians, a fistful of military and an awful lot of Afghans. The work will involve building good governence, advising the governor of the province should he ask, and generally helping to rebuild Afghanistan from the ground up. I'm getting a year of Dari language training in the mean time, starting late summer of next year. I head to Afghanistan in August of 2010, when the average daytime temperature is in the 140 range, and I am excited beyond any speaking of it.

Posted by Dakota on 7:45 AM link |

Sunday, June 01, 2008

I am currently working on a long post that outlines the woes of bidding and trying to figure out where I want to go next. But in the mean time, I pose the following question:

I've been under heavy pressure to join Facebook. I've stood strong thus far, because I'm not an undergraduate or a thirteen year old, and that seems to be the target demographic. But people here are pushing hard. I'm still saying no, but I'm starting, just a tiny bit, to crumple. Any thoughts on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Posted by Dakota on 1:06 AM link |

Monday, May 12, 2008

It seems to follow me --

Just reported a 7.6 earthquake in Sichuan province. I was (and am) in Beijing, which is about 1400 kilometers (or nearly a thousand miles) from Sichuan. That said, I did feel dizzy briefly in my office, which restrospectively was probably the earthquake.

The point of this post is to say: I am fine, and there is no need to worry about me at this time. More updates as events unfold.

Posted by Dakota on 2:39 AM link |

Saturday, April 19, 2008

So, I've been sitting on that Brunei post for months. Things that have transpired in the mean time:

1. The Foreign Service Journal, the monthly publication of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA, the State Department union), listed my blog along with a factually inaccurate description. But I'll take what I can get, even if they think I'm in my mid twenties (I'm rocketing towards 30: oh god), and think that I update frequently (I think "sporadic" would be a better description). Regardless, I'm all about publicity, so I was pretty excited by my mention in the Journal, which allowed me to wander the halls of the embassy pointing at myself and quoting AFSA's line that I have a "friendly and open demeanor." This is probably also factually inaccurate, but when it comes to wandering the halls quoting AFSA to the annoyance of my coworkers, any port in a storm.

2. Things have gotten busy at work. This is perhaps no surprise to anyone who's taken note of where I live and what's transpiring in this world. I'll say no more.

3. A considerable amount of my time is being taken up by an outside foreign language project of my own devising that I've been working on for quite some time. Few things excite me like grammar so I'm enjoying the heck out of myself with this project of mine -- but things like verb tenses don't exactly make for good blogging.

4. We're once again approaching the Great Wall Marathon, and per last year's vow I'm now training for the full marathon. This takes up every drop of my spare time and leave me with absolutely nothing to talk about, much less blog about. "What'd you do this weekend?" "I ran." That's it.

5. Other people who are running the Great Wall Marathon: 1. Multiple coworkers. 2. My mother. Let me repeat that, for emphasis: my mother. She's running the half, which means I have no choice but to run the full, because if I were to run the half and she (60, retired) were to outpace me (mid twenties, per AFSA), it would be a psychological blow on a scale heretofore unseen.

6. That's all I've got. If you aren't listening compulsively to the song Hang On, Little Tomato! by Pink Martini (of Sympathique fame), then you're wasting your time.

Posted by Dakota on 11:49 PM link |

I caught a ride from Brunei International Airport to the harbor with the pilot who flew me in from Manila. "Brunei," he told me in his broad Australian accent, "is nice and quiet -- very peaceful." From the harbor in to town, my Bruneian cabbie bragged: "Brunei is so quiet -- we have no nightlife here!" I asked the Chinese-Bruneian owner of my hotel if he was enjoying life in sleepy Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital city of Brunei. "Of course," he told me, "it's so peaceful here."

I started to sense a pattern.

I didn't come to Brunei for the nightlife. I came to see what happens when you have too much money and not enough people to spend it on, too much spare time and not nearly enough to do. There are well under half a million Bruneians living on a slice of Borneo about the size of Delaware; courtesy of their offshore oil deposits, they enjoy the second highest GDP in Asia (trailing behind industrious Singapore) without having to lift a finger: they call it the Shellfare State, with free education through the university level, free medical care, and subsidies for rice and housing.

Here's what I learned about Brunei: it's quiet and peaceful. Which is to say that the entire country feels like the inside of a library on a Friday night: not many people, not much noise, and not a whole lot of action.

If you have too much money and are looking for a way to increase hilarity in your city, you should follow the Brunei model and substitute polished marble for concrete in your sidewalks. It drizzled the entire time I was in Brunei, which I sincerely think increased the gravitation pull of the sidewalk. To put it kindly: I failed to stick the landing, repeatedly.

Other noteworthy encounters: On the way to the Sultan's house (palace, if you will), I passed the Bandar Seri Begawan central fire department, and since I'm a sucker for firefighters I ducked in to figure out what they're doing. They had a volleyball net stretched across the backyard and were playing three-on-three Sepak Takraw, a game I had never seen before and which is awesome beyond any speaking of it. It's a volleyball-esque game, with the familiar bump-set-spike intra-team passing, only the ball is made of rattan -- sort of an oversized, heavier-than-average whiffle ball -- and (since volleyball was too easy, apparently), you're not allowed to use your hands or arms.

It's like an uber-competitive hackeysack competition, soccer meets volleyball meets acrobatics. The guys who were playing were the sort of true athletes the world has come to expect in firefighters, and since the game involves a lot of throwing one's legs improbably far above one's head, it makes for a hell of a spectator sport. The spectators at the Brunei Central Fire Department explained the rules in patiently slow Malay (Bruneians -- Malays in general, actually -- are champions at repeating, rephrasing and, when push comes to shove, pantomiming), and once I had everything more or less hammered down, they waved me toward the court to give it a shot. "We'll go easy," they told me.

Center of the court: they served the ball as slowly and directly at me as possible. I chest-bumped it like I've seen hackey sack players do to slow the ball down, and let it fall gracefully towards my feet. I then followed that up with a sort of wounded game-bird flailing of my legs that ultimately resulted in zero contact -- none -- with the ball. The firefighters were about as impressed as you'd expect.

A mosque in the center of town: it seems that when Allah makes you the richest monarch in the world (Forbes estimates that at present the Sultan is worth 22 bil; about twenty years ago when his bank account was at peak value, he ranked as the 28th richest person ever to exist on planet earth), you apparently give back to Allah. So there's a mosque right downtown -- the Omar Ali Saifuddin, which was being renovated while I was there, but features gold-capped domes and sits on a man-made lagoon. And slightly further from the center is a second mosque, equally gold minareted with perfect Islamic architecture, and covered in Italian marble and chandeliers made from Austrian crystal.

Outskirts of town: about a decade ago, the Sultan decided to give himself a birthday present, and constructed a massive amusement park just outside of BSB (which is how hipsters abbreviate the capital city), and since Brunei is rich, he made the amusement park free for all. But the park has started charging admission a few years ago and hasn't bothered to repair on of the rides, and on the day I visited it was closed. Wandering the empty streets of a closed down amusement park in the middle of nowhere has a distinctly scooby-doo feeling to it, and I enjoyed it, but there wasn't a whole lot to see.

The amusement park is next to the Royal Brunei Polo Fields -- dozens of enormous fields, perfectly manicured and ringed by enormous baseball-stadium style lights, for evening games -- and I dropped by to have a gander at a few million dollars worth of polo ponies. The polo stables in Brunei (which by count seemed to house three to four hundred horses) are approximately as nice as my apartment in Beijing, with an it seems that the horse-to-groom ratio is obscenely high. But they were all friendly, albeit a bit curious why I was wandering around the stables. But they accepted my explanation -- mau melihat saja, I'm just taking a look -- at face value and even went so far as to let me pet some of the horses. (Do horses even like that? I have no idea).

Was there anything else? There was. A Dutch Catholic missionary whom I met in Palau had told me that I should consider taking the speedboat ride through the jungle to another section of Brunei -- "it's very James Bond," he told me. But I shared my speedboat with three housewives and a restaurant's worth of Chinese broccoli, which killed the 007 feeling somewhat, and courtesy of Chinese New Year there wasn't a single shop open on the other side of Brunei. But I hiked in my improbably sandals through the mud a bit until I hit impenetrable rainforest, and that made it worth my time.

So Brunei: was it worth the effort and expense and time to get there? Absolutely. That said, on the grand Asia checklist of countries, it was prioritized somewhere near the bottom, and that was assuredly appropriate.

Posted by Dakota on 10:36 PM link |

Saturday, February 23, 2008

The opening sentence of China Southern's in-flight magazine, perused en route from Manila to Beijing: "2008 is doomed to be a year of special and happy."

I will begrudgingly admit that it's good to be home. (A few more posts are coming out of this trip; photos to follow).

Posted by Dakota on 11:08 PM link |

Thursday, February 21, 2008

So, orangutans: turns out they're rapidly being driven into extinction by habitat loss. They currently exist only in the province of Sumatra, Indonesia, and in northern Borneo, straddling the border between Sabah province in Malaysia and Kalimantan, Indonesia. Those two areas and a few scattered zoos host the approximately 30,000 orangutans left in the world.

One of only five orangutan rehabilitation centers in the world is located in Semilok, Malaysia, about 25 kilometers outside of the city of Sendakan. (There's one other in Bornean Malaysia, two in Bornean Indonesia, and one in Sumatra). I was pretty excited by the idea of rehab for primates -- a place where they could write-tell memoires while going through the misery of smack withdrawal -- but it turns out its only for injured or orphaned orangutans, not for washed out addicts. Nonetheless, orangutans are offered a lifetime of free milk and bananas twice a day at the center at Semilok, and for a small donation (it's mandatory, which I think stretches the definition of "donation"), tourists can go watch from a viewing platform.

Semilok Rehab Center: Primates are the dirty thieves of the animal kingdom, and the center has on display the remnants of other people's belongings after the orangutans get done with them. Insect repellant is intensely poisonous to orangutans and monkey, and there are signs everywhere prohibiting bringing it in to the park lest the monkeys steal your bag and then unwittingly kill themselves with it. I'm not carrying insect repellent -- hadn't even occurred to me, honestly -- and the signs are a reminder that I'm in both a Dengue and a Malaria zone. Between that and the fact that I'm wearing birkenstocks in a place where they sell gigantic boot coverings to supplement the thick socks you're supposed to be wearing to deter leeches -- leeches! -- I can't help but feel a little unprepared.

I get to the center well before it opens and kill some time by strolling around. Semilok is the premier primate destination in Malaysia, and one of the top in the world, certainly. Another nearby primate attraction, a proboscis monkey park, is trying to piggyback off of Semilok's success, and they're got a pile of brochures that sound downright desperate. Apparently the proboscis monkey's leaping act is "superb, fast, steady, stylish and perfect." I'm not buying it.

At 8:30, a small museum-type exhibit opens up. It presents a few facts about orangutans -- the world's largest arboreal (tree-dwelling, they parenthetically explained) mammal, threatened by habitat loss due largely to illegal logging, four times stronger than adult humans, what have you. They don't say what basis of the human vs. monkey strength test was, but I think it's safe to assume that it involved push ups. They mention that 96.4 percent of human genes are identical to orangutans, and I start seeing some uncomfortable parallels between myself and my primate cousins: "adult males," they say, "are large animals with beards, throat pouches, and long lustrous hair." I'm not sure what the throat pouch is all about, by my facial hair has since grown back and I can't help but be glad I shaved my head in Guam: less animal-like. And then, hitting closer to home: "a large portion of daylight hours -- 60 percent or more -- is spent searching for and consuming food."

They have a small question and answer portion where you have to look behind little doors to see the answers. Do orangutans eat meat? (Occasionally insects, but mostly they're vegetarian). What is the main threat to the continued existence of the orangutans? (I was quite surprised -- the answer, unexpectedly, is MIRRORS!)

There was also a small exhibit on rhinos, which was less exciting than orangutans, but that did contain the exciting fact that male and female rhinos often meet at the salt lick area. I write this little factoid down because I'm pretty sure that with a little tweaking, I'll be able to find a practical application for my dating life.

After the museum, there's a brief film about the rehabilitation center. Before it starts, a woman from a UK-based NGO called the Orangutan Appeal gives a spiel about the need for money. It seems that the upkeep of growing orangutans is an expensive affair -- in addition to saving up for future orangatuition, they also employ a vet (which, I begrudgingly admit, does make some sense), and a wet nurse. I clearly don't understand the concept of a wet nurse, because I can't wrap my mind around exactly what this person is employed for. But god knows I would've loved to see the ad they put in the Semilok Times advertising the position.

Then the film: there's an overview and brief history of the center, and the whole thing is chock full of shots of adorable orangutans learning how to climb and swinging from ropes and getting their faces covered in bananas and milk, and generally just being heart-melting. The tiny orangutan in a gigantic diaper was what got me: adorable.

Once they've got you totally buttered up, they move in for the kill: for a scant 120 ringgit -- about 35 bucks -- you can adopt a baby orangutan. They've got two up for adoption, a little girl named Sen and a strapping young male named Sogo Sogo. 35 bucks gets you a newsletter and a certificate, and six months later they'll mail you an update on your orangutan. It's February and that's too bad, because if it were early December then everyone I know would be getting an honorary orangutan adoption for Christmas. As it is, I decide to go ahead and cover mom's birthday by adopting Sen (she's adorable!) on mom's behalf, even though my parents never check their mailbox and I'm pretty sure they'll trash the update as junk mail. (Later when I'm all set to go pony up my 35 bucks, Ms Orangutan Appeal is nowhere to be found, so mom didn't actually end up adopting Sen; I'll have to google for other wildlife adoption options a little closer to her birthday).

To the viewing platform! After dumping my backpack in a locker, and then going back to add my messenger bag, and (then to the chagrin of the locker guy) going back a third time to retrieve my camera, I followed the throngs of people to see some orangutans. The viewing platform is a large wooden affair elevated only a few feet off the ground, sort of like a nice outdoor deck that you'd find attached to a home in the suburbs in the States. It's in the jungle so there are plenty of trees around, and just off the viewing platform are a series of ropes that lead to a separate platform where they feed the orangutans.

There were a few orangutans hanging out, killing some time and waiting for the food to be served. Orangutans are solo animals and almost never congregate in the wild (the exception, they explained, is when a particularly large tree is in fruit, which is generally what drives me to meet up with my friends as well), so the social atmosphere of the rehab center isn't quite like they've got out in the jungle. A female was hanging out above the deck area, showing off the baby that was clinging to her, and shortly thereafter a male swung over to join her. Orangutans have opposable thumbs on both their hands and feet, in essence giving them four hands, and the swinging motion is identical to the motion of swinging on aptly-named monkey bars.

First observation: it seems that the reason they fly solo is because orangutans aren't really nice to each other. The male (whom I promptly mentally labelled deadbeat dad) was all up in mom's grill, trying to pull her off the pole she was hanging out on to better position himself for the smorgasbord. Now, I live in China and know my way around elbows in a buffet line, but even I will (usually) defer to woman with newborn kids. Unless there's some sort of tempura on the buffet line, and then really it's every man for himself.

Food is served: some volunteers tossed a couple dozen bananas around the feeding platform and filled a small metal pan with milk. The orangutans went to town, stuffing themselves with bananas (they peel them at light speed -- I was trying to take notes one how they do it, because I'd really like to up my banana consumption rate), and going in face-first to the milk pan. One of them started splashing around in the milk with his fist, and an employee from the center cuffed him lightly on the head to make him stop. It looked kind of friendly, like they were old pals: knock it off, my friendgutan.

Unexpected developments: there was a path just off the viewing platform. One of the orangutans swung down out of the trees and started walking up it, but an employee was standing in his way, blocking him from going any farther. But the orangutan feinted right and then unexpectedly shifted left, and somersaulted -- I'm talking Bring It On style tumbling here -- somersaulting past the employee and then vaulting on to the viewing platform. He swung over the bars, and then I swear he was barreling straight for me at a pace that implied I was wearing banana underwear. (I wasn't -- I checked later to make sure, because THAT would've been embarrassing). He was moving at a hell of a clip, particularly for being an arboreal animal that wasn't in a tree, and I was so busy backpedaling to get the hell away from him that it didn't even occur to me to take a picture. He was maybe three feet away from me, and I figured that if they're really 4 times stronger than humans, I'd have been humiliated if he challenged me to a push up contest.

The majority of the tourists cleared out once the feeding ended. My bus out of Semilok didn't leave for a few more hours, so I took a seat and hung out with the orangutans for a while longer. A little while later, there was a rustling in the trees indicating that there was another orangutan swinging towards the feeding platform, even though single momrangutan and her kid had long since carted off most of the bananas. But the guy sailing through the trees -- again the similarities to myself -- wasn't actually all that great at his job (his job being to grab branches, which is similar to my job which involves sending a lot of faxes and unjamming the xerox machine as necessary). He just kind of missed the branch he was reaching for, and cascaded down on to the viewing platform with a really unpleasant whumpppp sound. He stood up, did the orangutan equivalent of jogging off the pain, and then jumped on to the railing and went for a little walk. (Had said orangutan and I been on a date, I would've awarded him style points for the panache with which he pulled it off).

I promptly followed him, as did everyone else who was still there. About twenty feet down the line, he decided he'd had enough walking (you could tell what he was thinking: crawling on my hands and feet -- what am I, an animal?), and decided to just hang out on the railing and cool his heels. The picture taking was frenzied -- this dude was maybe two feet away, the closest I've ever been to an orangutan and (let's be honest here) probably the closest I'll ever be again.

A girl sidled up next to him and took a picture at arm's length, a self portrait with Orangutan; I was annoyed that she was blocking my view, but I was also eaten alive with jealousy at the internet dating potential of such a portrait. Our ginger-haired friend decided, however, that he wanted nothing to do with match.comutan, and responded not so well. He cuffed her on the head (which terrified me, but not her), and then to further express his displeasure, pulled her bag away from her. You know, like you do. There was no bug spray in the bag (she announced as such), but I couldn't help but silently hope that she hadn't brought any mirrors in to the park: they're the number one threat to the continued survival of the orangutan!

Our pal hoisted himself up a tree and swung off, the bag was written off as dead. Quoth former bag owner: it was "totally worth that bag" to be so up close and personal. I in the mean time, was totally enamored: I was trying hard to think of suggestions for how to improve the park (that's my value added: annoying suggestions to primate attractions), and aside from the addition of monkey bars for the tourists to work out their inner primate, I couldn't think of anything. Simian entertainment doesn't get much better than all of that.

Posted by Dakota on 10:05 AM link |

Thursday, February 14, 2008

(Flashback to Manila)

The pimps and prostitutes in Manila are aggressive, and I was approached by a woman at 7 in the morning who offered me a beautiful lady. "I don't want a beautiful lady," I told her quite honestly. "Oh," she said, thinking it over. "Maybe you want ugly lady? Yes, very ugly, I can get for you."

Posted by Dakota on 5:08 AM link |

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

I went to Indonesia in the summer of '99, when I was 19. I had won a grant through the time-tested method of dumb luck, on the basis of being in the right place at the right time, and they paid for me to go anywhere in Southeast Asia. I chose Indonesia.

At the time, I had studied French (old hat), dabbled in Spanish (seemingly exotic for its comparatively complex verbs and optional pronouns), and dipped my toes in German (whose case endings felt like a rite of passage). I had taken two semesters of Chinese, which I was great at, and one of Thai, which I wanted to be great at and nearly flunked. Both seemed grammatically uncomplicated and quite similar, albeit with each the inverse of the other in grammar.

I won the grant while studying for my Thai final. I was in the library with a classmate who was acing Thai and didn't really need to study, and I was hoping that by sitting near her it might somehow rub off and make up for my semester of bumbling incompetence. She was Cambodian, raised in the States since she was three, and fully bilingual in English and Khmer. All of these things gave her an unfair advantage, I felt -- even though Khmer is unrelated to Thai -- but she was nice enough to be studying with me (the village idiot of Thai 101), so it was hard to hold a grudge.

After a while we decided to take a break -- although it's questionable if I had even begun studying -- and check email. She came back to the table upset because she had just been denied a grant on the basis of being not a US citizen. "And the worst part," she told me, "is that they have no one else to give the money to -- no one else even applied!"

I am in fact a US citizen -- the only criterion for the grant, it seemed -- and six weeks later a check showed up in my mailbox. I had managed, by some professorial largesse, to scrape by with a B minus in Thai; the free trip to Southeast Asia was just gravy.

I loved Indonesia, but I think I loved it more in retrospect than when I was actually there. I was living in a boarding house with Indonesian college students, none of whom spoke English, and aside from lunch conversations with the few other students at school, I didn't have anyone I could take to. I was lonely, and I filled my time by throwing myself aggressively into Indonesian.

The owner an manager of the school where I was studying was a woman named Diah. She had short hair and was smart and funny and we got along well. In Indonesian, dia without an H at the end means he or she, and at one point I asked her -- don't you get confused? "Of course not," she told me. "There's an H at the end of my name; you just can't her it."

I started listening for it, and sure enough, there it was -- a sliver of raspy breath at the end of her name. I started taking pains to sound every H, all the ones I'd thought were silent in the middle and at the end of words. People remarked that my pronunciation had improved. That was th first revelation: I was surrounded by sounds that were invisible, until someone pointed them out.

Classes were one-on-one for six hours a day, and environment that I thrive in. And I was 19, which put me at a huge advantage over the other students, most of whom were mid to late career diplomats (some Canadians, a Dane and a few others, but no Americans), and most were struggling with the language, even though basic Indonesian is about as straightforward and uncomplicated as a language can get. I only had enough money for three weeks of school, and I was flying through material, determined to learn the entire Indonesian language in the little time alloted to me.

The teachers were mostly Indonesian grad students, and they rotated every two hours. They always sat across from the students rather than next to them, and wrote upside down on unlined paper using magic markers, switching colors to emphasize things. Diah had told me that learning to write upside down was part of the teacher training course.

At the beginning of the third week, Diah came in and sat down across from me. She was the manager and didn't usually teach, but I loved her classes and it was always a treat to have her instead of someone else. She was wearing a light blue outfit, pretty, and in the distance someone was playing a recording of Gamelan, traditional Javanese music played on heavy metal gongs. I remember all of this so clearly, even still.

I had written Indonesian off as a simple language with only the adorable quirk of pluralizing words by doubling them. For a word like teksi (a cognate: taxi), you've got one teksi but two teksi-teksi, which fun-loving Indonesians would abbreviate as teksi with a superscript two -- that is, teksi squared. That, I thought, was the best Indonesian had to offer for grammar.

And then came this: Diah (blue dress, gongs in the background) wrote down a list of verbs in a single column, and then began modifying them with prefixes and suffixes, explaining to me the accompanying shifts in meaning that make up the beating heart at the center of Indonesian grammar, the dance of the Indonesian verb.

It all comes down to these three factors: formal and informal (buy vs. purchase, understand vs. comprehend), transitive and intransitive (that is, whether a verb can take a direct object), and active vs. passive (bought the book vs. the book was bought).

In English, formality isn't standardized: knowing that purchase is more formal than buy will not help you extrapolate that comprehend is more formal than understand. Transitivity isn't marked in any way -- you just have to have an innate knowledge of the verbs themselves to know that "eat" can take a direct object (food), but sleep can't (you sleep when you take a nap, but you can't, for example, "sleep a nap.") And active vs. passive, the rallying point of self-styled grammatical gurus everywhere, is complex enough that it requires a full chapter, if not more, in English as a Second Language books.

But in Indonesian, it's much more straightforward: the base of the word carries the meaning and stays the same throughout, while all of the above characteristics are manipulated using only prefixes and suffixes, sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with one another. It's a dance: the formalizing prefixes shift depending on whether the verb is transitive or intransitive, active or passive, and with the stroke of a pen you can derive nouns from verbs and vice versa, or turn a staid intransitive verb into a dynamic transitive one, allowing you to be grammatically correct in "sleeping a nap."

The system is so logical, so brilliantly conceived and so fundamentally elegant, that it honestly blew my mind. The prefixes and suffixes all work in concert, building verbs and nouns from both ends, the left and the right, while the center carries the meaning all the while. In addition to the grammatical points, there are a few simple phonological rules for attaching prefixes, making their use more fluid in the mouth and thus even more elegant.

Diah explained all of this to me over two hours, using her list of verbs and a series of preselected prefixes and suffixes, marking words with the soft catch of a glottal stop in the back of her throat whenever two a's would unwittingly collide. It was the second revelation: everyone around me was, completely unbeknownst to me, speaking in an elaborate code that I didn't even know existed. The low rhythmic clanging of the gongs in the background were like a soundtrack to the movements of the grammatical elements, and for a brief moment, it honestly felt like a moment of clarity unlike any other I had ever experienced before -- like for a brief moment, the entire universe made sense.

It was an awful lot to extract from a verb structure -- but that's how it felt.

In two hours, Diah took delightfully simple Indonesian and turned it into the most elegant language that I have ever studied, even to this day. Indo-European languages pale in comparison, with their weak conjugations for person and tense. Chinese doesn't even try, never modifying its verbs under any circumstances. Verbs in Urdu (an Indo-Iranian, and thus a distant cousin to the more familiar Indo-Europeans like French and Spanish) are a step in the right direction, marked for gender and habituality, and with an intriguing ability to expand to a causative (to learn expands to "to cause to learn," which is "to teach"), and a double causative (one more step removed from the base verb -- to cause a third party to cause to learn -- that is, to have someone teach your kids, for example).

But for all its flexibility in that regard, Urdu still pales in comparison to the glorious intricacy of the Indonesian grammar structure, with its unbelievable expandability and glorious regularity.

I'm back in a Malay-speaking area for the first time in nearly a decade, and all of this has come flooding back to me. Indonesian and Malay are nearly identical (about as far from each other as American and British English), and they're extraordinarily pleasant to listen to -- Malay has a lovely singsong quality to it, an intrinsically playful up-and-down of the voice. People have had no trouble understanding me, although they recognize instantly, usually within a sentence or two, that I'm speaking Indonesian and not Malay. I don't know what's tipping them off, but they invariably ask -- did you study in Indonesia?

I am rusty, of course -- I really haven't touched Indonesian since I left in '99, except briefly to prepare for my State proficiency exam during my initial training. My admiration of the verbs is now largely theoretical: I've almost entirely forgotten the nuts and bolts of how to go about forming a passive, say, or how to shift a verb from transitive to intransitive.

But it's still there, lingering underneath it all. I see Malay written on signs and newspapers, and the prefixes and suffixed jump out at me. And even though the meaning is largely beyond me -- my Malay vocabulary now borders on non-existent -- it's still a reminder that I'm surrounded, unwittingly, by the most elegant grammatical system I've ever come across.

Posted by Dakota on 3:34 AM link |

Thursday, February 07, 2008

I think it goes without saying that the Siren Song of Borneo was too strong to resist. I left Guam, spent two days lazing around Manila (stopping off to see Mt. Taal, a volcano within a lake, but mostly spending my time eating lumpia and writing about the Pacific). But Brunei was only three hundred dollars away, and there wan no way I could pass it up.

I flew in this morning to the capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan, and then immediately headed east into Malaysia, trying to get as far away as possible to then work my way systematically back. I'm currently in Kota Kinabulu, and am heading tomorrow to climb Mount Kinabulu. Depending on how long it takes -- the logistics of actually getting to the mountain, and then the hiking itself -- I might then keep heading east to hit up an orangutan rehabilitation center in the rain forest.

(Orangutan, excitingly, is one of the few words in English that we've taken from Malay -- literally "person of the forest." All the other words we borrowed from them are also spectucular -- like amok, as in to run amok; and cootie, taken from kutu, meaning a dog-biting flea).

Anyhow, the logistics of travel thus far have been much more complicated than I anticipated, and getting to Kota Kinabulu took all day rather than the few hours I was banking on. I'm heading out to the relative hinterlands tomorrow morning, so it's possible that I'll be incommunicado until I fly back to the Philippines on the 12th. (Hopefully not -- god knows there are more words derived from Malay that need blogging about. Like taffy, the candy, whose name derives from tafia, a rum-like alcohol!).

The best of days!

Posted by Dakota on 7:56 AM link |

I was pretty excited for the Superbowl. Not for the football, of course -- I honestly didn't even know who was playing until the morning of Superbowl Monday (kickoff: 9 a.m. Guam time). Football is of religion-esque significance to quite a few of our men and women in uniform so Superbowl Monday is given as a day off for the soldiers posted in Guam, and I was geared up to go to one of the bars in the beachy strip town near my hotel to watch it, clinging mugs with drunk soldiers and other football fans. What I'm saying here is that I was in it for the EXPERIENCE of it. (And of course, when it comes to drinking too much at 9 in the morning, something I haven't done since college, really -- any port in a storm).

But I woke up on Superbowl Monday to high winds and a driving rain coming in hard off the bay. I showered, packed and then headed out, but the first two bars I hit were locked up tight, no one around. The this bar was open, but only for a troop of window washers, not customers. I asked them if they knew of any bars where I could watch the game (I abbreviated the Superbowl to just The Game in the hope of impressing them with my obvious deep love of sports). They recommended the TGI Fridays.

Fridays was closed.

The night before, I had returned my rental car to the airport and then gotten stranded -- unexpectedly, there were no taxis. I eventually met an Australian greencard holder named Judy who was waiting, on behalf of the Navy, to pick up some of her fellow Navy compatriots on an incoming flight. She offered me a ride into town once the flight arrived, but they were delayed, and she and I ended up chatting for about two hours. (She was two weeks away from retirement and crazy nice, and I've always gotten along with older folks. And I think, courtesy of my haircut, that she was convinced I had a military background, even though I explicitly told her otherwise).

When we were finally on our way into town, Judy told me that she was a volunteer at the USO, and that if I needed a place to watch the game she could sign me in as a guest. I hadn't planned to take her up on it -- I am ultimately not in the military, and going to the USO just seemed strange (bordering on creepy) to me. But having found no bars (much less any packed with the howling sports fans and military I was hoping for), I figured -- eh, why not. I assumed it would be packed, but I'd be able to catch a few commercials (in Guam, the first commercial of every break is an actual superbowl commercial; all the rest are local), and it would be somewhat reminiscent of the raucous experience I was looking for.

The USO was not packed. The USO had three volunteers working (including Judy), catering to a total of three military folks using the place: one on the phone (the USO provides free long distance calls home for the military), one playing video games (the USO provides free first-person-shooter games for the military), and one watching the game on a giant television. Judy introduced me to the football fan, who turned out to be her husband (he never took his eyes off the screen ones), and I plunked myself down beside him to watch some commercials.

He immediately started filling me in: "Pats are winnin' on points but you look at the stats and you'd never know it. I mean god damn, the Giants have run like 150 yards more than the Pats, running circles around 'em, but the Pats are up in score. For NOW, at least."

I briefly wonder what color the Patriots are. There's no means of knowing and god knows I can't ask. I respond to his lond explanation of differences in completed passes and blah blah blah with "gotcha," which was honestly the only thing I could think of to say. I think I sounded convincingly interested.

He had been watching the game by himself and was pretty darn excited that I had come along, giving him someone to discuss with. "I didn't even have a dog in this fight until yesterday," he tells me, "when all that spygate stuff came up again." I tell him that I've been in Yap, light years from televisions and news, and haven't heard anything about it. "Pretty much the same crap as before, just more of it," he tells me. I have no idea what he's talking about. "Gotcha," I respond. It's like the eighth gotcha in a three minute span. I'm sounding less convincing.

I start desperately looking for clues as to how I'm supposed to respond to his football-laced chatter. "Patriots kicking game ain't for shit," he tells me. "That's gonna hurt 'em," I respond blindly. He seems satisfied with my response. We're ok. "Neither Moss NOR Spratchka* have even TOUCHED the ball yet!" he says. I don't know which team these gentlemen play for. "Yeah -- YET," I say. He looks at me strangely. Wrong response, it seems. Just before the half, he looks over at me and says "9 outta 17, you BELIEVE that shit?!" I had completely glazed over and can't even begin to guess what he's talknig about. I shake my head. "Un fucking believable," I tell him.

I decide to duck out at the half, because I want to go keep hunting for Chamorro grammar books and because sitting next to him was actually extremely stressful. I kept waiting for him to figure out that I know nothing about football, not even the basic rules, and that I care about it even less. I was terrified he was going ask -- why are you here? Which probably would've prompted an awkwardly honest response on the order of "partly because I wanted to see the commercials and partly because I wanted to experience watching a major sporting event while surrounded by rowdy soldier types who're really in to it, and partly because Judy told me there would be reduced price breakfast."

So that was my superbowl. I saw only beer commercials, and they were all lame beyond any speaking of it. Dalmation jumps from horse cart to Miller truck -- that's the best you can come up with for your two million dollar ad? But hey -- at least I got reduced price breakfast.


*Names changed to protect the innocent, and because I didn't write it down fast enough to actually remember it.

Posted by Dakota on 7:27 AM link |

(Flashback to Yap)

The flight from Yap left at 4 in the morning, resulting in a waiting room full of groggy people anxious to get on the plane and fall asleep. When the announcement for boarding was made -- "we'd like to start by boarding our first class and elite members" -- a voice rang out from the back of the room, adding "and Swedish people!!" on to the announcement.

Posted by Dakota on 7:24 AM link |

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

On the second go-round, Guam ain't so bad after all. Once you get out of the soul-sapping beach town of Tumon and the soulless capital of Agana, the island starts to have a certain charm. Min you, huge swaths of the island are out of bounds for non-military folks, and I found myself doing awkward U-turns at bade entry points on a surprisingly regular basis, waved off by tense MPs standing bored sentry at the gates -- but aside from that, it's really not too bad.

I rented a car (a pretty awesome seafoam-green Toyota Yaris. Quoth the guy at Dollar Rental: dude, I like totally trip out on how sweet its gas mileage is), and swung south in a loop around the island. It's mountainous, with the sharp, craggy sort of mountains they have in Hawaii. The road wraps around the bays, and there are mom-and-pop grocery stores and houses painted in bright pastels -- a nice contrast to strip malls.

After a quick duck into a Denny's (ahh Americana -- and the only thing open at half past five in the morning, when my flight from Yap arrived), I swung around the island, stopping at World War II parks with halfhearted explanations in English and Chamorro of pillbox strongholds and US beach stormings. (Guam was an undefended island, and the Japanese took it with little effort, proclaiming their intent to rule for 10,000 years. 31 months later, the US retook the island through intense fighting and bloody beach stormings).

It was sunrise, and that's always nice, but I was feeling pretty indifferent on Guam right up until I passed a hand-painted sign at the southern tip of the island that read "Sweet Tuba For Sale." Shortly thereafter, someone passed me with the brittle remnants of a Christmas tree strapped to the roof of their Volvo -- you'll note that it's February -- and I thought: these are my people, really.

And then I swung by a flea market that was packed at 9 a.m., with people lining up at stands selling barbecued chicken kebabs. I had one, thinking that kebabs truly aren't just for breakfast anymore, and wondered -- what's not to like about this place?

I got lost in the military-dominated northern half of the island, surrounded by intimidating signs that read "unauthorized access prohibited: this area is patrolled by military working dogs." And then I passed another, more intimidating sign -- Notice to Joggers and Pedestrians: WARNING! Unexploded Ordinance." I made it out unscathed, without so much as getting yelled at (or snapped at by a working dog).

At around lunchtime, I took a walking tour in the soulless capital city that started at a replica of the Statue of Liberty, installed by the boy scouts. I took a sarcastic view of it, thinking that Guamanians are bound by the same rigid immigrations requirements as the rest of the world, but no -- full US citizenship was given to everyone in Guam beginning in 1950. Guamanians for their part are model citizens, enlisting in the military at a per-capita rate nearly double that of the rest of the United States.

I passed by a statue of the loin-cloth clad, well-muscled Chief Quipuha (Kepuha in his native Chamorro), the ruler of Guam who let the Spaniards in to set up a mission in 1668, one year before his death. A second Chief Quipuha would later lead an armed rebellion against the Spaniards, and just over three hundred years later the Statue would again be a cite of controversy when Ricardo Bordallo, the former governor of Guam on his way to prison for corruption and bribery opted to commute his own sentence by wrapping himself in the flag of Guam, chaining himself to the statue, and firing a pistol into his head during rush hour. He placed a placard in front of himself: "I regret that I have only one life to give my island."

When I was there, the statue had been gifted with a coconut, a mostly full can of coke, and an empty bud light bottle. The chief has a pretty sweet view of a tattoo parlor and a Vietnamese takeout place. Just south of the statue are a bunch of canoes, sitting in the sun next to a sign that reads "Guam Outrigger Canoe Club."

I pass by a florist offering a 15 percent discount on sympathetic arrangements. In the next window pane, they mention that they also sell Kama Sutra oils. Classy. Just up the road is a bronze statue of Pope John Paul II. His bronze head is beaming, grinning perhaps because 85 percent of Guamanians claim to be Roman Catholic. That, or maybe he's happy because he's mounted on a lazy susan, revolving 360 degrees every 24 hours like a papal sunflower. We should all be so lucky in memoriam.

I pass a few more signs that make me chuckle: "Guam Public Schools: Every child is entitled to an adequate public education." (Not great, mind you -- but adequate). And then later: "Every Husband's Nightmare Arts and Crafts Festival." I applaud Guam for calling a spade a spade.

As part of my pursuit of foreign language materials, I stop by the University of Guam (go Tritons!). Not only is it a linguistic jackpot, supplying me with a dictionary, intro text and reference grammar for Chamorro AND a Pohnpeian-English dictionary (which I bought without ever having been to Pohnpei, just because it was there), but there was also a post office so I could mail everything back to myself (via US mail!) and avoid having to lug it all around. And to cap it off, they had a live band playing in the cafeteria, which is about all you could want as far as I'm concerned.

I decide to stop by a few of the places my map labels as actual tourist destinations. I start at the Hamamoto Tropical Fruit World. China actually has incredible fruit throughout most of the year (brought in from tropical Hainan island in the south, domestically produced and thus gloriously cheap), so I'm not exactly expecting to be wowed. The place is packed with Japanese tourists -- with a name like Hamamoto I can't say I'm shocked -- and they tell me that it's 15 bucks to get in, which gets you a guided tour in Japanese and an all-you-can-eat fruit buffet. Walking is strictly prohibited: it's tour trolley only. I decide to pass.

I move on to a waterfall and cave where Yokoi Shoichi, a Japanese solider, hid out for 28 years, fearing reprisals from locals for the actions of the Japanese military during WWII. He found leaflets advising that the war had ended, but was still unwilling to call it quits, weaving clothing from jungle fibers and burlap sacks, bathing in rivers and eating breadfruit and fish he trapped himself. When he was finally captured by local hunters in 1972, he was declared the Last Japanese Soldier to Surrender, and returned to Japan and unexpected celebrity status for line to the press on coming home: "It is with much embarrassment that I have returned alive." (Two years later another Japanese soldier named Onoda Hiroo would become the actual Last Japanese Soldier to Surrender, emerging from the jungles in the Philippines and bumping Yokoi to number two, despite 28 years of life in a cave in Guam: some people have terrible luck).

I went to the cave largely because I wanted to check out it's adjacent site, the Guam Outdoor Shooting Range. I've never fired a gun and can't say I'm interested in taking it up -- I mostly just want to see who the clientele are. Soldier types? Don't they have their own shooting ranges? If not them, then burly, heat-packing Chamorros and Philippinos? The answer, of course, was none of the above: the range caters to Japanese tourists who lack such facilities at home. It explains why there are so many "gun clubs" in downtown Tumon as well.

It occurs to me that Guam really is nothing more than an America-flavored theme park for Japanese tourists. Maybe that's why so many people -- self included, the first time around -- find it so distasteful: it's the generic America, the America of strip malls and chain restaurants and shooting ranges and strip clubs, the McAmerica that I try so hard to avoid when I'm home. But in Guam it's writ large, fully on display and reveling in itself for the sake of tour buses full of people who don't know, and will never know, any other America. To them, the choice between the Hard Rock and the Planet Hollywood is excruciating, the sort of thing people at home are going to ask about, the one thing they'll really remember. It's all a little depressing.

So that's Guam, I guess: some to take, some to leave behind, and a lot of in between. I doubt I'll ever come back unless I'm in transit, but I can't say that I regret having come: it was something new, albeit somewhat familiar.

Posted by Dakota on 6:59 AM link |

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

(Flashback to Palau)

I loved Palau, I truly did. I will say this, though: Palau is basically the land that young people forgot. It's only old people here. The bar-hopping twentysomething scene just hasn't made it here yet.

There was a woman on my boat on the first day of diving, a corporate lawyer in her late 50s or so, and she and I started talking. One of us (I'm not sure who) brought up the subject of Chamorro grammar, and I got pretty excited about what an agglutinizing language is, and how Chamorro is infixitive, building its nouns excitingly from the inside out. You know, normal small talk. At the end of my diatribe, she mentioned in passing -- you know, this is why I like Palau. I mean, there are no poor people here, so everyone is educated, and it means that all the people are so INTERESTING!

Be advised, poor people: I have it straight from the diamond-encrusted horse's mouth that you bore the wealthy.

Posted by Dakota on 7:23 PM link |

(Flashback to Palau)

The Palauan joie de vivre manifests iteslf in a bounding exuberence for life, an enthusiasm even for everyday activities. My kayaking guide, a 22-year old with an easy grin and an encyclopedic knowledge of local fish and World War II history, would respond to every question with "oh, I'm so glad you asked that." You could practically hear the exclamation points in his answers: "so, you see -- in total there are nine species of clam in the world. And we've got seven of them right here in Palau!"

My waitress at dinner on the night of my departure kept studding her speech casually with the exclamation "yay!" "You're done with the soup, yay!" and then later "you're having the special, yay!" I don't think she was putting on an act; she was just genuinely excited that I was having the special -- yellowfin tuna in fennel-shrimp butter with fried potatoes, yay!

Posted by Dakota on 7:17 PM link |

(Note: This is the longest post coming out of Pacifica; you've been warned).

People come to Yap for two reasons. Sort of. The reality of the situation is that people do NOT come to Yap, an island chain in the Federated States of Micronesia of about 17 thousand people, some 12 thousand of whom live on the main island. I flew to Yap on a crowded flight from Palau and was thinking that I'd have to fight to get a hotel room. But the flight continued on to Guam, and during the stop in Yap I was one of only three people who got off the plane. They estimate that 6,000 tourists visit Yap every year, but the capital city of Colonia (population: 1,000) feels like a ghost town, and it doesn't seem possible that so many people make it here every year.

The few people who do come mostly do so to dive in Manta Ray Bay. There are a small fistful like myself, who come because Yap is the Island of Stone Money, home of the world's largest currency, and that in and of itself is enough of a draw.

The money in Yapese is called rai -- flat stone discs, three to eight feet in diameter, carved from crystalline limestone. There's a hole in the center, through which logs were threaded to aid in transport. The stones were quarried in Palau using only clam and oyster shells -- metal tools did not arrive on Yap until the Europeans showed up, hundreds of years after the Yapese began using stone money. (The first group of Europeans to arrive were Spanish Jesuits in 1731, but the Yapese sensed trouble and slaughtered the entire mission. Europe gave Yap a wide berth for the next hundred years).

I came to get up close and personal with some rai, and after walking both streets in the capital city, I rented a bike and pedaled around looking for it. The Japanese civil government in power in the 1920s endeavored to count all the coins and found over 13 thousand in an area of about 40 square miles -- about half the size of DC -- so it's not exactly hard to find. (That same Japanese civil government in the run up to World War II used the Yapese as forced labor to build roads and runways; ever pleasant in wartime, the Japanese punished non-compliance by smashing stone coins and using it as filler in the roads).

The value of a piece of stone money is determined not by its size, but rather by the number of lives lost during the quarrying, carving and 250-odd mile outrigger canoe trip each direction that one had to undertake in order to obtain said money. My kayaking guide in Palau showed us some of the uncarved limestone, and said the loss of lives that gave it value was not due to the fact that people were taking several-ton stone cargoes across the unpredicatable Pacific in hand-carved canoes, compassless and guided only by the stars; rather, he attributed the deaths to Yapese black magic. (The Yapese have long been known as the sorcerors of the Pacific).

The stones are all over the island, usually in groups of five to ten in so-called "stone money banks" on the side of the road.

The stones are everywhere, on proud display in front of the homes and businesses (often given as a gift, to wish luck to new enterprises), and in stretches of five to ten in so-called "stone money banks" on the roads that lead into villages. Rai, while largely superceded by the US dollar as a matter of convenience and practicality, are nonetheless still used for weddings, funerals, and to purchase property. When the money changes hands, the stone discs do not move -- everyone just knows to whom they belong, and how much they're worth, and what the story behind them is. Theft is not a problem: the money is protected by taboos and curses, and I was told that stealing one would put one's entire family at risk.

Yap isn't an easy place to explore by bike. For one thing, the entire island is uphill. More importantly, every inch of unpaved land is privately owned, and the Yapese (the most traditional of all the Micronesians) do not take kindly to strangers tromping unbidden on their property. And the majority of the island isn't actually on the paved road; a lot of the villages are tucked back in the jungle, connected by ancient stone paths that have been maintained for generations by the villages they connect. For the most part, my bike ride around Yap didn't do much for me except leave me sunburnt and hot (I had washed my mud-caked shorts and spread them on the balcony to dry, leaving me in jeans. And a decently deep cut on the bottom of my foot, right where the little toe meets the rest of the foot, made me exchange my sandals for closed toed shoes out of fear of infection. Neither are appropriate in tropical Yap).

The next day I hired a Yapese guide named Tilus -- short for Nautilus, he told me -- to take me around the island. Tilus was leathery, an inveterate betel nut chewer with the requisite red-stained lips and gums, and he had a raspy voice that spoke of decades of cigarettes. He was captivating.

Tilus was preparing for a three to four month trip from Yap to Samoa in a traditional hand-carved outrigger canoe, to participate in a Pan-Pacific cultural celebration that unites all the indigenous people of the Pacific. He told me he was fundraising for the trip and I mentally readied ten bucks to give him, but all he wanted was for me to pass word to the embassy: he was looking for corporate sponsorship. The primary expense of the journey, he told me, was going to be food. In order to cross the Pacific in a canoe, you have have to carry two to three weeks of food at a stretch for the time in between island stopovers. With a crew of 10 in the canoe and up to 16 in the traditional Polynesian supply boat that follows behind, it adds up to a lot of food -- upwards of two thousand pounds of more or less nothing but cooked taro root, the traditional long-lasting staple of epic Pacific journeys.

In exchange for corporate sponsorship, he offered me a spot on the boat. His project -- a true cultural preservation project -- is the sort of thing that embassies love to fund, and I promise that when I get back to Beijing I'll look in to it. He says a canoe journey of this length is a spiritual trip, a test of faith, and ultimately a lot of fun, with fishing and storytelling the whole way. But since I don't speak Yapese, it sounds to me like it would be a long and lonely trip, marked by seasickness and the looming possibility of scurvy. Mind you, I'd kill to go -- it would be like no other experience in the world -- but I don't think it would be the rosy cakewalk that Tilus paints it as.

We stop just outside of Colonia. Tilus points to a nondescript island just offshore, and tells me that it's O'Keefe Island. I had passed by it on the bike but didn't realize what it was: the former headquarters of David O'Keefe, an Irish immigrant to the United States who had washed ashore in Yap half-drowned in 1872, and was nursed back to health by the shaman who found him. O'Keefe was a hot-tempered fortune hunter, shipwrecked during an expedition to look for pearls; he recognized the Yapese obsession with stone money and proceeded to corner the market, bringing in metal tools from hong kong and using a employing a Chinese junk that was much more stable than the traditional Yapese canoe. (Because fewer lives were lost when O'Keefe came into the picture, the money he traded in was worth less -- but he still dominated the market, and made a fortune).

O'Keefe traded the stone money for sea cucumbers and copra, dried coconut meat used in the production of lucrative coconut oil. He became ungodly wealthy by selling copra to the Hong Kong market, although the jump in the money supply caused by the influx of rai led to stone money inflation, and O'Keefe's stones were regarded as worth less than the traditional ones. He was treated as royalty on Yap until he was lost at sea in 1901. All that's left of his former empire are a few scattered ruins on the island he called home and the remnants of his trading post, since turned into a bar.

Tilus takes me to where the outrigger canoes he's planning to take to Samoa are being carved. The process used to take years, beginning by felling a tree in such a way as not to damage it, leaving it for several years to cure in the sun, and then painstakingly scorching the top layer of wood to soften it, so it could be scraped away with clam and oyster shells. Metal tools have made the process easier, and he tells me that the almost-done canoe has only taken about 6 months to make. The project has been open to the public, with children and teenagers in particular urged to participate so the art isn't lost in a generation or two. "We were once the rulers of the Pacific," Tilus tells me, and you can tell that the slow erosion of his traditional culture by encroaching modernity is almost physically painful to him.

The canoes are beautiful, painted red and black and accented in white as tradition dictates. Tilus gets a far away look in his eye as he explains the various parts of the ship to me -- the hand-carved hull, the oar holes, the sail woven from pandanus leaves. The prow and stern are identical, to allow either end to act as the front when the boat tacks into the wind.

He starts talking about traditional sailing methods. "What do you do if a storm comes, with 20 foot waves?" he asks. "Start crying?" I respond. Incorrect: if a storm is threatening to sink the canoe, everything -- oars, sails, food -- is tied down using ropes woven from coconut husks, and the canoe is flipped in such a way as to trap a small amount of air in the bottom of it. The canoe retains bouyancy, and the crew can hold on or lash themselves to the boat to ride out the storm.

"But, but what about sharks?" I asked. (Tilus was in his element, and I was completely in his spell by that point). The traditional way to deal with sharks, he told me, was to throw them a coconut. When they bite into it, the fibrous husk gets caught in the ridges of their teeth, binding their mouth shut and leaving them unable to attack. They call this 'tying the shark's mouth.' "We've been doing this for thousands of years," he tells me. "You have your technology -- and we have ours."

The Yapese, already declared as the sorcerors of the Pacific, would always travel with a medicine man on board to pray for wind as needed. When the wind died, tradition required the Yapese to bind a betel nut with multiple knots in a tightly wrapped pandanus leaf -- the same leaf from which the sails were woven. The betel nut was then thrown overboard, so that whatever ghost was stealing the wind would be occupied with untying the betel nut, and the wind would be freed.

Tilus takes me to a meeting house in the northern half of the island -- a tall, spacious thatched-roof affair, graced by 10 stone coins from the ten villages that use it, and made from coconut wood and built without using nails. Tilus sounds the conch shell trumpet traditionally used to call meetings, and points out a spot in the distance where the Philippine Sea crashes into the Pacific. The ocean is impossibly blue.

Towards the end of the day, we head to a spot on the island with a rusted anti-aircraft gun and the remnants of two Japanese zeros, shot down during World War II. Tilus tells me that others involved with the canoe project want to ask the Chinese embassy for money, as China has traditionally been generous to Pacific nations that recognize the PRC over Taiwan. But Tilus wants the funding from America because we -- America -- freed the Yapese, he said. He gestured at the remanants of the planes. "From the Spanish, from the Germans and from -- from this."

I tell him that I'm going to check with the Embassy in Palau, and I will. It's a long shot -- I'm guessing that US Embassy Koror, Palau isn't the most well-funded -- but I'm captivated by the idea, and I want it to happen. "You'd be welcome on the trip," he tells me. "Regardless of the money. You'd be welcome."

Posted by Dakota on 7:08 PM link |

(Flashback to Palau)

My kayaking guide introduced himself to the group as TJ. "I always tell people to call me that," he said, "because my Palauan name is way too difficult for tourists." We as a group were unwilling to accept this slap in the collective phonetic face, and clamored to be told his actual name. He relented.

"My name," he told us, "is ..." And here he pronounced his name. It sounded like Tangqnggngau. "The easiest way to think of is," he told us, "is that it's like the letter T, and then the word 'and,' and then you just add on the word qnggngau at the end."

I shamefacedly called him TJ for the rest of the trip.

Posted by Dakota on 7:29 AM link |

Monday, February 04, 2008

(Flashback to Guam)

Once upon a time, a couple of years ago, I was sharing hotel room in downtown Charleston (South Carolina, not West Virginia) with Quixote and T-rempe. Quixote bolted himself into the bathroom and emerged half an hour later, looking a bit woozy from blood loss and holding a red-streaked towel against his scalp. He'd tried to shave his head using the flimsy single-blade razor that came free with the hotel room, and the end result was a bloody mess for him and hours of hilarity for the rest of us, joking about 'safety razors' and towels that had to be redbagged as biohazards.

The karmic cycle came full circle when I, on a whim, decided to shave my head in my hotel room in Guam using only a beard trimmer and an old 3-blade razor. I can now say on good authority that shaving your own head -- particularly the back of your head, using a sort of braille method -- is best left to stuntmen and other trained professionals. I avoided the bloodbath that leveled Quixote (such is the miracle of the Mach 3 razor), but I did in fact overlook a one inch by one square on the back of my scalp, leaving me with a sort of slightly northwest of center rat tail until someone in the hotel took mercy on me in the hallway and mentioned that I'd missed a spot.

When I was about halfway through the hour-long head shaving process (and looking very much like a post-op lobotomy patient), it occured to me that I was standing more or less on the equator, and was in the process of removing the only thing that stood between me and a blister-laden third degree sunburn on my scalp. Panic set in when I visited every single store in Chuuk on the way to the hotel from the airport and learned that all of them cater only to the local market, comprised of dark-skinned Micronesians who neither need nor use sunscreen. I had resigned myself to spending two weeks with a t-shirt tied around my head in a sort of uber-attractive Osama bin Sun Protection look, but the dive shop came through for me with enough SPF-35 to keep the sunburn to a mild pink at worst.

Posted by Dakota on 6:28 PM link |

Sunday, February 03, 2008

I've still got two long blogs to type, but I'm going to start filling in with brief one-to-two paragraph bits from previous places. Some of these will be in present tense (which is how I originally typed them), and to please you tense nazis out there, I'll convert some to past tense depending on how I'm feeling. Let's get started.

Flashback to Chuuk, en route to Palau (via Guam):

The Chuukese woman next to me -- like a lot of Chuukese women on the flight -- was wearing an elaborate garland of flowers in her hair, somewhere between a Hawaiian lei and a floral tiara. It was pretty, but I couldn't help but think that customs is gonna freak out when they see it. The War On Agricultural Smugglers is much more ferocious (and efficacious, I think) than the War on Drugs.

Just before the end of the flight she stuffed the whole ensemble in her purse, making me wonder if customs would ever even know about it. God knows it's fragrant enough that they should be able to suss it out: I was close to passing out from the fumes by the end of the flight.

Posted by Dakota on 3:51 AM link |

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Where Chuuk has failed, Palau has succeeded.

Let's start with this: the people of Palau, a tiny Pacific nation of not qute 25,000 people, independent only since 1994, has some of the friendliest, most outgoing people I've ever met.

Anecdotal evidence:

(This story is a little convoluted; bear with me).

So, I was sitting outside the airport in Palau with a Dutch guy I met in Guam, waiting for his pal Father Francis, a Palauan priest who was supposed to come give us a ride into town. Palau International is a small one-gate airport with very few people wandering around, and the few people that were there were clearing out fast. It didn't take long before there was only one shuttle bus left, a fancy-pants type bus belonging to a luxury resort in north-central Palau. And even though we didn't have a reservation at that particular five-star hotel, when the final passenger showed up, the driver made a point of pulling over to ask -- hey, do guys need a lift into town?

Shortly thereafter, one of the customs and border patrol inspectors came out. He didn't even pause before asking -- you guys ok? Need a ride downtown? (American customs inspectors are good guys who are big on border security, but they're not so good on offering rides to complete strangers hanging around outside the airport).

He was followed by the woman manning the Palau Visitor's Information booth, of of the last people in the airport. She asked -- who are guys waiting for? And when the Dutch guy told her Father Francis, she responded excitedly -- oh! Father Francis is a friend of mine! He was my religion teacher! I'll wait till he gets here, to make sure you guys don't get stuck.

And when the priest finally did arrive, he told me that there was an extra room at the church, and that it would be a waste of money to stay elsewhere; why don't I just stay there? And so I did.

Heck of a first impression, I'll be honest.

The thing is, this over-the-top friendliness, the you're our guest and we'll take care of you attitude wasn't an isolated experience. It's not some faux, put-on friendliness for tourists at the airport when they show up, or limited to dive masters or hotel staff who deal with tourists every day. Every single Palauan I met had the exact same attitude. It's just part of thier national way of doing things. I recognize that my experience is very limited -- but when even the people behind the counter at the minimart follow you out to see if you need directions, and when students hanging out at Koro Community College go so far as to walk you to the bookstore to make sure you don't miss it -- you just kind of know. It's the way it is here.

It seems like it's all being driven by this fundamental happiness, a sort of underlying joie de vivre. When people see you, you can almost hear them thinking -- welcome to Palau: we're glad you're here. And they're not glad you're there in some cynical sense, just because tourism is what's driving the Palauan economy. They're glad you're there because they're Palauan, and they're occupying a gorgeous archipelago in western Micronesia with perfect weather and and unbelievable diving and hiking and paddling and fishing and anything else you could want, and they're genuinely glad they can share it with you, that you can sit back with one of their outstanding local Red Rooster draft beers and watch the sunset over the lagoon, and for a brief moment you can enjoy the paradise that belongs to the Palauans. It's an unbelievably uplifting national psyche.

And the diving was indeed incredible, with sharks, sea turtles, manta rays, a barracuda and giant clams. The Palauans know what they have and recognize that if they lose it it's gone forever, so they're eco-friendly and conservationist in their tourism, collecting garbage, warning against kicking or touching the reef, what have you. There have been a few cases of flagrant disregard for this, which the Palauans dealt with swiftly: when two Taiwanese fishing vessels were caught wrecking the environment (one dynamite fishing, which destroys coral, and one with a cargo hold full of illegally harvested sharks fins), the vigilante justice was swift: both boats were set on fire and burned down. That sort of behavior just doesn't fly here.

On the night of my departure, I was sitting at an outdoor bar in southern Koror (the capital "city" of Palau), enjoying the air that's that perfect temperature with just a light breeze, so it almost feels soft against your skin. I was drinking a beer while typing all of this up on my blackberry when the dive master from my first day came in to the bar. He shook my hand, called me by name -- they're crazy good with names here -- and asked me what I'd done for the day (sea kayaking, which I loved). He asked what my plans were for tomorrow, and I told him that I was leaving on the midnight flight to Yap, in the Federated States of Micronesia.

"Oh," he said, "well -- I hope you enjoy Yap. But I really hope you can come back to Palau some day, too."

And he meant it.

Posted by Dakota on 5:40 AM link |

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Chuuk is an odd place.

It's often ranked among the best places in the world for diving, easily top ten and almost always number one for wreck diving. It was a massive Japanese base during World War II and was subject to one of the most intensive American bombing campaigns in the Pacific theater, and as such it has over fifty intact sunken ships (boats tankers, airplanes, the whole deal) from the World War II era alone, as well as ships from other eras, like the one I dove.

But despite the mond-blowing potential of it all, there's nothing -- nothing -- on Chuuk. To say tourism is in its infancy would be a generous statement, implying a future growth that isn't certain on Chuuk. There are basically only three hotels on the island, as well as a fistful of stores aimed exclusively at the local market and all selling more or less the same staple goods at identical prices: canned fish and spam, long cotton dresses, fifty pound sacks of rice for $16.95. There are a few places under construction, a small fruit market, a post office and a bank, and more or less nothing else. The island is covered in ramshackle houses made of corrugated iron and scrap wood, and there are rusted abandoned cars everywhere. The nicest building by far is the airport, refurbished with money from the People's Republic of China.

The entity of the Federated States of Micronesia is something of a political construction, and aside from a rough association by geography, there isn't much in the linguist, historic or cultural sense that links the four states together. Chuuk is the outcast amongst them, seen as a drag on the collective economy. Unemployment is at 36 percent -- more than one in three Chuukese people do not work. Despite this, the manager of the dive shop (an American, and one of multiple within the last year -- turnover amongst foreign staff is high) told me that it's not uncommon for people to skip work for several days, and then show up as if nothing were out of the ordinary. "If Chuuk had a motto," he lamented, "it would 'half-assed is good enough.'"

Alcoholism is rampant. I was instructed not to tip the dive guides directly, but instead to give money to the dive shop to prevent them from immediately using it to purchase alcohol and then skipping work for several days, incapacitated; the dive shop distributes the money when the guides aren't slated to work the next day. As I was out walking the island after my dive, two different groups of boys -- literally boys, probably 16 or 17 years old -- asked me if I had any alcohol I could give them.

And the Chuukese are known for being violent, a problem that doesn't mix well with alcoholism and is no doubt compounded by poverty and underemployment. Both the guidebook and the hotel warn against going out at night. When I was walking around, I was greeted with friendly hellos from the very young and the very old, but the vast majority of people I was were young men in their twenties, staring hostilely. Even historically the island had this reputation: the heyday of European colonization in the Pacific began with Magellen, who first visited in 1565. But the Chuukese had a reputation as being too violent and too hostile to deal with, and no European presence was established there until well over 300 years later, in 1886, when the Spanish finally established an administrative capital in what was then called the Caroline Islands.

Even then Chuuk was largely ignored as too hostile to be worth it, and was administered from the Spanish capital on neighboring Pohnpei. The Spaniards introduced guns, and the island descended into an ugly family-on-family civil war that continued until 1904, five years after the Germans bought the Carolines from the Spaniards. It took a deployment of armed troops and a policy of mandatory gun collection to finally establish peace.

On the day of my departure, I rented a car and driver and spent the morning puttering around the island. The road is mostly washed out stonebed, paved only in small stretches, and maximum speed rarely gets above ten miles per hour. The Chuukese tend to have large extended families, and my driver spent the time honking to cousins, aunts and uncles throughout the island, calling out "aurrek!" which is apparently how you greet family members. At one point we picked up a hitchhiker (I was excited to trot out the Chuukese I had spent the morning pestering the driver to teach me), and it was only later that I learned he was the driver's brother-in-law.

He took me to the Xavier School, the best high school in Chuuk. It currently has 181 students, including a fistful from Yap and Kosrae, two other Federated States. The building was a Japanese communication center in World War II, and there's still a gaping hole in the ceiling of the gym from when a US bomber scored a direct hit. They have a display of huts in the yard the shows off the the varied thatching styles from all the nearby islands, and inside the school there's a massive display case for trophies. "They always win at the basketball," my driver tells me. There's a foreign teacher with curly red hair reading in one of the lounges, but he didn't look up from his book when he responded to my hello.

As we drove back to the hotel, the driver pointed to the rusted chassis of a flipped car, and with schadenfreude in his voice told me that the owner, drunk at the wheel of his exciting new purchase, had flipped it just one week after buying it. We stopped briefly to go into a cave with a massive WWII gun inside. Next to the gun was a mattress, where the ostensible owner of the caves sleeps, exacting a five-dollar fee from tourists who come to see it. He wasn't there when I went to visit, which the driver took as a blessing. "He's completely crazy," he told me.

The only other stop on the island tour was a memorial the Japanese built to themselves. It was dated 1980, and memorialized Japanese and Micronesians who "sacrificed their lives" during WWII. It blew my mind that they had the audacity to build a monument -- the Japanese were atrocious to all the indigenous people of the Pacific during the war -- but my driver was only three years old when they built the monument, and didn't know if there was an outcry.

And that was it. We finished up, I thanked the driver (his name was Pisander, and he was a good guy), and set some money aside as a tip to have the dive shop give him when he wasn't working the next day, and then headed out. I shared a ride to the airport with the Brit I went diving with, and that was that.

Posted by Dakota on 1:34 AM link |

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

The wreck you are about to dive is the Sgt. Mjr. J. Pugh.

When Ferdinand Marcos was smuggling all the gold out of the Philippines, this ship was mysteriously abandoned in Truk Lagoon by its captain and crew while on a return trip to the Philippines from Tinian. Because the ship was learned to be a Marcos ship -- a feared man -- no one would touch it, and it rusted at anchor until years later, half sunk, it was towed to its present location just off the reef that juts out from the Blue Lagoon resort, and sunk there. (No one took the ship, but it was thoroughly looted). The gold that Marcos was running was taken from the Philippines to Tinian, two islands north of Guam, and then on to Switzerland on a chartered plane. This ship is a mysterious casualty of that gold running operation.

So, wreck diving is awesome beyond any speaking of it.

I showed up at my hotel (Chuuk was formerly called Truk; my hotel was called the Truk Stop, and whoever thought of that name deserves a medal), and told them my story -- 24 hours to spend in Chuuk, relatively new and inexperienced diver, any chance I can go see a wreck? Two hours later I was in a boat cruising out to the lagoon. I was tagging along with a British guy who was just finishing up a week in Chuuk, logging four dives a day and trying to see as many wrecks as possible.

As far as diving goes, I'm a true greenhorn: I learned in January of '06, went diving again in Belize in August of that same year, and haven't been since. If you were to count the number of dives I've been on, you would run out of fingers well before you ran out of dives. I could barely remember how to set up the gear (which shoulder do these hoses go over?), and was generally very stumbly and unsure.

Technically speaking, wreck diving requires a special certification, an advanced PADI course. I was very upfront about lacking all of this -- I'm not trying to bluff anyone when approaching 60 feet underwater. I figured at best they'd take me out to a wreck let me swim around it and see the outside, but definitely not go inside it.

Wrong.

My guide was Chuukese, and keeping in mind that I was inexperienced and haven't been diving in a while, he was asked throughout the dive if I was ok (I was!), if I wanted to keep going (I did!). I was underweighted (for my own record keeping, I require 10, not 8 pounds of extra weight), and thus couldn't descend very easily, so there was one steep staircase into a lower hold I had to skip, but aside from that I got the full tour -- the engine room, the dining room, the main hold, the bathroom, still with intact toilet. I felt like Indiana Jones, less handsome and more waterlogged. It was, as previously stated, awesome beyond any speaking of it.

So, wreck diving: it's a heck of a way to spend an afternoon. I have terrible fin-skills, so I kicked up an awful lot of sand and had to touch the wreck several times to navigate through the tighter spots on the boat, a big no-no that resulted in decently cut up hands. (The guy who came along with me, an amiable Brit on his second trip to Chuuk, advised that if I need a handhold in the future, it's best to grab clams, as they clamp shut, are unhurtable and won't cut your hand).

The way flight schedules worked out I could either spend one day in Chuuk or four days. It was an expensive place (although much less so than I was anticipating), but the reality of the situation is that I had neither enough time nor enough money to stay in Chuuk and continue diving. But going to an underwater shipwreck is truly enthralling -- I haven't even come close to capturing it here, nor did I really try (doing so would require far too many exclamation points, a punctiation mark of ill repute) -- and after my dive I found myself wishing I'd taken the four day option instead of just the one. I'm sure I made the right choice (onward!), but still: my god it's captivating.

Posted by Dakota on 5:01 AM link |

Administrative sidenote: There are going to be some out-of-order posts during this vacation. The way I'm writing things down is different than I normally do, so instead of carrying a notebook, writing down bullets and then typing out one massive blog when I find an internet cafe, I'm actually writing bullets and then typing full blogs into my blackberry, whcih I'm basically just using as a very small word processor. Once I do find internet, all I have to do is retype it (or, very rarely, bluetooth it, although that hasn't happened yet). As such, I've got several things written that haven't been posted yet, but will be eventually. I'll flag the out of order posts with a time or date (or more likely, place) stamp to signal where they fall in the vacation.

The next post remains in order.

Posted by Dakota on 4:57 AM link |

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Don't go to Guam, my boss told me -- it's horrible. He used to live in Indonesia, and the cheap flights home routed through Guam from Bali, so he's actually been. This shatters my whole I don't know ANYONE who's been to Guam! rationale for coming here.

Why is it horrible? I asked him. It's horrible, he replied. Seriously, don't go there.

Other people warned me that it's just like America (so they'd heard -- aside from the boss, no one else had been), only more remote, harder to get to, and for some unknown reason, unpleasant.

So of course I came determined to come away from Guam saying sure, it's got some things in common with the States, but there's this whole other level underneath! Or, better -- you're CRAZY, it's nothing like the States at all! Or something on that order. I was willing to overlook the fact that the first ad you see coming off the plane is for the Outback Steakhouse, and the fact that Guamanians -- that's the correct noun form, which is pretty kickass, if you ask me -- were at one time the number one consumers of KFC on the planet and (according to the guy from the hotel who picked me up at the airport) are in possossion of the world's largest McDonalds.

I asked that same guy from my hotel how long he thought it would take to walk to the main downtown strip area, called Tumon. "Ahh, Tumon," he replied. "You wanna go to the Hardrock Cafe, don't you!" I wasn't aware that there was a hardrock in Guam and I asked if it was legit, affliated with the other hard rocks -- my time in China has led me to assume that everything on the planet is in violation of intellectual property rights or copyright law. He took offense a little bit, I think, and promptly informed me that YES, it's the REAL DEAL, a GREAT PLACE where I should DEFINITELY GO during my time in Guam. He, a portly fellow, also informed me that it was completely unwalkable to get to Tumon, it would take hours, don't do it, it's just not feasible.

It took just over half an hour.

Here's what Guam has that the United States doesn't: Japanese people. A heck of a lot more of them then we've got in the States. And strip clubs! They're everywhere! And an awful lot of shooting ranges, which they call gun clubs, which I kind of like because it makes it sound like such a benign hobby. I passed one called the Hafa Adai Gun Clun, which utilizes the one word of Chamorro I know and means Hello Gun Club. Sweet.

As I was walking around, I passed a quartet of soldier types, with freshly shaved heads and that look in their eye that said they were on the prowl. I asked them where they were headed and if there'd be any place busy on a Sunday night. They told me they were heading to a strip club, and it usually isn't too busy on Sundays, no.

Shortly thereafter a rented van chock full of military gentlemen drove past. It screeched to a halt and the driver leaned on the horn while the passengers shrieked with great enthusiasm for a pair of breasts that were walking by, attached to a bikini-clad girl on the opposite sidewalk. We don't really have many soldier types in downtown DC, and cheering on breasts is an activity that I think we as a city have kind of grown out of, so I guess that makes the Guam experience a bit different than the America I know.

Aside from that -- I arrived in the late afternoon, didn't rent a car (terrible public transportation here -- welcome to the United States) and don't really have a feel for the place yet. Sure, the strip malls and chain restaurants are out of control -- there's a Tony Romas, a TGI Fridays, McDonalds by the dozen and what have you -- but I'm sure there's something charming here. I'm back in a week or so and have another full day and night in Guam, so once I'm back I'll be renting a car and sussing thing out while continuing my ongoing quest for an English-Chamorro/Chamoro-English Dictionary.

And of course, having not made it this time, I've still got a date with the Hardrock Cafe.

Posted by Dakota on 9:00 AM link |

Saturday, January 26, 2008

First impression of Manila: on the ride from the airport to my hotel, I passed what appeared to be a high-class fast food joint named The House That Fried Chicken Built. This place is awesome.

I'm only here for a couple hours -- basically just an overnight before I begin a series of short-hop Pacific flights. I'm out in two hours to Guam, where I hang out for a day (which by all accounts is enough. It's remarkable how many people I've met who haven't been to Guam who went out of their way to tell me, oh, I've heard Guam is horrible). When I was booking my tickets, the good people on the booking line told me -- you know, it's the same price if you stop for a day in Chuuk. Do you want to stop for a day in Chuuk?

I responded: Do I!? I do!

So the day after tomorrow I'm off to Chuuk (formerly Truk) in the Federated States of Micronesia. For some reason, I've always wanted to go there; it was one of those places I saw on a map when I was like 12 and ever since have been determined to get to at some point, although I never actually thought it was a possibility. Anyhow, hopefully there'll be wreck diving since I went clean shaven for this. Although as of now it's slated to rain for my one day in Chuuk, so we'll see if it happens.

Cross your fingers for an English-Chuukese/Chuukese-English Dictionary.

Posted by Dakota on 7:25 PM link |

I had been under the impression that Tagalog, the Philippino language, was a pretty close relative of Indonesian. They're both part of the massive Austronesian language family that stretches throughout the Pacific, from Hawaii to Samoa to Fiji, bouncing off Malaysia, through Indonesia to as far away as Madagascar. With that in mind, on the plane I tossed on some Madagascaran music I had (ahem) borrowed from the Georgetown radio station during my tenure there as World Music Editor, and started looking over the intro to Tagalog grammar in the front of the phrasebook I bought.

I was thinking that Tagalog and Indonesian would be about as close as Spanish and French -- that is, some slightly different grammar but still with enough in common that there's no major curveballs coming out of it. I had figured I'd be able to get 15 to 20 percent of a newspaper off cognates. And even though I don't plan to bury myself too deeply in Tagalog -- the Philippines is one of those nations with terrifyingly high rates of true fluency in English -- I was nonetheless to excited to be heading back to a place where the verbs would, I assumed, be an intricate dance between active and passive, formal and informal, transitive and intransitive.

I was pretty much wrong on all counts.

I can't understand anything! Tagalog grammar is nothing like Indonesian! It's bracingly complicated! The verbs dance, yes, but not like they dance in Indonesian!

So, it's got these funky infixitive verbs that appear to be full-on shapeshifters with at best a barely discernible pattern. It's (unexpectedly!) an ergative-absolutive language, which means there's an exciting shift in how you mark your direct and indirect objects that depends on what flavor of verb you're using. And perhaps most excitingly, it's a VSO language. VSO, Verb Subject Object! Which means that in any given sentence, the very first thing you bump up against is usually the verb! Subjects come next and your object is tagged on at the very end! Bites the dog the man!

I recognize that to most people, the verb coming at the beginning of the sentence wouldn't warrant exclamation points. But I've never been up close and personal with a VSO before, except for that one time in Santiago when I got two Irish backpackers at the hostel I was staying in to gibber at each other in schoolbook-rote Gaelic (the Celtics are the big verb-initial holdouts in the Indo-European family).

A lot of this trip was planned (loosely -- I'm really not a planner) around bumping into some awfully obscure languages. But I had written off Tagalog entirely as just a slightly more complicated Indonesian, and once I started looking it over, it basically left me bouncing in my chair in excitement at the rest of this trip.

And now let's be honest: if you've made it this far in the blog post without pooping out from all that grammar talk, congratulations. Because you're the only one.

Posted by Dakota on 7:08 PM link |

Friday, January 25, 2008

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there was a fearless blogger named Dakota. Here he is, in all his blogging glory:



And here he is in another photo, which is blurry and sort of makes Dakota look angsty, as if though he were in an independent rock band. (He isn't).


Dakota had a problem. Specifically, Dakota was planning a vacation, and part of that vacation involved diving. The problem is right there on Dakota's face: facial hair. If you're truly married to your facial hair you can work around the diving issue by coating your face in vaseline before you dive. But Dakota isn't all that married to his facial hair, even though he's had it for almost two years now and in reality feels pretty naked without it.

Long and short of it: this vacation provides an excellent opportunity to compare and contrast the many different facial hair options available to our pal Dakota. Let's take a look, shall we?

Here we go: the Goatee.



Could be worse. A survivable facial hair.


I'm in China. What's appropriate? The Fu Manchu!



I'm chuckling at the ridiculousness.



And now... the 'stache.




THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THIS IS ATTRACTIVE. Seriously. I don't know who they are, but they exist. Weirdos, honestly.



And then -- the end.



And of course -- the progression from what have I DONE? to ...what have I done?

Posted by Dakota on 9:53 PM link |

Friday, January 18, 2008

I've got seven flights booked. I think I'll keep mum on the destinations until I'm actually there. Leaving next Saturday, the 26th.

One brief moment of panic: my ATM card expires 02/08. You might know 02/08 as taking place in two weeks. It seems very likely that there isn't going to be time for my bank to get me a new ATM card before I leave, which means about halfway through this trip, my ability to withdraw money will completely dry up. Which means next week, I'm gonna have to tromp around Beijing until I find a place to get some traveler's checks. Traveler's checks! This makes me feel very old school, like I'm taking an extended vacation back in the 1940s.

Regardless, it's all very annoying, since I think this might be an expense-heavy trip -- lots of potential for exciting side trips and whatnot -- and while I've got plenty of money set aside for this vacation, I'm gonna be mighty annoyed if I end up having to not do something because my money has become unaccessible.

Posted by Dakota on 10:06 PM link |

Thursday, January 17, 2008

I had been laboring away here in the salt mines of Beijing under the impression that I was going on vacation next Friday. Tragedy struck when I realized I had incorrectly counted the number of days in a week (seven), or perhaps had somehow incorrectly added when I combined the current date with the number seven (carry the one). Regardless, I was truly devastated (I mean, truly) when I realized that (oh god) February first, the beginning of my vacation, is not next Friday, but the Friday after it.

I am currently in negotiations to add a week to my vacation, on the basis of shoddy arithmetic. It is unclear how much progress is being made, because I am for some unknown reason terrified of actually coming out and asking my boss if I can tag an additional week on to the beginning of my vacation: it seems like it would be somehow overstepping my bounds. Instead, I'm resorting to dropping massive hints that I'm considering extending my vacation, to sort of soften my boss up before the other shoe actually drops. You'll note that passive-aggressively intimating that one would like to take some extra time off was (shockingly) not included in the list of seven habits of highly effective people.

In related news, Beijing was blanketed in a light dusting of snow today -- perhaps an inch -- which promptly froze into ice on the streets and sidewalks. I wasn't exactly planning a bare-all vacation, nor do I know if the Philippines even has such facilities available, but any possibility of my tromping around a nude beach on my upcoming trip has now been precluded by the gigantic bruise spreading across my tail from when I bit it hard on an icy sidewalk shortly after exiting the Korean restaurant next to my apartment.

Posted by Dakota on 8:46 AM link |

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Part of the reason for all this travel -- the bounce from Seoul to Vietnam, two long weekends in a row -- is because I've started to panic about Asia. Asia.

This tour in China was supposed to be operation Go To All The Asian Nations I Haven't Been To. And it hasn't been. I made it to Taiwan (the province of Taiwan) during language training, and went to a few places in China proper that I haven't been (Manchuria, Henan and Hunan and Qinghai provinces), but I haven't been sprinting around going to all the places that I haven't been, like I'd planned to. It's partly a money thing -- being a Property Owner means that extra disposable income goes directly to the knee-breakers over at Bank of America. It's also partly a time thing: China's far from everywhere, except Japan and Korea (and Mongolia, but come on: it's the dead of winter), and five, six, seven hour flights to get anywhere start to seem awfully daunting and definitely remove weekend jaunts as a possibility.

So I've started to panic. I've only got a year and a half left, which seems like a lot, but the summer is entirely blocked out as a no-leave period (Olympics, moving to a new Embassy), I'm probably going to go home for Christmas (no new countries then), my parents will be here in May (leave to go places I've already been), and my planned month during Chinese New Year has been scaled back to two weeks. Panic.

There are, as of now, 15 countries in Asia I haven't been to. There're a few obvious no-gos: I ain't going to Afghanistan on vacation, and North Korea won't let me in the door, so they're both out. I'm willing to scratch Bhutan, since the visa is 200 bucks a day and the only flights are from Calcutta, which isn't exactly close by or easy to get to from Beijing. And the Maldives are out too, since I'm not made out of rupees and sitting on pristine white sand beaches surrounded by absolutely NOTHING isn't something to do without a partner in crime (and god knows: I believe in flying solo when it comes to international travel).

So, let's set aside those countries and the other four nations that end in 'Stan besides already ruled-out Afghanistan and the two I've already been to (Pakistan and Uzbekistan) and see where that leaves us:

Bangladesh, Brunei, East Timor, Mongolia, Myanmar (Burma, if you will), Nepal and the Philippines.

Seven nations. A year and a half. Can this be done? I'm going to say: maybe. The thing is, these are not easy places to get to. Brunei? I don't know ANYONE who's been to Brunei, and Brunei is easy when you compare it against East Timor -- which has flights only from Bali, occasionally from Jakarta, and from Darwin, Australia.

But now comes the waffling. I'm almost definitely going to the Philippines for Chinese New Year. I've never been, and my buddies here from the Philippines Embassy are all hilarious and fun, and I'm looking forward to it. But then I find out that for 200 bucks roundtrip from Manila, I can go to Guam. Guam! A U.S. territory! The world's largest K-Mart! A freaky indigenous Austronesian language called Chamorro that's an internal agglutinizer!

So I decided: I should go to Guam. And I might, depending on how hard Philippines Air makes it for me to get a ticket.

But THEN I found out that for only about 350 bucks, I can go roundtrip from Manila to Brunei, and suddenly I can't help but think -- I should go, shouldn't I? But if I go to Brunei (and then either back to Manila or on to KL for a one-way flight home), I won't exactly be spending a whole lot of time in the Philippines -- which is the whole reason for going to the Philippines in the first place.

So now it's a conundrum. I need to buy plane tickets approximately tomorrow, but in the mean time, I've somehow got to decide -- am I chasing this "Go to all the countries I haven't been too in Asia" thing too hard? Do I really need to drop an extra five hundo to go to Brunei Dar Es Salaam for two days, to see what the capital city (Bandar Sari Begawan!) is like? Is it at all worth it? Am I wasting not only money but also an awful lot of precious time just to go to places more or less exclusively because I've never met anyone, ever, who's been to them? Is the checkbox and the blog post that important?

I'll let you know in mid February what I decide. (Although now that I've mentioned the blog, it cements my resolve a little bit: god knows I'm always looking for stuff to blog about, and the world's largest K-mart might just be it).

Posted by Dakota on 9:33 AM link |

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

I'd move to Hanoi tomorrow if they gave me the chance. It's perfect: ungodly green (Beijing has been experiencing record-breaking pollution for the past few weeks, so green means more to me these days), set on a small fistful of two lakes (two), with a spectacular old town, great food, low prices and cheap beer. And even though I don't speak any Vietnamese beyond phrasebook pleasantries, I still found the Vietnamese people whom I met to be friendly and outgoing and eager to communicate, albeit often with only waving hands.

Vietnamese, in the mean time, is one of those uber-boutique languages that, while not particularly useful in a pan-global sense (the vocabulary is largely Chinese; the grammar feels more like Thai) can only impress people: the phonetics of it are so other-worldly bizarre that it sounds like an alien language.

Things accomplished: visited Uncle Ho. Of the three preserved world leaders (four if you believe dicey rumors of an embalmed Kim Il-Sung in Pyongyang), I've now checked the boxes next to two of their names, having viewed Mao in 2000 but having missed Lenin during my two brief sojourns in Moscow. With only Mao to compare with, I can say on good authority that Ho Chi Minh has a pretty sweet set up.

Mao's got a box seat view of Tiananmen and hundreds of adoring visitors who toss flowers at him (the flowers are plastic and are continuously collected and wheeled back out front to be resold in a never-ending capitalist loop that would make the world's biggest communist spin in his so-called Mao-soleum if he knew). Ho Chi Minh, who ostensibly just wanted to be cremated and get on with the afterlife, has so much more than just a mausoleum. The actual is box is a staid columned affair done in marble and protected by fresh-faced Vietnamese guards in ceremonial white uniforms, who look bored and enforce the rules: no talking, no photos, and no hands in pockets. You can't carry a bag, but they provide a bag check under a sign that reads "Keep luggage: free. No gold or jewels."

I got yelled at for attempting to write down the quote in the entranceway of the mausoleum, to have someone translate for me later; apparently there's no taking notes either. Subsequent googling reveals that the quote -- khong co gi quy hon doc lap tu do -- apparently means 'nothing is more valuable than independence and freedom.'

Uncle Ho himself is pretty much as you'd expect: waxy.

The House of Mao stops at the box containing him, but the Ho Chi Minh compound continues for days. For a small entrance fee, you can walk past the presidential palace, to a small exhibit of Uncle Ho's Used Cars (his Peugot and a Russian car were being sulkily examined by a pair of Americans wearing -- rather distastefully, I thought -- camouflage cargo pants). There's a mock up of his bedroom, including his twin bed -- Uncle Ho never married, although he urged people not to follow his example in this regard, just as he urged them not to smoke; he was chimney-esque, apparently. And there's a house on stilts where he ostensibly spent quite a bit of time, although probably not as much as the museum claims, since he would've drawn American bombers like moths to a flame.

The compound itself is lovely, covered in flowers and carp ponds, and thronged with tourists and young Vietnamese soldiers who feed the fish and applaud when they eat. For another 10,000 dong -- 70 cents or so -- you can tag through the Ho Chi Minh museum, and I promptly ponied up the money to do so. The first floor is primarily long quotations in Vietnamese and pictures of speeches being made or listened to and didn't do a whole lot for me, since I don't speak a lick of Tieng Viet. The second floor, though, is a modern art representation of the life of Ho Chi Minh and modern Vietnamese history. It's amongst the oddest museums I've been to, and lacking a guide or a guidebook I can't say that I fully understood it -- lots of sculptures of heads with the eyes both on one side and stylized rifles and hand grenades, with the lighting done primarily in muted red. Very strange; it inspired me to buy an ice cream cone, although that probably wasn't the intended effect.

So, Uncle Ho: check. I feel compelled to finish the Trifecta (the quadrumvirate if I can somehow swing a ticket to North Korea, but I can't help but think there's a zero percent chance of that in my future), but Lenin's going to have to wait: there's an awful lot of Asia waiting to be seen before I go back to Moscow.

Posted by Dakota on 9:18 AM link |

Friday, January 04, 2008

I’ve always declared myself to be afraid of motorcycles, ever since I was in an accident when I was 19 in the tiny beach town of Pangandaran in West Java, Indonesia. I'm generally unwilling to ride any sort of two-wheeled conveyance that I'm not powering with my own legs.

There was a brief moment in Greece when I decided I needed to 'get over it,' and attempted to rent one of the scooters that everyone on the island, Greek and foreign, sober or otherwise, drives everywhere at all hours of the day. But the gentleman behind the counter saw my license ("class c," which he assumed meant "class: car" and not motorcycle) and my general trepidation, and refused to rent one to me, allowing me to explore the island exclusively on foot without so much as a pang of guilt at my own cowardice and inability to get over it. (I am, to this day, haunted by the face of the other person involved in the accident in Pangandaran, and don't really have any desire to overcome this particular fear of mine).

But now I'm Hanoi -- having left Korea on New Years Day, stopping in Beijing only long enough to wash the smell of bar smoke out of my jeans and wrap up what little work was on my desk to pass off to someone else. The streets here are choked with mopeds, and there's not really any other option when it comes to getting around. I was content with walking, and headed out into the streets this morning starting at about six, well after Hanoi was already awake and bustling. I keep a compass attached to the bag I always carry, but it froze during a winter trip to northern China and hasn't given an accurate estimation of north since then; once day was fully set and the sun was no longer in the east, I found myself without any idea where I was or which direction I should be heading.

No cabs. No choice but to hail a moped.

Mind you, I delayed this for hours, stopping at roadside stands for yet another unneeded snack (snacks cost pennies and are ungodly delicious, so they served the dual purpose of delaying my getting on a motorcycle while providing me with an important avenue for the ingestion of pork). But further delay eventually became untenable, and I had no choice but to stop one of the guys muttering "moto?" on the outskirts of Hanoi.

My mental criteria: I wanted an old guy -- old guys have been around a damn long time, and if they'd driven a moto for this long, there was less likelihood that I'd die in tow. I wanted a new looking motorcycle -- the newer the ride, the less likely the guy would barrel into oncoming traffic and risking denting his means of conveyence. And I wanted a guy who wouldn't rip me off, and would take me downtown for less than 3 bucks.

I found all three, about eighteen seconds after I started looking. Hanoi is basically an all-you-can-eat buffet of moto drivers.

Here's the thing that maybe all of you people who lack my motorcycle fear already know: riding a moped is kinda fun. My driver (he told me his name, something impossibly Vietnamese which I promptly forgot; I wanted to introduce myself as 'Nguyen,' but my boss, an old Vietnam hand, had told me that Americans in Vietnam don't take local names) handed me a helmet, which I put on. The fact that everyone wears helmets to me indicates that they're required by law -- these are people who do arc-welding while not wearing a shirt; if safety isn't mandatory, it's not a consideration. My helmet lacked a chin strap, which means it was useless as far as concussion-prevention goes, but it made me feel safer and (I can only assume) made me look fantastically dashing.

The ride took much longer than I was expecting -- I had been walking for about 6 hours, in no particular direction, only branching when one street looked more interesting than the one I was on. By the time the morning fog had burned off, I was (apparantly) in the middle of nowhere, since the ride went on and on.

I didn't realize there were pegs for my feet, and by the halfway point my thigh muscles were aching from keeping my legs from dragging on the ground. We stopped for gas. The driver saw my foot-pedal problem, pointed out the pegs, and everything was smooth sailing from that point forward. He didn't even seem to mind my death-grip on his waist, and seemed expert at adjusting for the fact that I was bizarrely weighted (small pack slung on my back, messenger bag dangling at my side): I assume this is because I picked an old guy. I silently applauded my criteria.

We arrived at my destination; I gave him a few bucks more than we had agreed as a thank-you for getting me home alive (I was grateful, and told him such in my politest Vietnamese. He responded, but god only knows what he was saying: this language is impossible).

He drove off, and a few seconds later I sprinted after him yelling "hello, hello!" because I don't know the Vietnamese for "I still have your helmet." But he happened to glance back as I was waving the helmet at him, so driver and helmet were reunited. Which is kind of a shame: it made me look so dashing!

Posted by Dakota on 7:08 AM link |

Monday, December 31, 2007

Last night I found myself in a largely abandoned bar, sitting next to an English teacher whose face was weighed down with an intricate set of piercings, and who was resolutely losing money in a Korean card game that she didn't appear to know the rules to. I ordered a beer and tried to suss out how the game was played, but since the player closest to me appeared to be equally in the dark as I was, the only rules that I could see involved her taking out her wallet after every hand and forking over a few bucks to one of the bartenders.

I was going to hurry through my beer and leave when another bartender, sensing my boredom and imminent departure, walked over to me. She, a tall, attractive Korean with an easy smile, waved her fist at me and rather solemnly intoned ka-yi, ba-yi, bo! I had enough Korean friends in high school to recognize those three words -- scissors, rock, paper -- and to know that a challenge was being laid down.

We sparred a few times -- it took a second for me to catch on that Koreans throw on three, rather than just after it -- at which point she explained that Koreans, through a long history of either intense boredom or an ongoing need to make equitable decisions on the fly, have developed a number of surprisingly complicated variations on the otherwise childs-play-esque rock-paper-scissors.

She explained the first game to me -- you throw (every throw is invariably accompanied by a chanted ka-yi, ba-yi, bo! with the throw coming on the bo!). Whoever wins pauses for two seconds or so, and then when the other guy isn't suspecting it, you shout "mok!" and change whatever it is that you originally threw to another sign of your choosing; if, when you shout mok! the other guy ends up with the same sign as you, it seems that he loses. There are a few other things you can shout in Korean, but as I am not a speaker of Korean and wasn't carrying a notebook, they've been lost to history.

In short: I did not, and still do not, understand how this sort of rock-paper-scissors is played. The fact that I failed to grasp a children's game is not lost on me.

She called over another bartender, and they played for a few minutes to show me how it was done -- she consistently winning, barking out mok! and him slowly backing away from her while losing every hand. She was a semi-professional. I still couldn't get the rules.

Noting that I was a moron, she moved forward to the next variation.

Each player uses both hands simultaneously, counting out ka-yi, ba-yi, bo! and throwing down either rock, paper or scissors with one hand and a simultaneous different throw with the other hand. The initial throw is followed immediately by the invocation "gop-be-gi!" at which point the players each select one of their hands to push forward. You are, in essence, playing two-handed RPS, setting out a buffet line of choices that you and your opponent will each choose from, and then making the final decision at the very end.

Whomever loses has to put one hand down on the table and play with only one throw in the next round, putting them at a massive disadvantage. When they lose again, they put their hand on top of the hand that's already down, to be slapped by the winner -- and not lightly, either; Koreans play for keeps.

We played briefly, but it was clear that I was thinking too hard -- Korean rock-paper-scissors is dominated by speed, a fact that I didn't fully grasp. She again called over the other bartender, and they went at it. I was dazzled by the speed of their throws; they could go through five rounds in as many seconds, barking out ka-yi, ba-yi, bo! Gop-be-gi! over and over and over again. It was impressive, and the male bartender continued to lose hand after hand to the female, who wasn't exactly cutting him any slack on the hand slapping.

By this point the English teachers had entirely lost interest in playing cards and were intent on rock paper scissors. The current game was expanded handily to include five people, a feat I didn't realize possible for a one-on-one game, but the Koreans have thought all of this through and it worked just fine. Sort of. I still found it blisteringly complicated, but by that point I was firmly established in the mind of the bartender as a mook anyways, so it didn't really matter.

The English teacher then introduced variation three, which she claims she plays with her students and which would land any American teacher squarely in litigation-ville with a squadron of lawyers screaming for blood.

The two players hold hands loosely in the standard hand shake position. The other hand is used to throw (while shouting, of course, ka-yi, ba-yi, bo!), and the winner then goes on to slap -- quite hard -- the loser's hand. The loser, however, can use his free hand to defend the hand that's being held, so that it becomes a contest of speed to see who can register fastest that they've won or lost and either slap or get into the protection position. This game is also breakneck, about a throw a second, and it only took about twenty seconds for the bartender to have the English teacher mingling obscenities with her very vocal ow's.

Shortly thereafter, I finished my beer and the English teachers declared themselves out of money, so that was it for my evening of lighthearted, playground-style violence. I feel like there are dozens more variations on this game waiting to be taught to me, but they're probably going to go undiscovered unless I move to Korea or start hanging out in the Korean-dominated parts of Beijing.

Posted by Dakota on 4:40 AM link |

Last night I was wandering the mean streets when I passed a guy with a deep fryer mounted on a push cart. He was shoving hotdogs on to chopsticks, and then dunking them in a thick batter before rolling them in panko, Japanese-style breadcrumbs. He dropped the end result into the aforementioned deep fryer, and three minutes later out came a Korean corn dog.

It goes without saying that I immediately purchased one, waving off the proffered ketchup and mustard. I dunked it in kojujang, a bright red Korean-style hot sauce made from roasted peppers and sesame and to which I'm completely addicted to, and enjoyed the hell out of it on my way back to my hotel.

Today I was again wandering the streets when I saw a different vendor doing the same thing. After he rolled the dog in the breadcrumbs, though, he was going back for a second dunk in the corn batter, and then rolling the entire conglomeration in French fries that were then fried into the outside of the corn dog, so the entire meal -- main dish, side dish -- were all part of the same fried chunket-on-a-stick. This variation on a theme of corndog makes me feel that Koreans are living in the future.

Posted by Dakota on 3:32 AM link |

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Of all the Asian tourism campaign slogans, my favorite by far is Malaysia: Truly Asia! which has a sort of paranoid, defensive ring to it, even though it would take some truly aggressive cartography to attribute Malaysia to any other continent.

Much less compelling than Malaysia is Korea's slogan -- The SEOUL of Asia! which is the sort of pun that even I, a pun-loving fool, think is too easy. A more convincing tagline would've been Seoul: An hour and a half flight and a hundred bucks roundtrip from Beijing*, which is ultimately why I got on a plane yesterday to come here for the weekend.

Here's what I didn't really realize about Korea: you step off the plane, and BAM -- you're in the heart of the first world.

I am enraptured with Korea. It started with the custom's declaration form, on which the first question is "Are you bringing into Korea: firearms, knives, crossbows or other weapons?" (I suppose with several thousand US soldiers running around, you need to take every precaution you can against projectile weapons from the middle ages). Then you land in the uber-modern airport and hop on the train only to discover that seats on the train are HEATED, a luxury I thought confined only to high-end Volvos; the trains run every twelve minutes and there's no need to question if they'll be on time; you can tell from the pristine station, the complex but user-friendly ticket machine and the perfect signage that it's going to be on time: of course it will.

And there's also the Korean language, with its exciting division of consonants -- rigidly unaspirated and heavily aspirated and excitingly stressed! -- as well as it's bright, crisp vowels, and its single, shapeshifting combined r/l liquid, all of which have me enchanted. I could listen to it all day, which is good, because there's an awful lot of Korean being spoken in Korea. And the snacks. The snacks! Korea is FILLING UP with deliciousness, and it's not going to eat itself, people!

Enraptured.

It's eye blistering cold, though, that's for damn sure.

*Ok, technically the ticket was a hundred bucks but the taxes add another hundred and twenty that I don't think is worth mentioning. It was a hundred bucks roundtrip, and damn the man.

Posted by Dakota on 8:13 AM link |

Thursday, December 20, 2007

My beloved bicycle (218 kuai, or just over 25 dollars and a rickety deathtrap that I love) ceased to function, the pedals inexplicably locked. On more or less every corner there's an enterprising guy (always a gentleman, never a female) with a "Bicycle Repair" sign, and having nothing to lose I walked my bike to the corner nearest my apartment.

The gentleman there looked it over, played with the pedals with his hand, felt the chain, and then stepped away. He went to his toolbox, grabbed a hammer (two steps below a sledge hammer, but still massive), and proceeded to pound on the bicycle, on the pedals, the gears, the frame, over and over and over. After about fifteen solid thwacks, he stopped, and lifting the back tire, turned the pedal. The tires moved. He declared it fixed.

I tested it out; it worked.

As I rummaged in my wallet for the quarter he'd asked me for to pay for his services, I asked him -- so, what was wrong?

Unclear, he replied.

Posted by Dakota on 10:15 AM link |

Friday, December 14, 2007

Osteosarcoma: cancer of the leg that normally starts at the knee and spreads quickly; cause unknown. Treatment, in the late 70s, started with amputation above the knee and moved forward from there.

Terry Fox: a Canadian diagnosed with osteosarcoma in 1977; leg amputated that same year. Three years later he began: filled a bottle with water from the Atlantic to carry to the Pacific, dipped his left toe into the ocean and started running west at a pace of 26.2 miles per day, an Atlantic-to-Pacific run split into a marathon every twenty four hours, run on a prosthetic right leg. He called it the Marathon of Hope.

Terry Fox did not make it to the Pacific Ocean. He stopped running 143 days later, just north of Thunder Bay in Ontario, 3,339 miles into his run: golf ball sized tumor in one lung, lemon-sized tumor in the other. A year later it was over: funeral broadcast on national television, buried in his hometown of Port Coquitlam, on the outskirts of Vancouver. He was twenty-two.

Terry Fox was running to raise money for cancer research; the net gains from his high-profile run and the subsequent celebrity telethon shortly after he stopped raised millions of dollars for cancer research. I had never heard of Terry Fox until I moved to Pakistan and the Canadian Embassy started organizing a run, but Canadians consider him to a be a national hero, and voted him to number two on the list of Greatest Canadians, ahead of Alexander Graham Bell and Wayne Gretsky but behind Tommy Douglas, the founder of the Canadian medicare system.

The run in Pakistan was later cancelled in the wake of the earthquake, deemed inappropriate to raise money for another cause when the fundraising for Kashmir was ongoing. But the Terry Fox run is an international non-competitive event held annually in memorial of the original run, the single largest one-day fundraising event for cancer in the world. It's held simultaneously in over 400 cities every year, with additional international stragglers in the weeks that follow.

Beijing's Terry Fox Run was a few months ago. It was poorly advertised, held in the park just outside my apartment building on a cold morning marked with a steady drizzle that turned into sleet. I had told our DCM (the second in command of the Embassy) about the event previously, and he'd dug further and emailed me a few extra tidbits: Run starts at 8 in Chaoyang Park. Free entry, donations accepted. Starting gun to be fired by Canada's own Da Shan.

The DCM no-showed on the run, but I was there with a few other loyal embassy compatriots, shivering in the sleet and waiting for the interminable speeches in incomprehensible loudspeaker mandarin to finish up. I was pretty excited for a number of reasons:

1. It was drizzling on a freezing morning, which means the turnout was terrible. They say the run is non-competitive, but it was a sparsely attended 8 kilometer race -- the 8k is my favorite distance -- and the lack of attendees in the drizzle meant that I, for the first time ever, had a shot at a winning a race, albeit one that they claim isn't a competition.

2. The starting gunman was Da Shan. Da Shan is the Mandarin-speaking Canadian wunderkind previously quoted as excited to be a member of Team Canada for the Olympics, as it will make the Chinese think -- hey, Canadians are our friends! Unlike those Americans! Poor turnout in a small venue meant that I would have a shot at actually meeting Da Shan and telling him exactly how I felt about his comments.

Speech after speech after speech. At one point I looked up and was shocked to see a white guy at the podium, and then was annoyed that I too was impressed at how fluent Da Shan's Chinese is: he sounds like he's from Liaoning province. More speeches. I stop paying attention. Five people on the stage shout in unison -- the marathon of hope begins NOW! and all five raise their starter pistols and fire. The 200 or so runners move towards the starting gate when one of the people on the stage grabs the mike and starts shouting -- not yet! Don't start running! Wait wait wait!

They start announcing groups -- runners from the Canadian International School -- go! Runners from Central Middle School Number 7 -- go! I wait about 45 seconds, but it's freezing and I've still got it in my head that I can win this race (at which there are no runners and no one cares about winning), so I finally duck off and start running.

8k is five miles and I'm pacing at under 8 minutes per thinking I can hold it easily over 5 and maybe kick it hard on the last mile. By the end of the first mile, there are only two people in front of me and I'm feeling strong. By the end of the second mile the two people in front of me are long gone but I'm in a solid third with no one in sight behind me; I pass a spectator who shouts -- the first foreigner!

At 2.2 miles, about 3 and half kilometers into the race, I round the corner into the empty starting area. I have run for just under 17 minutes, at 7:42 per mile. There is no one in the starting area except the two people who finished in front of me and a few people milling around the stage looking bored. I jog to the other runners and ask -- are we supposed to do it twice? They don't know. I ask one of the organizers; she doesn't know. I start to run towards the starting gate again, and they wave me back -- no, you've finished. That's it.

So -- I placed third. Probably the closest I'll ever come to winning a race, although referring to the Terry Fox run as a "race" really stretches the bounds of the definition of athletic competition. I will cling to this, nonetheless: third place. (I will also maintain, steadfastly, that if I had known it was only a two mile race, I could've easily knocked a minute off my mile time and perhaps come in first; but no one likes post-race sour grapes, so I keep that thought to myself).

The rest of my buddies finish shortly after me. One tells me -- hey Dakota, I finished right behind your favorite person in China. And he points, and there, a few feet ahead of me is Da Shan.

Da Shan. The moment had come.

I jogged to him and called out -- Da Shan! Hey Da Shan! He greeted me, and I wasted no time before leaping into the matter at hand.

I said: Hey, Da Shan -- listen, I saw your remarks in the China Daily about being on Team Canada, and how it's all about friendship, how you want the Chinese to see you on the team and think, hey, that's Da Shan! And his our friend, and team Canada is our friend too! Unlike those Americans. And, as a fellow Canadian*, I really thought that those remarks were unprofessional and quite frankly very unsportsmanlike.

His reply was instantaneous: Oh, that, that was a misquote! That was originally quoted in the Toronto Star, and then it was all taken out of context, and that's not what I originally said at all. I mean, I don't have a problem with Americans -- I have American friends! -- and I really do think the Olympics is all about friendship, but there are some people, some Americans out there who don't think that way, and that's what I was talking about. Some people don't think that the Olympics are a friendship kind of thing -- and I guess I'm one of them now, according to the press.

This was the most enjoyable moment of my entire life: Da Shan, backpedaling like a madman.

My friends were following out of earshot but within watching distance, and they described Da Shan as "visibly uncomfortable." He apparently was moving at a diagonal the whole time, taking steps to move away from me. When our conversation was over, he disappeared into a taxi at near light speed. I'm pretty sure this wasn't a revelatory moment in the life of Da Shan. I don't think he lost a lot of sleep over my comments. But I'm guessing that it DID give him pause for a brief moment, and I'm sure he told his friends about it, and that, THAT is all I was hoping for.

Score board: Da Shan zero, team America one.

*Yes, I claimed to be a Canadian. Yes, that was a dirty lie, but it was a NECESSARY dirty lie -- if I had said I was anything else, I would've just looked like another whiny American with an irrational axe to grind, upset at having been slighted and, by extension, perhaps a little bit jealous that my country failed to produce a Mandarin wunderkind like the Shan-ster himself. But please believe me when I say that I'm not in any way jealous of Da Shan, and that my ire at his comments goes well beyond nationalistic irritation into the realm of full on homicidal hatred.

Posted by Dakota on 10:38 PM link |

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Ways in which my office in the Foreign Service is not like a regular office:

When one of my coworkers left a bag of yak jerky on my desk, I had to ask around to figure out who it was from. When another coworker spotted it, she said -- wait, someone brought in more yak jerky?

Posted by Dakota on 9:13 AM link |

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Today I was strolling in to my office building from across the street, where I went to cash a check to get kuai to pay back my boss for all the money he'd loaned me to purchase losing raffle tickets during a charity dinner to support Africa last Friday. There was a small crowd gathered in the lobby, surrounding our embassy's Nurse Practitioner. She and I are two of about a dozen people who serve on the Ambassador's Morale Committee, but the charm of the committee lies less in the results achieved and more in the infrequency it meets -- about once a quarter -- so I didn't immediately recognize her. But one of the guys in the crowd works in my section, and he flagged me down to stop, and once I'd slowed the nurse called out to me -- "flu shots!"

Here's the thing: I'm skeptical of flu shots. You can never know, of course, if the damn thing is working; if you do get the flu, the medical professionals will say that it's another strain, and if you don't get the flu then there's no telling if the not-getting is in any way linked to having actually had the shot.

When I was in Pakistan, the health unit dragged themselves down the hill from their offices to the consular section to facilitate the out-giving of flu shots, free for all employees of the Embassy, both American and Pakistani. I registered my protest to my boss -- not a chance they're getting ME to get a flu shot -- and she immediately shot back that I was welcome to not get a flu shot, but if I did get the flu I wouldn't be allowed to call in sick. She continued to mull it over for a while, and came to the conclusion that if I did get the flu shot, I also wouldn't be allowed to call in sick, since the shot prevents such illness. It's fortunate that we Dakotas don't get sick.

I was cajoled into going outside, and I promptly asked the nurse if it would hurt because, before all else, I am the world's largest coward. The nurse, a scrappy woman from northern England, married to a Pakistani and resident in Islamabad for years, immediately responded in her thick Leeds accents -- Oh for God's sake, roll up your sleeve and take your shot like a man!

Suitably chastised, I did so.

Flu shots in Islamabad were given out in early winter, well after the Earthquake -- which is to say, following the influx of hundreds of military that accompanied the relief efforts. And because of the high number of military types roaming the sidewalks on the compound of US Embassy Islamabad, the health unit was able to give me a SWEET camouflage band-aid to cover up the gaping hole in my upper deltoid where the shot had punctured my arm. It goes without saying that the aforementioned arm decoration did not in any way diminish the amount of whining I did about the unbearable pain that my sadistic boss had forced me to undergo in order to maintain the ability to call in sick.

So today the nurse flagged me over, and just as I launched into the rigamarole of asking whether it would hurt, the door to the small conference room opened up and the Chinese nurse inside called out -- next! -- and I was promptly ushered into the room. I immediately asked in trepidatious Chinese -- it won't hurt, will it? And the nurse shrugged, and replied -- eh. A little bit.

This wasn't the answer I was expecting: they never admit it's going to hurt. It's part of the unspoken agreement between nurse and patient. I was standing with my sleeve rolled up, about to be stabbed by the nurse, a bruiser standing five foot two with murder her in eyes, and the best come back I could muster was -- oh. Can I sit down? She told me there was no need, and while I never saw her roll her eyes, I'm assuming that she did so in a sneaky and underhanded fashion that prevented me from seeing it while she readied the needle. I averted my own gaze; I can't watch such things.

Post shot, I exited the conference room and stopped to fill out the necessary paperwork, signing for my free shot and collecting the info provided on flu shots and what to expect, including the rather exciting paragraph on rare but massive complications like death. As I signed and initialed, I asked the nurse -- so, where do I get my cookie? We get cookies, right? She reminded me that you only get cookies if you donate blood, not for getting a shot, and that was pretty devastating to me, because I had all but worked myself into a lather in anticipation of that free nutter butter I thought I had in store. I told her that I'd be ok with no cookies, so long as they at least had a lollipop for me.

That's when she dropped the bomb. It turns out that our Doc at the Embassy is married to a nutritionist, and step one when he arrived was to clean out the US Embassy Beijing health unit of all vestiges of crystallized sugar (or, as I like to think of it, happiness). Which means beg and plead as I might, there was a zero percent chance of snagging a dumdum for the torturous ordeal I had just undergone.

I mentioned the crushing pain and psychological trauma of all of this to the Marine who was standing post a few feet away. I'll be honest with you here: he was less than impressed.

I promptly returned to my desk to email my section the news that caveat emptor, the Embassy Beijing flu shots were a lollipop and cookie-free affair, despite the crushing pain one could anticipate (Subject line -- Flu Shots: TOTAL SCAM). One of my coworkers came down the hall and presented me with a pink band-aid with Snoopy on it, and that went a pretty long way towards easing my pain.

Aside from her, not a single one of my coworkers responded, which makes me think that people have either discounted me as over-reactive (check) and cowardly (also: check), or have configured their inboxes so that emails from me automatically delete themselves. Anyone who received emails from me regularly will probably agree that this was inevitable.

Posted by Dakota on 9:05 AM link |

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Beijing's in full pre-Olympics blitz mode, and the propaganda is everywhere. The word propaganda in Chinese lacks the negative connotation it has in English, and what's scattered all over the city is all written as I-statements and commands. It feels like I should be documenting it.

Welcome the Olympics!
Espouse Civility!
Usher in a new atmosphere!*

I participate!
I contribute!
I am happy!

What's hard to communicate here is how numerous these signs are, how omnipresent the slogans and posters and how they crop up literally everywhere. I espouse civility. I choose to line up, because I am civilized. It's on walls all over the city, written in newspapers, posted at bus stops, printed on the flags that people who direct bicycle traffic carry. It's inescapable. It's almost all Olympics tinged, although some of it is of a more general be-a-good-person type. Love the young, respect the old. Board the bus in an orderly fashion; politely let others sit.

The signs appear and disappear around town with remarkable frequency -- Beijing does brisk business in big-character posters, always on red cloth with white characters. I understand that civility starts with me: I will not spit. I'm told they're not expensive, but I've never priced them.

There's a joke that you can always tell what the major problems are in any area by the big-character propaganda posters that show up. When Fervently help the police fight crime: do not tolerate the sale of drugs shows up in a neighborhood, you can fairly well guess what's going on.

There's a certain linguistic gracefulness that isn't evident in the somewhat clunky translation of these slogans that I've come up with here. For the honor of the motherland. To add splendor to the Olympics, for example, in Chinese is an elegant two-part phrase, both of which are five characters and start with wei (which means for, or for the purpose of), and echo Mao's exhortation of Serve the People, another five character phrase beginning with wei.

Car yields to person, and yields a little bit of safety.
Person yields to car, and yields a little bit of civility.
Car yields to car, and yields a little bit of harmoniousness.

Harmoniousness is big. It's the underlying principle of Hu Jintao thought -- the creation of a harmonious society. It dovetails with the Eight Honors and the Eight Disgraces, another plank in the civility platform that for a while appeared on the dashboard of cabs throughout the city. Take loving the motherland as honor. Take harming the motherland as disgrace. The Eight Honors/Eight Shames was painted on the wall just outside the Sanlitun bar district throughout my time in language, but it's since been replaced with an advertisement for a building company that's putting up a mall there. Take serving the people as an honor. Take turning one's back on the people as disgrace.

There's more, tons more out there, but I haven't been writing it down as religiously as I should've. I can't help but wonder if the city was covered in posters like this when I was a student here in 2000. I assume it was, but my reading ability was definitely not up to tackling it. I was only halfway through my most recent bout of language training that I was finally able to read and understand the words written on either side of Mao's portrait on the Forbidden City, facing Tiananmen. Long live the People's Republic of China! Long live the solidarity of the workers of the world! (In my defense, "solidarity" isn't a word that comes up all that often in casual conversation, unless you're talking to union organizers). The point of all this being that propaganda was no doubt well beyond my skill back then. But now that I've learned the base political vocabulary for it, I feel compelled to start taking more detailed notes.

* Espouse Civility and Usher in a new era are my own translations for Jiang wen ming, shu xin feng. They're not great translations, and I welcome comments or improvements.

Posted by Dakota on 9:44 AM link |

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

All right, so I'm not dead. I'm not dead, and neither is Face The Sun just yet. Admittedly, it's on life support and struggling day by day, but it hasn't kicked it just yet.

I'm not going to Iraq. Should anyone be losing sleep over the future whereabouts of Dakota, there's no need to panic just yet. Despite the press and the horrible words "directed assignment," I'm not one of the lucky ones given two weeks to write a justification of why they shouldn't be sent to Iraq. They're tagging experienced people who actually know what they're doing or who've won the booby prize of getting Arabic training or have regional experience, and none of those things apply to me. It's possible but unlikely that I'll be one of the lucky ones the next time around, when I bid on new positions in the summer of 2008, but for now we're ok.

If they do want to send me to Baghdad in 2009, I think I would go. A guy down the hall from me was just there, and he tells stories that are terrifying, but I think I could do it for a year. Or maybe not: it's possible that I'd get there and only last a few weeks before I clapped my hands and said: that's enough, send me home, I'm done. But I think that if they tapped me on the shoulder and said -- you're next in line, Baghdadward -- I think I'd pack my bags and go give it a shot.

If, come 2009, they tell me that I'm one of the lucky ones slotted to go serve outside the green zone, on a provincial reconstruction team in the middle of nowhere, then I'll shake hands, thank them for the language training and the laughs and then go apply to PhD programs.

Aside from that -- Beijing is Beijing. The cabs still have meters that say "Welcome to take Beijing taxi" in English when you get inside. The streets are packed and the buses are crowded and I've started biking to work to avoid the crush. I spend a lot of my day at work writing; I mostly write memos that go unread, but it's still a lot of time spent putting nouns in front of verbs and making sure that my commas are all in the right place, so when I get home from work, I'm almost invariably not in the mood to write. And there's an awful lot to say that's not appropriate for this forum. Thus, the idle blog.

About a three months ago, I attended what was quite possibly the world's single most blog-worthy event in the history of my blog: the Henan International Miss Tourism Beauty Pageant in sunny Zhengzhou, central China. I went, attended as an honored guest and then came home; shortly thereafter I began the having a huge mental debate: Should I blog about the Beauty Pageant that I attended? Do I dare? Is it possible that my comments would be perceived as an assault on a particular nation, rather than of making fun of the entire concept of a beauty pageant? Would someone take offense, and would that offense result in my getting fired, despite the intense difficulty of firing someone from a federal job?

For example, if I published Ms. Armenia's response to the question and answer portion, would it seem like I was singling her out and making fun of her for being a non-native speaker of English? (Question: Give me three words to describe your home city. Answer: Big heart. Kind, very kind. And ... Red.) Would it matter that Ms. Armenia's answer was considerably better than the contestant from America, whose answer I still quote to my buddies in Beijing? (Question: What's your favorite city, and why? Answer, given with the huge advantage of being a native speaker of English, in lilting a Los Angeles Valley patois: Um... ok, so my favorite city is Los Angeles, because it's my home and it's where I'm from, and because it's a melting pot, and so people come there from all over, to work, and for medicare, and to live. AFter all, it just so happens that medicare is why LA is my favorite city too).

The whole thing was crackling with blogworthiness. It started at the very opening with the "national costume" portion of the contest: apparantly the national costumes of two nations -- Azerbaijan and Lebanon -- are sort of fairy-tale princess esque. In the mean time, the Honduran national costume is neo-aztek warrior, and she (the eventual winner of that portion of the pageant) far outshined the American, who appeared to be wearing cowboy boots and hat, a low cut, overwhelmingly breasty leather jacket, and no pants. Which pretty much summarizes what I think of as the American National Costume.

I ultimately decided that it didn't matter that the scribblings in my notebook were all in good fun, that I of course didn't want to offend anyone but hey, beauty pageants are already ridiculous so let's all have a good laugh. I decided that I had to just bury it and not put it on the blog. Because at the end of the day, someone was going to get bent out of shape when I said that THEIR nation's entrant was dressed like a candy striper, and that was odd, but not as odd as the nation who's entrant appeared to be dressed like a jelly donut.

And so I did just that -- I buried it. I never wrote about the lascivious Russian whom we met in the airport who informed us that he worked "vith veemen and alcohol," and who wholeheartedly supported the pageant's decision to break down the winners by continent, since the choices were too overwhelming. I never mentioned being tapped to give out the award (sash, statue, tiara, flowers) to the "Most Beautiful Tourism Lady of Americas," Ms. Dominican Republic, who was less than impressed with my excited Spanish FELICIDADES! but who still kissed me on the cheek.

I assuredly never mentioned the African diplomat whom I sat next to during the competition who, during the question and answer portion exploded out in his rich, inimitable African accent, "Blockheads! They are all BLOCKHEADS!" I didn't mention the ridiculously large bouquet that the Henan provincial government gave to me and the other American attending for us to pass on to the American contestant, and how both of us shamelessly stuffed out business cards into the roses, telling her we'd be happy to help -- "you know -- if you have any problems or anything during the rest of your time in China."

The list of Things Not Blogged is overwhelming. There were the hosts -- a British guy who sounded completely unimpressed when he droned out "don't they look absolutely stunning," and a bilingual Chinese-American, who condescendingly asked the Thai contestant in slow, demeaning English, "do you need trans.la.tor?" only to have her respond in perfect idiomatic English that no, she was just fine.

And there was the Russian contestant, who responded to the question of "What's your favorite food?" with a minute-long response in her native language, only to have the translator come back only with "uh... fish. Fried fish." And there was last year's winner, whom the host asked for advice as she handed her crown over to the fried-fish loving Ms. Russia, and who responded only with "Well... I'm really glad my reign is over."

Having dropped the blog ball once, I was determined not to do it again. And lo and behold, shortly after my attendance at the Henan Ms. Tourism International Beauty pageant, another invitation came rolling down the pipeline, this time from Hunan (which, despite the similarities in spelling, is indeed a different province, quite a bit farther south). I promptly proclaimed to the Embassy community that I had somehow gotten the fashion portfolio -- I was going to attend the Lusong Emperor Yan Apparel Festival and Fashion Show.

It had potential. It had a ton of potential, but a combination of things happened: the smaller part of the problem was that it didn't quite live up to that potential -- it wasn't crackling with hilarity like the beauty pageant had been. But moreover, I once again got nervous. It's that whole thing about representing the USG: it's unclear how much I can talk about the experience (indeed, I'll use the term experience) of visiting Mao's birthplace without stepping on toes.

I had pinned my hopes on the fashion show -- an actual runway-type Paris-style fashion show as I understand them to be. And the first tranche of models strolled out and it was everything I wanted it to be: androgynous females dressed in neo-hip fashions, walk walk pause -- turn, look like you're pissed off-- turn again and walk away. The stage was lined with butane cannons that shot jets of fire into the air and made the air from where we were sitting quite warm; some of the models looked a bit nervous about being turned into living kabobs.

Most of the models moved too quickly to take down the sort of sarcastic, cynical notes that really make for a good blog. I noted that I wasn't expecting scarves made of stuffed animals, and I had scrawled "some of these models have clearly never worn high heels before," but aside from that, didn't have too much to say.

And then came the lingerie portion. There was a male Austrian attaché to my right, a female Greek to the right of him, and three female Philippino diplomats to my left. There was about a fifty-fifty split on the gender of our group, but I was amongst the youngest, and when the lingerie started, all eyes swiveled towards me expectantly, as if I might leap out of my chair to get closer to the action. About halfway through, the Austrian (a connoisseur of such things, it seems) leaned over and whispered, "the bras, they are like fortresses!" I wasn't sure how to respond. The Philippinos were studiously avoiding eye contact with me when the Greek leaned over and asked, "so then… did you enjoy looking at them?" Awkward. "It was… it was fascinating, more than anything," I told her.

Next up on the agenda was a portion called "the Envoy's Wives." I spotted it and asked the Philippino diplomat next to me -- hey, is that us? She looked vaguely annoyed and said, "not us, we're not the envoy's wives -- we're the ENVOYS." I backpedaled, said that I hadn't meant them specifically so much as all of us, the group -- and then the program organizer came by and asked all the females to go with her for the Envoy's Wives portion of the event.

A few people protested -- there were some high-ranking female diplomats present -- but eventually they all got cajoled into it. The thing is, the invitation had asked females to come to the show in "national dress." For the Philippinos, that meant classy embroidered silk shirts that wouldn't be out of place in Sunday church. For others, it was a bit showier, the flashiest of which was the Peruvian rainbow-felt extravaganza that was, in short, over-the-top awesome. It was topped perhaps only by Ambassador from Lesotho's wife, who had a massive crown woven out of reeds.

Here's the thing: at things like this, you can't help but feel a bit of solidarity. I'm not female, I wasn't in "national costume," and I've never been dragged on stage for my job. But you never know when you're going to get called out to do something ridiculous, to eat some food or engage in some ridiculous activity that you have no desire to do but have absolutely no means of saying no for no other reason than because you're ostensibly representing your country, and its somehow important that on behalf of your country you do whatever the hell it is you don't want to do.

So when the female diplomats took the stage, strutted like they were born for it, turning on their heels like Parisian champs -- I loved every second of it. And so did the crowd: they lapped it up. They particularly loved the crown, but they cheered for everyone and it was fantastic. Considerably better than the rest of the fashion show, as far as I was concerned.

And that was basically it. The rest of the trip was largely a wash, entirely un-blogworthy. There were times when I thought things might make the cut -- they put us on a bus for 6 hours each way to go to a temple, for example -- but no, the notepad stayed empty, and there was nothing to say.

But it's on the blog now, the stumbling block has maybe been removed, and we'll see if I can get back on the horse. I can't promise anything, of course, but I'll see what I can do. I doubt there's anyone still checking the blog all that often. If there are, though: well, thanks for sticking around.

Posted by Dakota on 9:32 AM link |

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

During my training class on how to process visas, we were shown a video entitled FISH! Set in the Seattle seafood market, the video pointed out that any activity can be made fun, and once you make it fun, you'll sell an awful lot of fish. Now that I've done my tour as a visa officer -- an activity that by its very nature deals in raw human emotion and (since no country that I know of has a 0 percent refusal rate) disappointment -- I'm somewhat unclear on what the relationship between fish and visas was. But at the time I was STOKED to get to post and process some green cards in a manner that would be FUN.

It is unclear if I brought any increased levity to the Immigrant Visa wing of US Embassy Islamabad.

I had completely forgotten about that whole FISH! thing until I showed up in Seattle and started heading that way. And even though the fish mongers weren't quite the happy-go-lucky, over-the-top friendly salmon chuckers depicted in the video (I found them to be a little pushy, and they seemed annoyed at all the tourists), I still found myself overwhelmed with desire to buy some fish. I can't tell if that's because the Chinese fish market leaves something to be desired (Chinese seafood as the target of FDA food safety investigation headlined on the day of my visit to the market), or if it's because I desperately wanted to have them shriek out CATFISH! (and echo back, CATFISH) before hurling my fillets across the market. The video was right: hurling seafood is intrinsically fun.

It also makes me wish that we'd done things a little differently at the embassy, so that when, say, the child of a US citizen came to the window, I would've shrieked out IR-TWO! and had the FSNs echo back IR-TWO!. (Going to Manhattan! Going to Manhattan).

Posted by Dakota on 2:28 PM link |

Three days in Seattle and this much I know is true: it's FANTASTIC here. Looking at real estate fantastic. Except for that whole weather thing (it's the dead of summer and it's freezing), it approaches perfect. Some thoughts:

-- People in Seattle do not jaywalk. If the street is completely empty the light is red, they will not cross against it. In this, they resemble Norway. In this, they're the Anti-China.

-- I knew that Seattle would be an ultra-left paradise, but I didn't realize the implications that would have for people's hair. There seem to be more blonds here than elsewhere, and more of those people are sporting massive heads of curly hair than anywhere I've ever been. I want to refer to this phenomenon as the blondfro, but I'm not sure if that's PC.

-- It seems like there are more crazy people here than elsewhere, but I can't tell if that just a readjustment to America thing. I of course do remember large swaths of the criminally insane in DC, but my neighborhood in Beijing is pretty much 100 percent devoid of crazy people.

-- The sheer number of organic vegetables on sale is a little overwhelming. Everyone all over the city is giving out free samples, and I've eaten my body weight in bing cherries. But I also can't help but convert dollars per pound to kuai per half kilogram, and the prices -- which are literally 20 to 40 times the going rate in China -- are a little stunning.

-- Seattlites seem to have a thing for revolving statues.

-- Japanese restaurants outnumber McDonalds by a ratio of about 5 to 1. People in Seattle apparently love teriyaki.

-- Rain does not phase these people in the slightest. There's no flinching, no hunching of shoulders, no hurrying for cover. It was cloudy all morning, but it started raining at the exact moment the sun came out, which is pretty much in keeping with everything I know about the meteorology of the Pacific Northwest.

Posted by Dakota on 2:27 PM link |

Thursday, June 21, 2007

So then, it's over. Final score: 3+/3+, well above the State Department's Bonus Money Threshold, and thank god for that: not getting it in Urdu STUNG; not getting it in Chinese might've resulted in sniping off the roof with a high-caliber slingshot.

I was definitely trying for the 4 in reading, and was very sad to miss it -- I could definitely feel it slipping away from me as I read (and failed to understand) the second long article that they gave me, but I'm ok with that. I was damn close. And I can always retest in 6 months, once I've had a chance to memorize a few thousand more characters. For now, I'm perfectly content with the fact that for the first time ever, I'm completely comfortable with Chinese newspapers, and can read them only slightly slower than English.

It's about time: 5 years of studying in total, and words can't express how glad I am to be DONE.

Posted by Dakota on 2:29 AM link |

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Lucky boxers: check. (Scooby-doo, ensconced in cartoon hearts and surrounded by the words "Lover Dog").

Lucky t-shirt: check. (White, technical fabric, soft from a hundred washes, and one of three t-shirts that accompanied me to Eastern Europe).

Lucky shirt: check. (Maroon, tailored by my boys at Wazir's Tailoring in Islamabad, and which my boss declared as "an attempt to look like a mafioso." She later recanted and somewhat apologized -- "I guess I wasn't completely right about that mafioso thing" -- and the shirt's been lucky ever since).

Last minute memorizations: check. (Ge jin suo neng, ge qu suo xu, From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs; dong mian, hibernation; zhi-fa bumen, as contrasted with xing-zheng quanli, executive branch vs. executive powers or executive privelege).

The goodwill text messages are flying in. The coffee has been drunk. My stopwatch is ready and my embassy badge is in my pocket. My hands are shaking only a little bit. My hair is sculpted and my shoes are shined, and the nausea has largely passed.

I'm off to Starbucks to drink a nonfat caramel machiatto and listen to Beethoven's ninth while taking deep breaths. I will review a few last minute idioms (zhao san mu si, to pull the wool over an unsuspecting population's eyes, based on the story of the monkey leader and his worthless banana proclamations), and I will walk to the embassy while reciting potential opening lines to the 5 to 10 minute speech that, for me, is the hardest part of the exam.

By 4 o'clock this afternoon, I will be free.

Posted by Dakota on 9:25 PM link |

Monday, June 18, 2007

Homeward bound: my final exam is on Wednesday at 1:00 Beijing time. And I am FREAKING OUT. And then I'll be running (sprinting) to a bar to have a celebratory or consolatory martini, and then I'll be packing, to get on a plane on Thursday evening to come home for my mandatory month in America to re-adjust to Americana and remind me why it's home and why it's wonderful.

So then, my home leave schedule:

Thursday, 21 June, arrive in Atlanta at just before midnight.
Thursday, 28 June, ATL to Seattle.
Sunday, 1 Julyish, Seattle to Portland (overland).
Wednesday, July 4th in Portland, to run my first ever full marathon.
Thursday, July 5th, arrive in Charleston, South Carolina.
Sunday, July 8th, Charleston to DC.
July 12th-ish, to South Bend, Indiana for a wedding.
July 15th-ish, back to DC.
21 July, back to Beijing.

I'm looking forward to seeing almost everyone in DC, but the important thing here is that if anyone feels like coming along to anywhere else on the itinerary -- particularly Charleston, SC, but everyone's welcome on the west coast or in Atlanta as well -- let me know and we'll coordinate.

And now, back to freaking out about Chinese and my complete inability to speak it.

Posted by Dakota on 8:32 AM link |

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Flash back to two months ago: the Tiananmen 10K, marking the 500th day before the olympics. Blue skies, cool breeze and flags blowing around the forbidden city; perfect weather for a race, with a turnout of maybe 500 people, about a third expats.

Word is circulated: the Tiananmen 10k is actually only 9.2k; don't hold your breath waiting for that final .8 k, because it ain't coming. Casual running for fitness and liesure is something of a new concept in China, just taking hold; the vast array of clothing being worn at the start line is testament to this: standard overly-skimping running shorts are next to khaki pants and work boots, and a couple people are in jeans.

The starting line, in the center of Tiananmen: An embassy official, distinguished in both age and career, is wearing a blue number, indicating his running category: Chinese males under the age of 14. "You'll need to stand with your age group," he's told, and waved towards the 14 year olds. Upon protest, they agree that he can stay with the adult expats, but that he'll need to stand near the back, closer to the kids.

The starting gun sounds: the run circles Tiananmen and then breaks left on Chang'an towards the Museum of Military History. The race route is lined with a decent turnout of spectators, staring quizically in complete silence at the people running. I find myself clapping for myself and shouting jia you!, Chinese for "Add Gas!" to build my own enthusiasm. The spectators, generally speaking, do not respond.

Water stop: the sun is blazing in blue-sky glory and the streets are hot; they're distributing full half-liter bottles of water at approximately the halfway mark in the run. The gentleman next to me finishes the whole bottle in a single, remarkably fast gulp, and I hear him pant, groan and throw up. I sip down about a third of my bottle and then look for a place to get rid of it. The route is lined with stern-faced policemen, keeping pedestrians from entering the race route; littering seems like a bad idea. No one else seems to still have a bottle, and there are none on the ground and I see no trashcans. I see an old woman with a broom and a dustpan and I run outside the police-set boundaries to ask if I can give her my bottle. "Why didn't you just drop it?" she asks.

Forward: My GPS watch indicates that by my math (converting .8 K to miles and then subtracting from 6.2) we're one mile from the finish. I shout out this news in English and then Chinese, tagging on an ADD GAS! at the end; a few people clap, but more people are commenting on the fact that a foreigner (Laowai, the vaguely-insulting-via-over-use catch-all term for white foreigners; it does not, to my knowledge, apply to black people or Asian-Americans) was speaking Chinese. About 10 meters after I've shouted out the one-mile warning, I round the corner and find that I've already finished the race.

The Chinese do a lot of things well, but organized spectacle is something they're particularly good at. The race marks the 500th day before the Olympics, and they're using this as a warm up. The final stretch of the race route, 100 meters or so after turning the corner, is lined with what seems like hundreds of volunteers, almost entirely women, all dressed in red, screaming encouragement and waving red scarves up and down. After the deadpan silence of the race route, it's hypnotic and fantastic.

At the finish line: GPS devices are compared; someone's got one in metric, and we learn that the Tiananmen 9.2k was actually only 8.6k. My time is somewhere in the mid 40s, certainly not good, but since the race wasn't an actual distance that a race has ever been before, it doesn't matter -- there's nothing to compare to. What does matter is that I have lost the race by a full 4 minutes to my upstairs neighbor (The Engineer), and I owe him 50 kuai.

They're giving out prizes for the top ten male and female finishers in both the Chinese and expat categories -- 40 prizes in total. One of our embassy colleagues, a ball of both physical fitness and modesty ("there were only 10 entrants; I was bound to win something"), placed 9th amongst expat women, so we stick around to watch the ceremony. When we approach the stage, there's a group of women, mid forties to fifties, waving pompoms in a semi-choreographed routine for the gentlemen on stage, all of whom appear to be officials from Beijing City Government.

They finish their routine. One of the gentlemen from the stage thanks them and then makes a brief speech; it's in fast Chinese with a Beijing accent, spoken through a scratchy speaker, and I can't make out what it's about. (Loudspeakers and PA systems are my linguistic achilles heel. I struggle with them in English, head cocked to the side like a confused golden retriever, and I usually don't even try in other languages).

The cadre finishes his speech. The pompom ladies file to the side and kneel, and are replaced by a troupe of women with short shorts, bare midrifts and surprisingly large busts enveloped in fuzzy, low-cut tops made of material that resembles faux fur. Their routine basically involves jumping up and down in front of the cadres on stage, like a live-action closing to The Man Show on Fox or Spike tv or whatever channel it is that carries it. About a quarter of the way through, the pompom girls on the sidelines stop kneeling and stand up, blocking the view from the sidelines; this is met with great disapproval from the crowd of runners -- the gentlemen in particular -- waiting for prizes.

There's another speech that I again can't understand, and then the prizes are distributed. The Chinese winners' names are called out along with their times, and they're given an enormous bouquet of flowers and a sweet-looking clip-on MP3 player meant for runners. I haven't won anything, but I'm pretty excited on behalf of my colleague, because hey -- free MP3 player!

They get to the expats and start calling out times and country names. Winners are given a bouquet identical to the Chinese winners', and a box. The box, it turns out, contains a pair of shoes produced by a Chinese shoe manufacturing company, a sort of domestic Nike. There has been no attempt to size the shoes, so people are swapping halfheartedly; the questionable aerodynamics of the shoes somewhat quells enthusiasm.

We get home; I pony up my 50 kuai and we all go out for bibimbap, a delicious korean iron-bowl rice dish, with vegetables and meat and hot sauce all wrapped up in one. The day is declared a riotous success (prize shoes?!).

The point of all this: the Tiananmen 10k is a warm up, a 2 months warning bell for the grand event of the past weekend, the event for which I signed up with great enthusiasm and had been dreading ever since:

The Great Wall Marathon.

Which for me was actually The Great Wall Half Marathon. 21 kilometers, 13.1 miles, and brutal enough that I'm still sore three days later. The first three or so K went directly up hill to get to the wall, and then there were 5 k actually on the wall on steps and stairs and through towers overlooking the mountains. The remaining 12 or so K either on flat ground or winding through a moderately hilly village.

The full marathon, with over double the distance of the half actually spent on the wall (including, brutally, the last 7 kilometers) is really an event reserved only for the most hardcore of sado-masochists. I plan to run it next year.

So then, Friday at 4:15 pm: I am sprinting around my house throwing t-shirts and undergarments into a bag, about to be late for my rendezvous with a dozen or so other runners. The day of reckoning has finally arrived: we're catching a bus to the middle of nowhere three hours outside of Beijing, to spend the night in a "peasant hotel" in advance of an early morning starting gun.

I am questioning my motives in this run, even more so in light of the events at packet pick up the day before: the only other person in the office was about 6'3 with approximately point one percent body fat, a rippling wall of running ability; I'm feeling devastatingly outclassed.

I wear running shoes to the bus pick-up point: they are brand new, fresh from the post office and never worn, and I'm hoping I can break them in by jumping up and down and walking around. The ringleader of the runners, head of one of the Hash running clubs in Beijing and the fifth place finisher last year in the Great Wall Half Marathon, expresses disbelief that I'm going to run in brand new shoes ("Wow. I've heard THAT'S a good idea," he said). But my other shoes are in tatters, blown out from frisbee and my own ungraceful instep, and they kill my knees and my feet and are not an option. Nervousness increases.

Everyone's lean and fit and munching on runner-type snacks; lots of nuts and dried fruit and other food products that increase lean muscle mass and don't add fat. I run and purchase some barbequed pork with rice. I clearly don't belong with this crew.

I realize that in my rush to pack, I failed to bring my GPS watch. I intentionally left the iPod at home, but I've been training with the GPS watch and I can't conceive of running without it. I consider using this as my excuse to drop out of the race. One of the runners shows his swollen ankle and indicates that he might not run because of it. I've got a blister on my left heel which isn't nearly as serious as his swollen ankle, but I still add it to my list of reasons why I should drop out. The Engineer, the same neighbor who outpaced me in the Tiananmen 8.6K, hears my list of excuses and indicates that none of them are acceptable for not running.

On the bus: N and his girlfriend S, friends from Shenyang in Northeast China. N, self-declared as "not a runner," is running the 5K purely out of solidarity with S, who's running the full marathon. He asks if I've got a time goal for the half marathon. I indicate that my primary goal is to not die, and if I accomplish that, I'd like to run in under maybe six hours or so. I ask -- "you're running the 5K, right?" He responds: "I am. Same goal."

Countdown to D-Day: on the bus.

The training instructions on the great wall marathon website indicate that about two months prior to the race, you should be at the point where you can run for about an hour to a building with a lot of stairs, and then run the stairs for an hour, and then run home for another hour. If you do this for the two months prior to the race and then taper off, they say, it will adequately prepare you to run the wall.

Three months before the race, The Engineer and I started training: thirty to ninety minutes of running around the park, thirty to sixty minutes of stairs, sometimes on the same day. I hurt, all the time: progress was being made. The Engineer, in an effort to promote stereotypes, obtained a spreadsheet for tracking training data, and it seemed like things were going along at the pace required to finish the race.

About two months before the race, we got tired of all that running, and so we stopped.

And so I'm sitting on the bus surrounded by true athletes, all of whom are discussing their training regiments and appear to be munching on fat free whole grains, and I, having not run in two months, am wearing brand new unbroken-in shoes and looking for a place to dispose of my barbequed pork container and am generally wondering how I ever got roped into this in the first place.

We barrel towards the peasant hotel. When we call ahead to tell the owner that we're only 19 people, not the original 20, he indicates that at 50 kuai a head -- $6.25! -- he's making a KILLING off of this regardless, and he doesn't care at all how many people we are. He guides us in via cell phone, and we ditch the bus.

Peasant hotel: for fifty kuai in the middle of nowhere China, you can actually get fairly nice digs: clean beds with big blankets (the evening and morning are chilly), with breakfast and dinner thrown in. There are only two toilets and they aren't overly clean, and there's only a single shower for the 19 of us, but for 6 bucks it's hard to complain.

Dinner: we were all under the impression that dinner would be fairly spartan. But the owner of the hotel apparantly is out to make a good impression -- maybe to attract repeat business? -- so course after course after course keeps hitting the table. The night before a marathon, it's pretty much nothing that anyone wants -- fried shrimp, fried dough strips, a few cold vegetables, and few hot vegetables, some oil-laden meat dishes. We order rice and plow through a few things (like the di san xian, the three freshnesses of the earth, with potatoes and eggplant and green pepper in a brown garlic sauce), but for the most part it's an exercise in wastefulness.

The owner indicates that breakfast will be corn porridge, steamed bread rolls and soy milk. To my knowledge, not a single person even entered the dining room to touch the food; I feel very guilty about this.

The Morning Of: 6 a.m. and I'm awake and ready to go. The French gentleman I shared a room with shakes his head and questions why we do this to ourselves -- "we could be in our own beds, and in three or four hours when we wake up at a normal time we could be having some nice pancakes or something." I'm very much with him on this one.

I pin my number -- 748 -- on to my shirt. In Chinese almost every number means something, and the Chinese are deeply superstitious about it. 748 roughly means "anger is the death of wealth," or alternately "you've angered your father to the point of death." It's a terribly unlucky number. The French guy is 746 -- anger is the death of luck -- so between the two of us we're all set.

I search through my race packet for my chip timer, which goes on your shoe to track your official time. Normally you can rent or borrow a chip for a race, but for this run you HAD to purchase the Great Wall commemorative chip, for 35 bucks. It's not in my bag. I've come 3 hours to the middle of nowhere to run a race, and I have neither a wristwatch nor a chip timer; in other words, if there's no clock at the end, I'll have absolutely no means of knowing how fast I run.

I become very Zen about the whole thing. It's pre-sunrise and it's cold, but the sky is clear and there are roosters in the background. I'm not going to break any land-speed records on this run; I'm here for the experience and not having a chip is just fine. "You can probably get one from the race organizers," one of the other runners tells me, and if that's the case then great, but if not I don't really care.

Bananas. Red Bull in lieu of coffee. Halfhearted stretching, and then out of the hotel to walk the 150 meters or so to the race start gate. There are dogs and a horse and 20 or so sheep walking in the same direction as us, and there's a light breeze and no clouds and hundreds of overwhelmingly attractive runners going the same direction as us and it's a glorious day to be alive.

The Engineer, playing the role of black sheep.

The race is organized by Danes, and the majority of the runners are Europeans -- Brits and Germans and Scandinavians, some French people and a fistful of Americans. There are a handful of other Asian nations represented -- Japan and Malaysia and the Phillippines, but Chinese people appear to be the minority. (Nationality was printed on the race numbers; I'm going by what I saw).

The starting area is in a courtyard, with the wall stretching out over the hills above us, appearing to be directly uphill in all directions. I've gone from terrified to excited: I'm ready to get my race on.

No Really, uphill in all directions.

I stand in line and talk to a Dane about my chip, asking if I can buy a new one. "Maybe you'd prefer to just borrow one?" he asks, and hands me a loaner for no fee. He writes down the new chip number and my old number to switch them in the computer. I'm still zen: if it happens, great, but if not, no worries.

Waiting for the starting gun: I'm in numerologically-obsessed China, and I'm in a situation where everyone is wearing a number. This is exciting beyond words to me, and when I confide to one of my buddies -- "I'm really into the Chinese numerological aspects of this race" -- she calls me out as odd. But when I run into race number 518 -- "I want to be rich!" in Chinese -- I can't help but gush out, "your number is so LUCKY in China!" Mr. 518 is less than impressed with me, and I decide to keep future numerological insights to myself.

Despite the big-ass FINISH sign, we're actually about to begin.


Race start is divided up by categories and ability, so the fast marathoners go first. S, from our crew, is put in with the fast marathoners because of her performance in the Marine Corps Marathon in DC. She's intimidatingly fit, like a rubber band stretched to its full length. I can't help but feel a little jealousy at the people running the full marathon -- it's going to be brutal, but the bragging rights are enormous.

Marathon group 2 sets off, and then the first wave of half-marathoners lines up. I'm in wave 2, for the piercingly slow. N, who's running the 5k, wishes me luck. The first wave starts the race, and I and the French guy from the hotel, the one numbered Anger Kills Luck, line up. I'm feeling good. We smile at each other, mouth the word yes pump our fists.

I cross the starting line: 7:44 in the morning.

My standard running strategy is to sprint out of the gate, blow myself out after a mile or two, lag towards the middle and slow it WAY down for the end. This is a terrible strategy, and I recognize that it's untenable for this race. I keep my pace reasonable for the first K, on flat ground. It's on a road that's only half blocked, and trucks and buses and tractors are rumbling by on the other side. People are joking that it wouldn't be a race in China if there were no thick black smoke to inhale.

Kilometer 2: start of the uphill. I'm still feeling strong (a by-product of the bananas, no doubt), and I run for the next K or so. But it's directly uphill on a winding country road, and I realize that I can walk at the same pace I was running and not tire myself out as much. There are a fistful of spectators, and they see me walking and call out a half-hearted "jia you?" or "Add gas?" I see this not so much as encouragement as them shouting "hurry up, fatboy!" I'm tempted to respond with the Chinese for "mind your own god damn business" -- "well water should not seep into river water!" but in the end I keep it to myself. I start alternating between race-walking and jogging.

Here's the thing: I live in Beijing. Not only do I live in Beijing, but it's not my first time living in Beijing. I've been to the Wall multiple times in multiple different ways, with friends and with school and with my parents and what have you. I've got Wall fatigue. I was expecting the Great Wall Marathon to be cool, something to talk about and assuredly something to brag about to the guys in my running club in DC, but I wasn't expecting it to blow my mind.

We round the corner on the hill leading up to the wall, and the country side stretches out below us and the wall is towering above us on green hills, and the sky is deep blue with exactly two picture-perfect puffy white clouds in the distance.

It blows my mind.


Yep, mind-blowing.

I'm staring open jawed at the scenery, as is everyone else. "Do you think," the guy next to me asks, "that maybe the jagged mountains were enough to keep out the mongol hordes, but they went ahead and built the wall just because they knew it would look cool?" I'm tempted to respond with great enthusiasm about Yuan and Ming and Qing dynasty government boondoggle projects, but I'm still stinging from being called weird for loving Chinese numerology, so I keep it to myself.

The wall: the road that brings us directly uphill ends in a parking lot. There's a bathroom on the right, some fruit and trinket merchants on the left, and then a set of crumbling stairs that lead on to the wall. I grab water, intending to walk while I drink it and then start running again. No one's running, though, and it seems logical to follow their lead. From that point forward, there were a few straightaways and a few areas with not too many steps where you could run, but for the most part, all you could do was hurriedly walk; in some parts, single file was the only way forward, and in areas you had to wait in line to go forward.

We jog-walk-hustle in a pack, up stairs and down stairs, through tower after tower after tower. We pass a local, sitting on the steps holding bananas and chanting onedollaronedollaronedollar. The woman in front of me is wearing a t-shirt that says "kuai tai-tais," or "fast wives." It's a Shanghainese running club for married women; she declares herself to be the "bu kuai tai-tai," or "not fast wife."

The gentleman behind me comments that last year, his wife said that the Great Wall marathon was a lot like giving birth. Kuai tai-tai whips her head around and responds: "I've given birth twice and it's easier than this. During childbirth they give you an epidural."

It feels like we're approaching the end of the wall portion. We pass a guy -- South African, I'd guess from the accent -- who's sitting in the bushes near the wall, shouting out encouragement. It's an odd place for a spectator, and it's unclear how he got up the mountain or why he's there. There's also a Spanish TV news guy and cameraman on the wall talking about the race. I hear the word "marveilloso" as I go past, panting.

At this point, I'm starving. I ask if anyone else is hungry, and everyone, it seems, is. There are no food stops on the run, no pretzels or bananas outside of the starting area. This is unusual; normally marathons give you SOMETHING, at least some of the powerbar goo or a damn piece of fruit. I start fantasizing about fish and chips, and when I mention this to the guy next to me, he starts murmuring about Kentucky Fried Chicken, and how he's EARNED it.

We round the corner and it looks like we're getting off the wall; we're about 8 kilometers into the race, and I declare to the world that my legs feel like they're made of tofu. I've passed kuai tai-tai, so I start talking to the guy in front of me, a British student double majoring in Chinese in Spanish. He and I, previously surrounded by a pack of people, find ourselves alone on a long stretch of the wall. It's eerie. We wonder if we've taken a wrong turn, but then someone wearing a marathon number (full marathon numbers are black; the half is red) sprints by us.

The wall dumps us into the courtyard where we started. There's a crowd and they're cheering, and I am thrilled to be no longer on the wall. Through the courtyard, to the street: I grab water, walk while I drink it, and watch the British kid zoom off.

It's blazing hot, ungodly hot for a road race -- the thermometer will eventually push over 37 degrees, close to a hundred in Fahrenheit. We pass the nine K mark and continue down the road. Runners, looking tired and very, very fast, start passing us in the other direction, heading towards the finish line. The woman next to me comments that if they're already coming towards us, we must be almost done. I still haven't lost some of my speech habits from Pakistan, and immediately respond with Mash'Allah. She chuckles and responds with great enthusiasm in what sounds like great Arabic with "mf'tiq'Allah! Alhumdulilah!"

I hit the 11 k mark and announce that there's only 10k left; we eat 10ks for breakfast! And even though my legs feel gooey and I'm pretty tired of running, I think I can handle another 10 kilometers.

We leave the road and start running on a dirt trail into a village. The way is lined with kids giving high-fives and there are old women hauling baskets full of discarded water bottles. The bottles can be recycled, and the villagers are making a killing off of this race.

We're approaching the turnaround point in the race. I keep trying to do the math to figure out exactly where that's going to be -- it involves a lot of long division, and some subtracting too, and neither of those things have ever been my long suit. I come to the conclusion that at the 14.5 kilometer mark, we'll be turning around.

We're still in the villagey area when we turn left; this, I've decided, is the turn around point. We're just going to turn left again to wing around this here rice paddy and then we'll be on the straight-shot back to the finish line (and by extension, to the free sandwich that I'm so dying for). At the edge of the rice paddy the race goes to the right, not back the way we came from. We're headed further and further away from sandwiches, running on a dirt road that's studded with sharp rocks. We're also going uphill. Nothing is going my way whatsoever.

I'm with two other people in a hyper rural area of town. One guy I'm running with is 698, one of the luckiest numbers in Chinese. He's in from Seoul, just for the race. We pass a tiny old woman hauling empty water bottles, and she comments: these foreigners look so tired.

There's a girl about 20 feet ahead of us, running strong. We follow her when she turns, and it's only a little while later that we realize that we're wandering on an unmarked trail. We pause, look back at the path we've left, and see a runner zip by: we've taken a wrong turn and added a little bit of distance to our half marathon.

We backtrack to the actual path, crest a hill, and start heading back towards the village. We're still on sharp rocks, and the path is covered in goat shit. It's a sharp downhill and I'm more than happy to let the terrain do the work for me, so I start running faster.

About 8 seconds later, I trip.

I like to think of the fall as graceful, that there was a movie-esque tumble and roll, and that I quickly hopped back on to my feet in a manner befitting a cat, or a kung-fu hero. The fact that the two runners behind me sprinted up to me shouting "holy god, man, are you ok?" makes me think that it was maybe slightly less graceful than all that.

I announce that I'm fine, get to my feet and walk it off. My knees are bleeding a little bit, and they're covered in thick red mud; my shirt is equally dirty, and I'm quite proud of it all: battle wounds. The fall has somewhat killed my momentum, and even though I wasn't exactly sprinting before, I rejoice in my new-found excuse to slow down. I ask the guy next to me the all important question: "Am I covered in goat shit?" He, a non-native speaker of English, asks, "you are ok?" I try again: "I'm fine, I'm fine, but, is there... stuff all over me?" "Some... some dirt" is the best I can get out of him.

Back through the village. A group of cops are standing and chatting and one points out: that foreigner fell. The Chinese for fell down is shuai-diao, roughly "shatter-collapse." Which pretty much sums up my state of existance.

We're back to the dirt road that leads out of the village area. We're now heading back, passing slower people who still haven't hit the halfway point; I rejoice in the fact that I'm almost done.

Back to the paved road: I keep pace with a guy who's an engineer for Cathay-Pacific. Three kilometers out, the sun is blazing and there's no water but we're so close to done; and then two K left, my god almost there. And then on the right, head down and jogging determinedly for the finish line is runner number 518, of "I want to be rich" lucky number fame. His number: not lucky enough to avoid being passed by me, unlucky 748. Take THAT, 518!

The one kilometer mark: we pass the peasant hotel, the police station, a guy selling trinkets and postcards. There's a runner ahead, already finished, and she calls out "200 meters left!" I try to pick up the pace but can't. Cathay-Pacific runs ahead strong.

I enter the finishing area alone about thirty seconds behind him. The announcer is scoping numbers and calling out names and countries of finishing runners, and there are cameras and I want to put on a good show so I sprint, sprint through the archway, into the courtyard to the finish line, cross the line and am DONE.

I underestimate my speed and the size of the finishing area, and sprint into an orange cone and the unfortunate reporter standing behind it. It happens.

(The Engineer, upon hearing that I fell during that run AND that I took out a reporter and a cone, smugly proclaims that my running and endurance are just fine, but perhaps next year I should consider working on my coordination).

The finish: bottle of water, another, then a banana and a quarter of a turkey sandwich. The sandwich makes me ungodly queesy, and I sit in the shade doing nothing for a while, trying to not throw up. I sip a diet coke.

Race results are posted from time to time; my name does not appear on any of them, and I am under the assumption that my bootleg chip is the problem. I find Cathay Pacific, the gentleman I ran with and finished just behind, locate his time and add 3 minutes to it to conclude that my final time for the half marathon was two hours and 58 minutes. Under three hours: I am thrilled with this time.

The race has imported Danish doctors to attend to any medical needs, and I decide that my well-cut knees warrant a trip to go see them, a little bit because a goat-shit laced cut screams infection, but mostly because Danes are the most beautiful people on earth and maybe there's a doctor there who, upon examining me earth-encrusted knees and dirt-streaked shirt, will fall in love with the (clearly quite rugged) individual they're examining.

The Danish doctors are all middle aged chicks. It is unclear if twitterpation took place.

The Doc gives me a sponge to clean my knee, and then rubs the cut to see if there are any stones in it. "Do I need any hydrogen peroxide or disinfectant?" I ask eagerly. "This cut," she tells me matter of factly, "is very superficial." Her clear underestimation of my medical condition means that I now discount any medical knowledge that the Danes might have.


All done: My dirt streaked t-shirt following the race.


Waiting: the half marathoners from our group have all finished (including the aforementioned Ringleader (number 68, so lucky!), who placed fifth). We're killing time waiting for S, who's running the full Marathon. She's aleady long since passed the halfway point (split time on her half marathon: 2:37 minutes, a full 20 minutes faster than I ran the half), and N is rocking back and forth nervous, killing time waiting for her. The waiting goes on for what seems like an eternity: there's no telling how long it's going to take her to finish the last seven brutal kilometers, uphill on stairs on the Wall.

Waiting, more waiting, more nervousness, pacing.

The finale, sparks and all: He's already told the announcer and word has spread about what's going on. S rounds the corner. Her name and country are called and the announcer follows it up with "N has something he wants to ask you. Today is a day you won't forget, and not just because you completed the marathon."

And then she, after 5 hours and 55 minutes of brutal running in the near-hundred degree sun, finally crosses the finish line, and a medal is placed around her neck, and N moves in and hugs her and whispers something, and then he's down on one knee and holding a small box containing a gold band with a single stone, and he's asking the question, The Question, and a crowd has formed, they know what's going on, 30, 40 people all watching, and S, exhausted from the race, is rocking back and forth and looking at N and at the ring, and someone in the crowd shouts out SAY YES!

And she does. N and S: engaged at the finish line of the Great Wall Marathon. It doesn't get much better than that.

Posted by Dakota on 9:44 AM link |

Monday, May 21, 2007

With great indignity, I announced that I cannot stand -- cannot stand -- when people add an extra S into the middle of Fudgicle, making it Fudgsicle.

But just now I googled it: wrong, for all these years. Am I the only one shocked by that sneaky S? I mean, can we discuss? In related news, I remain convinced that you're all incorrect.

For the record, should anyone be wondering: I have no intention of changing my pronunciation.

Posted by Dakota on 8:20 AM link |

Saturday, May 19, 2007

A good handful of Western companies in China have gone to great lengths to add products to their sales line that specifically target the Chinese market. KFC offers original recipe and extra crispy, but they've also got a Peking Duck wrap -- a chicken finger, a whole grilled scallion and a ladle of plum sauce, wrapped in what appears to be a flour tortilla. McDonalds carries the McKorea (god only knows what it entails), and they upped the number of chicken nuggets on the dollar menu (which, at 6 kuai an item, is actually the 75 cent menu) from 4 to 5 after someone tipped them off that 4 means death in Chinese.

Potato chips come not only in barbeque and sour cream and onion, but also roasted chicken, finger-lickin' braised pork, cucumber, and fresh seafood (to name only a few -- the potato chip aisle is one of the true delights of living in China; I myself am particularly partial to Thai Curry Crab flavor, but the grilled steak flavor will do in a pinch. Seasoned China hands will tell you to avoid the smoky creamy bacon flavor, and you'd do well to heed their advice).

Starbucks, now almost as ubiquitous in Beijing as in DC, changed their product line almost none to cater to the Chinese market. They do not, for example, offer an expanded selection of tea, despite the huge preference for it. Their products are mostly the same, with a few missing (white chocolate mochae, for example) and pretty much none added.

Which makes me wonder: is the banana-java frappucino that I just had a specifically-for-China commodity? Because it was ungodly awful, and if Starbucks is rolling that one out worldwide, they're making a huge mistake.

Posted by Dakota on 9:39 PM link |

Monday, May 14, 2007

Every year on new years, Quixote asks the same questions; almost against my will, I've taken it up as my rallying cry as well: it's 2007! Where are the flying cars? Why can't we control the weather?

This morning, the China Daily featured a color-glossy insert covering All-Olympic news. Noteworthy things: Dashan, a Chinese-speaking Canadian white guy who's achieved uber-celebrity status on the mainland for his nearly flawless Beijing accent, will be acting as the Canadian Team Attache for the olympics; the hope is that Chinese people will say "Dashan's on that team and they're our friends. As opposed to the Americans."

I take comfort in the fact that Dashan is universally hated by white people in China. Most expats are unclear on exactly who he is, I think, but his name comes up constantly: "Your Chinese is great! But not as good as Dashan's!" and god forbid Canada gets mentioned in a casual conversation. "Hey, Canada! Dashan's Canadian. Did you ever see him in The Palace Artist on TV? I just bought my nephew Uncle Dashan's Storybook!"

Uncle Dashan's Storybook? Look me in the eye and tell me that's not creepy.

Aside from the big news that Dashan (whose name means Big Mountain, and in whose general direction I shake my fist) is thumbing his nose at America, the color glossy insert on Olympic news featured a two-page centerfold of an anti-aircraft gun. It seems that despite Quixote's yearly protestations, the Chinese can control the weather, and in the lead up to the olympics, they'll be doing so with "planes, rockets, and other modern artillarly."

Anti-aircraft guns loaded with silver iodide will be positioned as close as 15 kilometers from the Bird's Nest, the intimidatingly awesome Olympic Stadium in north-central Beijing. Chinese meteorologists are still nervous, and have made it clear that no one -- not even the People's Liberation Army -- can stop heavy rain.

I'm unconcerned that they haven't perfected their systen yet, and I'm also unconcerned that 15 K from the Bird's Nest is more or less my front yard. All that really matters is that if the Chinese are controlling the weather, we're that much closer to flying cars.

Posted by Dakota on 8:56 AM link |

Sunday, May 13, 2007

2002: I exited Georgetown with a bachelor's degree in worthless, and moved into an adorable rowhouse with Adelmank, nee Mageek. The rowhouse, at 2228 12th Place NW, was an overpriced unheatable shitpit, with an unresponsive landlord and an infestation of slugs in the backyard. But it had it's perks -- proximity to Ben's Chili bowl, a planter box with competing ferns named Joe and Little Steve-o, and funky neighbors, labelled college radio-esque by some, with an ugly dog and a firm belief in astrology. "Oh, you're a scorpio, that makes so much sense. I mean, a fire sign, yeah, that's why you're like, you know, roarrrrr".

But the best part of the pit on 12th place was living with Mageek. The penne alla vodka flowed like water. She forgave me when I left some chicken breasts in the fridge for a month and a half, producing a smell caustic enough to render the downstairs more or less uninhabitable. We'd go out to separate bars at night and swap stories in the mornings, and we hated our jobs with equal intensity. Life was good, except for the inability to get the house warm enough that you couldn't see your breath.

I don't know why this sticks out in my mind so much, and it might be over-emphasized in my memory, but nonetheless: Mageek had a minor obsession with a cone-shaped candle-like apparatus that you stick in your ears and set on fire. Through some mysterious chemical reaction, the pressure is somehow lowered inside the device, drawing the wax out of your ear and into the cone, for easy disposal. When I say she had a minor obsession, I mean that it came up more than once, but probably not all that often. To my knowledge, she never realized her goal of flaming-cone ear wax extraction while we were living together, but I could be wrong.

Whenever Mageek brought up the candle-powered wax extractor, I would mentally second the idea, thinking how much *I* wanted to undergo the same cleansing, if somewhat terrifying, procedure. But an opportunity never materialized; Mageek never came through on the device in question, and I wasn't so gripped that I was willing to pour energy into locating a wax-sucking cone emporium. I eventually became convinced that the whole thing was, perhaps, a figment of her imagination.

And then last week, in a market in central Taipei, I discovered that Mageek was not in fact making things up, and that for the low low price of 380 Taiwanese kuai, one could in fact have one's ears cleaned via flaming cone.

The booth was big, a square with tables all around, and two gentlemen in the middle facilitating. Upon seeing it, I immediately mentioned that I had once had a roommate who was obsessed with this procedure; my friends encouraged participation. The booth was packed, almost all the spots full of people lying with their head on a towel-covered pillow; eyes across the board were closed.. The cones were ensconsed in a metal holster apparatus that could be adjusted to the height of one's head, and the candles were ensconsed in plastic jars to catch dripping wax so it didn't fall into your ear. It was a depot for inner-ear cleansing, a veritable machine for cerumen disposal, and at 380 kuai a head, a damn cash cow.

I was scared, and I asked a few nervous questions: How long per ear? (Seven minutes). Will... will it hurt? (Exasperated eye roll. No). My upstairs neighbor, The Engineer, talked me into it, and we plunked our heads down on pilows next to each other. A cone was fitted in to my ears -- it's tight! Is it too tight? I don't know! Ack! Also beyond my grasp: the subtle Chinese for "I'm worried that the cone is too far down in my ear canal and that I'm going to go deaf or start shrieking in agony." Final conclusion: my ear cleaning profession, seasoned in his career, knew what he was doing. My eyes clamped shut.

There was no pain. I spent my seven minutes waiting for searing agony that never arrived. At the halfway point, my friends, photographing on the sidelines, ask how it is. I don't have much comment.

I flip to the other ear and the process is repeated. Towards the end I became convinced that 7 minutes had already passed, and that the candle was burning beyond the holster and the my ear was, at any moment, about to be filled with searingly hot wax. Shortly thereafter the candle was removed and all was right with the world. They slice it open in front of you, and everyone can gauk at the ear wax inside, and it's all pretty gross to look at.

I was convinced, at that point, that I had supernaturally good hearing; the market was set in a carnival-type area where you could win prizes for hitting balloons with darts, and there was traffic honking and hundred of people milling around and what not, and it all seemed much more SO after the candling, and I felt good about my 380 Taiwanese Bucks that I could've been spending on corn dogs.

But then I got home googled it. Wikipedia indicates that ear candling is the "triumph of ignorance of science." The Straight Dope says that the candles fill with what appears to be earwax regardless of whether they're burned in someone's ear or on a table. I've been swindled!

It goes without saying that I'm glad I went through with it -- I could never have looked Mageek in the eye again otherwise -- but the point here is that should you find yourself in a market in south central Taipei, choosing between ear candling and (oh let's say) more of those delicious deep-fried shrimp roll things, you're going to want the shrimp rolls.

Posted by Dakota on 10:35 AM link |

Thursday, May 10, 2007

There's something about language training that saps my will to blog. This has always been the case -- the blog entries from Urdu training are sparse at best, and while the last time I was in China was pre-blog, the emails home were still few and far between.

But I genuinely like having a blog and having the ability to look back and see what in god's name I've been doing; whenever I go back and re-read snippets, it reminds me of things I'd forgotten.

Part of the problem is that language training is a pressure cooker; it's 6 hours a day, one on one, with every day a reminder that the final exam is coming and you (yes, you) are not prepared; I live in terror of failure, despite failure being a near certainty. The actual class time dovetails with an hour for lunch and well over an hour of commuting each day. Tag a few hours of studying on top of that and there's not much time left for anything else; not only is time short, but night time generally finds me not wanting to do anything except crawl into bed.

But aside from the weak excuses of too busy and too tired, I also find myself not wanting to sit in the small office in my apartment and type for any length of time. I'm behind on emails (it's coming, Paginita, I promise; I just don't know when), and behind on admin (god knows I've been MEANING to request a replacement insurance card). There's something about the room -- its small, west-facing window looks directly into another building so there's almost no natural light -- that kills my desire to sit there and blog.

I came to the conclusion that location was the heart of the matter, that if I had the ability to blog from anywhere, I'd get on it constantly -- from coffee shops and bus stops and taxi cabs and noodle joints, and all the other places I hang out. Short snippets of Beijing life, like the bumper sticker that reads "Baby on Road," or the sign on the Hospital that reads Beijing Anus and Intestine Clinic, or a run down of my thoughts on traffic (a lack of civil engineers and the resulting poorly timed lights is largely to blame) or the "Civility Campaign" that's ongoing in the lead up to the olympics ("I yield my seat to those in need. I choose to line up, because I am civilized. I participate, thus I am happy").

Rarely a day goes by that I don't think -- that should go on the blog. But I either forget, or the office in my apartment kills the desire.

So I bought a blackberry off the internet. THIS, I thought would be the key. I can text message at a ridiculous rate -- imagine what a thumb-keyboard would do for me! And blogge means that you've only got to send an email and BAM! it's on the blog!

But China Mobile doesn't appear to offer blackberry service, despite the fact that their website (the Chinese version) claims that they do, and despite the fact that OTHER people have working, functional blackberries. Apparantly you've got to configure it outside of China and THEN bring it in, preferably in roaming. It seems that it won't start working until the next time I visit Hong Kong or go home for home leave. I read the entire internet -- over three trillion pages -- while trying to solve this problem. I have come to the conclusion that it can't be done.

Attempting to configure the blackberry was, as far as I'm concerned, about as good of a final exam for my Chinese language ability as I could want -- listening to China Mobile's auto-phone line ("press 5 for billing information"), dealing with customer service ("I've got a SIM card, but I need you to tell me about GPRS plans"), and reading page after page of China Mobile's primarily-Chinese website.

China Unicom, the other State-owned cell-phone service provider, apparantly started something of a bruhaha when it introduced a competitor to the blackberry, called the Redberry. According to a zillion different websites, service was running at 5 kuai -- 62 cents! --a month, plus a few Mao per email, a ridiculously reasonable rate. I went to inquire. The salesperson at China Unicom, somewhat flustered from the beginning of the conversation (she had that look that implies an unwillingness to believe that a foreigner might speak Chinese), was unwilling to lose face by admitting that she didn't have the beginning of an idea what I was talking about; she responded to my question about the redberry by telling me that all China Unicom phone numbers begin with 133.

So, the blackberry plan is dead to me as of now (perhaps to be revived over home leave in June). Fortunately, a quick trip to the second hand electronics store provided me with a hilariously small computer, suitable more or less only for word processing, and I'm back on the blogging horse. And I'll still be carrying around the blackberry, so if nothing else I can still use it on the fly to compose things and then toss it on the blog later. It's considerably more annoying than posting to the blog directly from the blackberry, but hopefully it'll re-kickstart Face The Sun and get the blog ball rolling once again.

Posted by Dakota on 11:37 AM link |

Sunday, April 29, 2007

There's so much to say -- there was indeed a date although nothing particularly blog-worthy, and then I jaunted off to Hong Kong for the HK International Film Festival, which made me feel very jet-setter, and then there's the upcoming Great Wall (half) Marathon and an awful lot of what have you.

But for now, it's the May holiday -- Happy May Day! (and if you can avoid chanting mayday!mayday!mayday! as if your plane is crashing then you're a stronger person than I am) -- and I'm in Taiwan, and god knows the deliciousness is flowing.

Off to an "Aborigine Dance Performance," part of a genre of entertainment that I think we can all agree is delightful.

Posted by Dakota on 6:55 AM link |

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

A poll:

I'm considering leaping back into the world of internet dating. Who doesn't love internet dating? It's glorious. A coworked pointed me in the direction of a website that services Beijing, and then tossed out a cautionary "but god knows, I wouldn't put a picture on there." I opposed: I mean, what? No picture? I mean, god knows of course nothing scandalous, but just a picture of my face? "Hey man, it's your career," he said. I called another friend for a second opinion. "Oh god no," she said. "What are you crazy? I mean, *I* wouldn't. But it's up to you."

I found all of this shocking. It's internest dating! Everyone does it these days! So I'm asking everyone -- particularly foreign service folks, but I welcome any opinions. I'm looking to re-enter the dating world, and word-of-mouth ain't cutting it. Online dating is worthless without a picture -- no one will pay you a lick of attention if there's an X drawn through the square where your face should go. Has online dating gone mainstream enough that putting a picture of my well-manicured facial hair online is nothing out of the ordinary? Or is this, for some unknown reason, too unorthodox?

Let me know your thoughts.

Labels: FSLife, onlinedating, poll

Posted by Dakota on 6:18 AM link |

My interest in Qinghai (and later Gansu) was largely logistical: I had some serious questions regarding the day-to-day lives of Tibetan monks.

(I recognize that going to Qinghai and Gansu rather than Tibet seems illogical, but it was necessary. Moreover, only three of the six major monasteries of Yellow Hat Tibetan Buddhism are located in Tibet. One's in Gansu, one's in Qinghai, and a third is across the border in Himalayan India).

It took me about 15 minutes at the Ta'Er monastery, on the outskirts of Tibet, to get a monk to invite me home. This was all the invitation I needed to grill him on everything I wanted to know.

So then, monk logistics:

If you're a monk, the monastery will give you an annual income based on how long you've been at the monastery and rolling under the assumption that the temple has been pulling in donations. This ranges from about 2000 kuai ($250) a year to about 4000 kuai ($500) a year. This allows you to pay for your monk cell phone, which you are not forbidden to have since Tibetan Buddhism is, shall we say, unique.

The monk I was talking to, a respectable old-timer with 14 years at the monastery, was pulling in 3500 kuai (about $430) a year. You get paid in cash, in a single lump payment once a year, every November.

If you're an irresponsible monk who isn't good at budgeting and you blow through all your monkmoney by oh-let's-say mid to late August, you aren't going to go hungry: you can always get yak butter and millet flour* -- the staples of the Tibetan diet -- from the monastery.

The monk who invited me home was 36, and had been at the monastery for 14 years, meaning that he entered when he was 12. This is not uncommon. He claimed it was his own choice, but despite that, when his head was shaved and he was given his robes, he was near tears. His parents live about 5 hours away from the monastery, in eastern Qinghai. He usually gets to see them every year or two.

Being at a monastery for 14 years will get you a pretty sweet pad. His was a multi-bedroom complex (he had 6 roommates), with a backyard where he was raising a vicious Sharpe puppy who was out for blood.

Following my in-depth interview on monk logistics, he pulled out a bag of pears, sent a younger monk to go wash a few, and then asked me some questions of his own: since you're an American, can you help me get a US visa? (No). Will knowing you make it easier to get a US visa? (No). How can I apply for a US visa? (See the website -- it's in both Chinese and English). Do monks have a better chance of getting US visas than other Chinese people? (See the website). But really, what's it going to take to get a US visa? (I'm not kidding, Mr. Monk: the best thing for you to do is see the website). Can you give me a letter to give to the Embassy for when I apply for a US visa? (Dude. No.).

*Coda: I am a person who is embarrassed by foods I dislike. I have been systematically identifying foods that I don't like and forcing myself to eat them until I do like them, so that at this point there are very few things I sincerely won't eat. I recently got over my phobia of wasabi and other horseradishes. Mustard has long since been conquered. Onions are old hat. Hard boiled eggs remain a stumbling block.

Despite embarrassment and systematic eradication, I'm going to come right out and say this: Yak butter is perhaps the single most god awful "food product" on the planet. It retains it's gamey, full-on animal flavor while having none of the pleasant properties of butter. It's full-flavor comes on top of a crumbly and waxy texture that wouldn't be good on bread if there were bread to be had, and the smell, the overpowering room-filling reek of it makes everyone and everything in Tibetan areas smell vaguely Yak-y. In addition to being a food product, it's also a medium for sculpture (monasteries keep elaborate butter sculptures of Buddhist icons for a year before cutting them up and giving them to the poor), and is burned on alters in large candles.

The Tibetans love it as "yak butter tea," which is a hunk of yak butter in a teacup with hot water poured over it so the butter melts and forms an oily skein on the top. This puddle of oil is then blown away by the person consuming it, allowing them to drink the now Yak-flavored water underneath it while lightly painting their upper lip with liquefied yak fat. When the teacup is half full, a handful of millet flour is tossed in, and is combined by hand with the liquid in the cup to form a dry, crumbly dough with little nutritional value, an intensely chalky texture, and an overwhelming flavor. This dough, called tsampa in Tibetan, is the primary staple of Tibetan cuisine, and goes a long way to explain why there are few if any Tibetan restaurants in the US.

Labels: Buddhism, China, Qinghai, Tibet, Tibetans, travel

Posted by Dakota on 6:16 AM link |

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Note: is seems upon reading that this post, more so than any other, is CRAZY reminisce heavy. For that, I apologize.

Enough pontificating: Qinghaiward! Train departs from Xizhan on Saturday at 2, and I in standard fashion get to the station exactly 8 minutes before departure. I'm off to the frozen northwest, and having left myself exactly 9 minutes to pack, have forgotten hat, scarf, gloves, deodorant, notepad, and camera. Killing me.

When I was a student, I rolled into Beijing a month early to roam around China for a month before I started studying. I arrived at night, stayed at a buddy's place, and then went to the train station the next morning. My first train experience was a hard-seat 30-some hour train to Guangzhou, a grueling ride that to this day people -- self included, really -- find hard to believe I've done. (My teachers have made it clear that they would never have taken a 33 or so hour train ride in hard seat).

I didn't know how to read the tickets at that time, and so when the gate opened, all the people in the waiting area started SPRINTING for the train. I assumed they were running for seats, and that if I took my time, I'd be standing for the next 30 some hours. It turns out even in hard-seat, the seats are assigned and listed on the ticket, and that people sprint to lockdown scarce overhead rack space. Despite having assigned seats, I now find that every time I'm on a Chinese train platform, I can't help myself: I sprint.

And this time is no exception: I'm late, as usual. I sprint through the station, hit the waiting all area, figure out where I'm headed, and make a break for it.

The waiting hall: as a student, I switched from Beijing Normal University (Beijing Shifan Daxue) to Nanjing University (Nanjing Daxue) about half way through my time. I had to renew my visa, and doing so required leaving China, either to Mongolia or Hong Kong. I ended up going to Hong Kong, carrying everything with me. The train to southern China (for an onward bus connection to Hong Kong) left from Xizhan.

By that point in my life, I hadn't figured out that I'd there's nothing I'd rather have more than an almost non-existantly light backpack. I was carrying enough junk -- textbooks, clothing, and a ridiculous amount of trinkets (a mahjongg set, chinese chess set, go board and the requisite dozens of black and white stones, a beer mug from a bar we used to go to, what have you) -- to fill two huge backpacks, and was wearing one on the front and one on the back. It was heavy enough that breathing became a bit of a struggle. I remember standing in line for the ticket takers and having a guy across from me sneer out -- that foreigner has so much STUFF! And I, mortified but thinking fast, responded that a fellow student's father had just passed away, so I had his stuff too, was taking it to him in Hong Kong, don't judge, it's not all mine.

I'm not sure if that flew or not. I just remember my shoulders aching for days from those two stupid backpacks and all that stuff I neither wanted not needed.

Right o. 8 minutes to go, I fly through the waiting room, hit the platform, and fly towards car number 8. I've got a sack full of ramen noodles (Chinese ramen comes in a remarkable variety of flavors and is considerably better than US ramen) as well as some other snacks to entice my fellow travellers to chat with me. I'm in hard sleeper, my preferred class of train in China (the beds are longer than soft sleeper, and it's easier to talk to people). I make it on board just before departure, rip open a can of Thai Curry Crab flavored potato chips, and try to fire up a conversation with the woman across from me.

She doesn't speak Chinese. She's a Korean tourist, 67 years old and on her way to Lanzhou in Gansu province. Blast.

Throughout the trip, due to her inability to speak Chinese and my white skin, everyone will assume that we are together, and that I can translate for her. Neither of these things are true.

I try to entice some of the actual Chinese people to talk to me by opening up a bucket-apparatus that's full of mini-snickers bars. Everyone likes snickers. Find me someone who doesn't like snickers bars, and I'll either show you a near-death diabetic or a liar. And yet: No one wants the Snickers. Everyone wants to help the Korean lady learn very basic Chinese characters. No one cares that I'm reading the newspaper! A Chinese newspaper, no less! No one wants to discuss events of the day! This is all a complete disaster! I console myself by eating approximately 26 mini snickers, which, on top of a complete can of Thai Curry Crab potato chips (my favorite flavor!) leave me feeling really ill.

In 2000, I and my roommate to be, Mark Christopher (Ma Guifu in Chinese, a name which Chinese people found to be very turn of the century; all of them wanted to correct it to Ma Fugui, but he was having none of that) took the train from Shanghai to Urumqi in the northwestern-most province of Xinjiang. It was a 72 hour train, and it was awesome. Everyone was bored by day 2, so everyone was sharing snacks and chatting and playing cards and chess and whatnot, and it was GREAT. I was expecting that my 25 hour train to Qinghai would be similar, but the distance it seems just isn't quite far enough to cross that friendliness threshold. And not for lack of trying: there isn't anyone on that damn train who didn't get offered a snickers.

Labels: China, reminiscing, trains, travel

Posted by Dakota on 4:25 AM link |

Further updates on India will have to wait: the notebook containing my notes on India is in myat-home-office. I, in the mean time, have been given a week off by my language training program to head off to anywhere-I-want China, to stay in Chinese hotels and chat up real-live Chinese people and in general put the ol' Chinese into action.

And so I'm in Qinghai, on the outskirts of Tibet, surrounded by Tibetans and other people who don't so much speak great Mandarin. It seemed to make sense: I've got questions. The monks have answers.

I bought my ticket on Saturday morning from the Beijing West Train station (Beijing Xizhan). Xizhan is, I believe, the largest train station in Beijing and serves pretty much any place that's west of Beijing, including my destination. I could've gone to any number of places more convenient than the train station itself to get the ticket, but when I was student I came into and out of Xizhan an awful lot, and I wanted to see if it was as I remember it.

It is, and it isn't. It's still huge, but it's now well signposted in both English and Chinese (the Chinese signs are bracingly specific -- "Ticket Sales, 138 meters -->"). There's an information booth that's clearly signposted as "FREE INFORMATION" to cut down on hucksters charging to tell you where the bathroom is or when the next train to Xi'an is or what have you. The information booth is even broken down into logical subsections -- train timetables, lodging in Beijing, tourist information, restaurants and nightlife. I have no recollection of any of that being there in 2000.

And then tickets sales. In 2000, I remember there being a single huge room with dozens of windows, each with a cluster of about 20 people surrounding it. There was no semblence of a line, and when you finally pushed your way to the front, people would still jam their money into the window ahead of you to break queue.

It was like the Seinfeld Soup Nazi: you had one single chance to ask for what you wanted, and if they didn't have it or you didn't understand, you'd be muscled aside and the next person would already be barking out their ticket order. More likely than not, even as you're asking for your ticket, the people on either side of you would also be shrieking out what they want, so understanding the ticket seller's response to anything you might say -- muffled through barely functioning microphones -- was pretty much impossible. You'd spend your time in line rehearsing: tomorrow night, Xi'an, hard sleeper. Tomorrow night, hard sleeper, Xi'an, and if you screwed it up, it would take you at least 10 minutes to get the ticket seller's attention again. All in all, there was only about a 50 percent chance you'd end up with what you wanted, and there sure as hell wasn't anything fast about the process.

I remember thinking that the lack of lines and general chaos when trying to purchase tickets was my least favorite thing about China, and how everything -- EVERYTHING -- would be better if they would just LINE UP.

The ticket hall is still big, but they've got metal bars in place that force people to line up. I was there at an odd hour -- about noon on a Saturday -- but there was almost no one there. There were two people in line in front of me, and while I waited, 2 people came up behind me. They waited patiently and didn't break queue. They ticket vendor was perfectly polite, and repeated the train departure time without complaint. She smiled when she gave me my change. No one pushed me, even once. No one shouted anything.

It was all a little disappointing.

This is, I suppose, the fundamental dilemma of the expat: when there are no lines and the hall is nothing but jostling and shouting, we complain about a lack of civilization. When they put in bars and people learn to line up and it all becomes so easy, we say that it's become sterile.

So then, Xizhan: in the run up to the olympics, the Chinese government is running a series of campaigns to teach people western-style politesse. They include large-character posters that say things like "I line up, because I am civilized," and "my behavior reflects on China". Rumor runs that they've made 11th of each month "Line up, Beijing! day" to emphasize standing in line instead of jostling for position. Everyone I know -- expats and Chinese folks alike -- supports this plan.

Xizhan has, I would say, undergone exactly the sort of transformation that the Chinese government is hoping for. But it made me a little nostalgic for the way the place used to be. The fact that the way the place used to be drove me absolutely batshit insane doesn't bear mentioning at all.

Labels: China, reminiscing, trains, travel

Posted by Dakota on 3:48 AM link |

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Friday, 8:30 in the evening: flight from Beijing International to New Dehli, direct, on the Chinese national carrier. I'm seated next to the reincarnation of a bobblehead doll, who throughout the flight swings his head from left to right in a long sweeping motion, until he notices me looking at him, at which point he sheepishly stops until he thinks I can no longer see. But the seats in economy don't exactly have an ocean of distance between them, so I pretend I can't see him to allow him to get his head swing on.

At 3 in the morning, a scant hour and half behind schedule, we begin our descent into New Dehli. The stewardess, struggling a bit with the English, makes the following announcement: Indian Regulations require that we spray down the cabin for… dysfunction , and with that precaution, they air-freshener the entire cabin. Suitably refreshed, we deplane in Dehli.

I've declared this trip to be No Sleep Till Varanasi, which is like the song No Sleep Till Brooklyn, only with an Indian flair. So while my boss and his wife, on the same flight as I was, head off to bed, I head to the train station to hop the first Taj Mahal-bound train to Agra, 2 or so hours away.

Dehli Railway Station, four in the morning: the first immutable law of solo travel in India comes to light: you cannot attempt to do anything without someone "helping" you along. So, while I'm trying to wrestle a ticket out of the ticket venders ("come back in… 13 minutes," they tell me), someone else is trying to convince me that the easiest way – nay, the only way -- is to go to his friend's travel agency, just across the street, and there's no need to even stand in this line, get out of this line immediately, come with me, why aren't you moving, are you not listening? And so on.

I shake him. The process of getting a ticket requires an application form, printed on ancient paper and re-xeroxed (or mimeographed, it's hard to tell) so many times that the words are illegible. The guy behind me, smartly dressed in a purple tie and looking far too well put-together for 4 a.m. in the train station, helps me out in return for the use of my pen.

I get my ticket for the 6:15 express to Agra, and then wander across the street to find a bottle of water. There's a fistful of small open-air restaurants the street, and one guy, frying paratha and chapati -- two different Indian flatbreads -- asks in polite Hindi if I want breakfast. I'm thinking that I'll just get a chapati or a paratha and move on -- surely bread can't make me sick -- but when the bread (steaming hot, still frying in it's own oil) arrives, it's coupled with a side of chickpeas (chole, my favorite), and even though I'm at the train station at 4 a.m. and this place has violent illness written all over it, how can I not eat? So I do; there's a layer of spice baked into the paratha, and the chickpeas are swimming in an oily cumin, tomato and hot pepper sauce that's ridiculously good, and I decide that if I have to get sick, it'll be worth it for food like this.

On the train to Agra I'm surrounded by shriekingly giggly Japanese schoolgirls. A stereotype, shattered in my mind: I had no idea that Japanese people were capable of being loud, much less obnoxious.

Agra, 8 a.m.: just outside the train station I see my first sacred cow, grazing in the dumpster. This is exceedingly exciting to me and I take pictures, but in retrospect (perhaps because I was alone), I realize that despite my well intentioned plans (which mirror every other pun-loving India-bound traveler's plans), I forgot entirely to say "holy cow!" upon seeing it.

No Sleep Till Varanasi: I head to the ticket counter to get my overnight train ticket to Lucknow. The window, labeled in English, reads: Foreign Tourists. Ladies. Freedom Fighters. I (who blur the line between foreign tourist and freedom fighter), am informed that the overnight to Lucknow is sold out.

Agra Fort Bus Station: the entire length of the outer wall doubles as an open-air men's room, and multiple people are going about their business. The smell is overpowering; it's unclear where women go for such things. I'm told that there's a "sleeper bus" to Lucknow, leaving at 8 p.m., no reservations available.

I wander around the outside of Agra Fort (British Era, imposing and impressive, still an active Indian army base). A sign reads Wearing of Crash Helmets Is Compulsory. I packed light -- too light, it seems, since I don't have a crash helmet on me. I decide it's time for the Taj.

The Taj: as impressive in real life as it is in the pictures. And it makes me pause a bit: I feel like I'm checking off a Major Life Box, a box labeled Things You Must See Before You Die. And by checking it off, it's like I'm one step closer to death. If a formal list of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World existed, the Taj would assuredly be on it. What's left to see? (The answer: the Pyramids, of course). Further introspection on this topic can now be abandoned until I see the pyramids.

The Taj Mahal ("Crown Palace") deserves more than a single paragraph, I feel, but what can I say that hasn't already been said? I can mention that Islamic calligraphy that runs the length of each side of the Taj, and that I, after having examined such calligraphy relatively extensively in Pakistan, was captivated by it. Or that the entranceway to the Taj is flanked by professional photographers who snap portraits of tourists for small amounts of money, and who bully casual tourists from taking that perfect entranceway shot with the long reflecting pool just as you enter so they can monopolize it.

Also, since the perfect tripartite symmetry of this trip was carefully planned, I'll go ahead and mention that the Taj, the mausoleum and mosque of the Taj Mahal, represent one side of the symbolic triangle of this trip. That triangle side can be labeled: ISLAM.

45 minutes outside of Agra: the village of Fatehpur Sikri, home to a World-Heritage mosque and mausoleum. In Pakistan, one of our officers had to go out to a village on field assignment, and upon returning would only comment on the state of the village by exclaiming: The flies, my god the FLIES! This leaps to mind as I walk from the bus station to the mosque, passing by butchers and samosa venders, merchants selling sweets and chickens and tobacco, all covered in thick clouds of flies, and I can't help smiling.

The inside of the mosque is full of kids asking for pens, and a stonecutter who claims to work in the mosque. (His story falls apart under questioning -- he's a local stonecutter who's in the mosque to drum up business). You've got to take your shoes off in the Mosque, but the buildings are covered in beehives, and there are dead bees everywhere inside the courtyard. I, like all massive cowards, live in dread terror of bees and have to concentrate all of my energy on not stepping on their corpses.

I'm sitting writing down all of these things when I little girl next to me -- maybe 7, 8 years old -- says hello. I finish my sentence and then look up and reply, in Hindi, hey, how's it going? She leaps backwards, and stutters -- Y-you speak Hindi?! A little, I tell her, and she spins around to her parents and relatives and shrieks, my GOD, he speaks Hindi! And they all cluster around, and they're friendly and not trying to sell me anything and it's fantastic. And so, with their entire family in tow (they've brought along everyone, maybe a dozen people) I brush out of the mosque, past the stonecutter who's still hoping to take me to his shop, to the ice cream cart, where we all have cream-filled mango-popsicles on a stick (the Indian equivalent of the Orange Dreamsicle), and it's a glorious day to be alive.

Back to Agra, for sunset at a small restaurant on the roof of a hotel overlooking the Taj. The sunset is lovely and the Taj is magnificent in fading from white to orange to pink to gray. But the restaurant is built over a sewer and the night air smells overpoweringly of human waste, and this sort of blunts my enjoyment of the lentils and bread that I eat for dinner.

Overnight bus to Lucknow: I'm on board at least an hour early, maybe the sixth person on the bus, but someone has already taken up every inch of overhead space with dozens and dozens of shoeboxes, bound together in packs of 8. I had been lulled into a false sense of security by the word "sleeper bus," thinking that it might be slung with hammocks like Chinese sleeper buses. But it's full of seats, and resembles the ones in Sri Lanka -- too small for my legs, bracingly uncomfortable.

The bus, subsidized by the government and extremely inexpensive (well under 100 rupees, much less than $2.50 for an overnight ride) is clearly a means of transportation for those who can't afford the train. The gentleman across the aisle from me only has one arm; the woman behind me is trying to keep her four children in line. I'm pinned into the corner by the guy next to me, who dozes off on my shoulder. Someone hops on the bus and tries to sell a used pair of tennis shoes. He's aggressive, waving them under the noses of passengers to show their freshness. The price, at 90 rupees ($2.25) is right, but I decide to pass.

None of the windows on the bus close, and it's freezing cold. By one in the morning I'm still wide awake, shivering, exhausted and wearing every piece of clothing I own -- two fleeces on my torso, one tied around my neck like a scarf, and two t-shirts wrapped around my face in an effort to keep warm.

I'll be honest: I can't remember the last time I was as miserable as on the overnight bus to Lucknow. Tired I can handle. Uncomfortable I can handle. But my god, being cold makes me absolutely miserable. When I came to this conclusion, I still had 6 hours to go on the bus. But I pull through in the end, since there aren't exactly a lot of accommodation options at 3 in the morning in the middle of nowhere, Uttar Pradesh.

Lucknow: Famous for the purity of its Urdu. One of my old Urdu teachers told me that when Urdu speakers from Lucknow use their full formal dialect, the result is poetic, but (to him) rather annoying.

And perhaps that's enough for now. It's almost time to head to the next city over, to hop the overnight train back to Dehli.

There is a bus. I'm just not that hardcore.

Labels: Agra, buses, India, Lucknow, travel

Posted by Dakota on 5:09 AM link |

Monday, February 19, 2007

Everyone who has ever come to India -- every single person in the long history of India who's paid a visit here -- has described it as "overwhelming" and "sensory-overload." They usually fail to adequately describe exactly what it is that makes the place so sensorily overwhelming. They don't mention:

Every waking second of every day is spent slogging through excrement-laced mud that's flecked with ancient garbage and the shiny packaging from betel-nut wrappers, and long open sewers are everywhere and almost unavoidable. As you walk, you're invariably dodging oncoming traffic (cars, three-wheel tuk-tuk rickshaws, bicycles, trucks and donkey carts), all of whom are honking at you with horns of different pitch but unvarying loudness, and in addition to vehicles of all sorts, you've got to dodge street dogs, street goats, and sacred cows that thoughtfully munch on garbage and don't move for anyone. Meanwhile, you're being tailed by minimum three hucksters who are looking to sell you something, take you to a guesthouse to snag a commission, or rip you off in some other way; those three people will, over the bleating of the goats and the honking of the horns and the crunchy-wet slorp of your boot crushing garbage while skidding through frothy mud, will be continuously shouting at you Hello! Where are you going? Friend, hello, where are you going? As background to the shouting and the bleating and the whatnot is religious music of some sort being blared from a massive speaker outside of a tiny booth selling 5-rupee cassettes, while simultaneously the stench from the open sewers is punctuated by massive clouds of incense smoke that billows from half-burnt sticks attached to every stand, stall and samosa cart in the city. In the mean time, at least two women holding children have seen you and are now begging for coins by waving their babies at you and there's also probably a dust-streaked crippled person, lovingly maimed by well-intentioned parents decades ago to ensure him a lifetime of income from begging, now dragging himself around on a cart of some sort and also begging for coins, and meanwhile you've got your hands stuffed in your pockets and clutching your wallet, because there's plenty of pickpockets and monkeys -- MONKEYS! -- both of whom have been known to steal things, albeit not usually for the same reasons.

If all of this sounds miserable, please let me assure you: it's fantastic beyond any speaking of it. This chaos --this absolutely out-of-control berserkness that accompanies every-day life -- is the fundamental reason that one comes to India.

I'm in Varanasi, which ranks amongst the coolest cities I've ever been to. Internet and electricity are unstable, so more likely than not, nothing will get said about any of this until I'm back to China. In the mean time, the best of days!

In full disclosure: I've only seen a couple of monkeys thus far, and none of them have tried to steal anything from me.

Labels: chaos, India, travel

Posted by Dakota on 7:36 AM link |

Friday, February 16, 2007

Blogger just forced me to upgrade to The New Blogger. Being a luddite, I feared that my entire blog would go away, egads! So I copied and pasted the entire thing into Word to save it. I can now say on good authority that I've written 193 pages about absolutely nothing.

Happy Chinese New Year: it's the year of the pig, starting tomorrow. As such, I've got the week off (three days off, two days of self-study, mash'Allah). Plane leaves in five hours. Destination: New Dehli. Updates will hopefully be more frequent while I'm on the road. Until then, the best of days!

Posted by Dakota on 2:34 AM link |

Minimum fare in Beijing Taxi is ten kuai, a buck twenty-five even. Maximum fare on a Beijing bus for those wielding a transportation card: eight mao, or one thin dime. This is the explanation I use when people ask why it is that I've become engrossed with the Beijing Public Transportation system, but it fails to fully explain the reasons behind my obsession.

In short: the Beijing bus system is the best I've ever seen, ever. The vast majority of the city's 16 million people rely on the bus and subway system to get around, which means the demand for buses is astronomical. As such, the number of buses plying any given route is through the roof, and the wait for a bus is never more than 4 minutes. The buses themselves take only about 25 percent longer than cars, except during rush hour when Beijing traffic grinds to a gridlocked halt but the buses ride designated bus-only lanes at twice the speed of regular cars.

I've always been impressed by people who are good at transportation. Quixote, in DC, could hear someone's address and name the bus route. 16th street heights? Ah, the S2. Here, a girl from Frisbee heard my address and where I study, and responded: so, you take the 117 and then transfer to… and I was immediately jealous. The jealously turned into light-hearted research, which then turned in to a full-on obsession.

My new favorite pastime is the game of Whatever Bus Comes Next, Take It To The End. Thus I can tell you that the 729 southbound will get you from my house to the Embassy for a nickel, whereas a cab will run you $2.50. (The 729 northbound, by contrast, will zip you out to a god-forsaken industrial area in the Northeast part of town, rife with large piles of rusty rebar. If you, for any reason, need to purchase rusty rebar, the 729 northbound is your bus). The 815 winds its way through old neighborhoods, past a temple to the ancient bell tower. The 117 will take you to a shopping district, and then on to a 24-hour Taiwanese noodle joint.

And then some buses just don't seem to go anywhere at all, and you get off and think: my god, why does this line exist? But within 4 minutes, another bus will show up and take you back to where you came from.

In DC, SmartCards make the trip smoother, but aside from the convenience for the user, there's no real incentive to get one. Passengers are still allowed to feed their rumpled bills into the machine and clog up the entranceway, slowing down transportation. In Beijing, the ticket taker is in the center of the bus, rather than at the door, so everyone gets on at the same speed. Moreover, unlike DC, Beijing encourages users to get a smart card by means of market forces: it's a kuai -- 12.5 cents -- to ride without a card, but 4 mao -- a nickel -- with one. Things are smoother, the ride faster and the fare lower, and everyone wins.

I am strangely proud of my Beijing smartcard. I feel that it somehow makes me legitimate as a resident of Beijing.

Aside from the odd person riding with me, I've only ever seen one other foreigner on the bus. When he got on, several minutes after me, a passenger turned to her friend and commented -- so many foreigners! Her friend responded -- they must be friends.

I spend inordinate amounts of time on bjbus.com; the English version is scaled down and rarely works, but the Chinese version is top notch, rivaling anything WMATA has to offer. A few weeks ago I hacked apart the 50 pages of a Beijing bus route book, and then pasted them together to make a single enormous map. And then I started copying bus lines from the route book onto a map of Beijing, marking out each route in pen to see where they go.

I crane my neck to see the numbers on buses when they roll by. I actively memorize the names of bridges, which often correspond to bus stop names, so as to make route planning easier. I chat with ticket takers, just for the sheer joy of it. My cocktail party chat has become intensely boring, and people actively seek to get away from me when they hear my dedication to public transportation. This is a price I'm willing to pay.

Labels: Beijing, buses, China, travel

Posted by Dakota on 2:32 AM link |

Monday, January 22, 2007

In October, I flew to the city of Yanji in frozen Manchuria, with a small herd of people from language training on a mission to meet up with a tuberculosis-curing Doctor's Without Border's doc who, in a fit of boredom, had invited us to join her.

The trip, in the bracing cold of early winter in Jilin province, was overwhelmingly blog-worthy. Briefly, in bullets:

-- The trip started on a deserted road just outside the airport, with the missionaries who claimed to be international art speculators, and with whom we hitched in from the airport after the door fell off our first cab and the owner of the remaining cab attempted to charge us 50 kuai for the 5 kilometer ride.

-- It continued on with the Sangria -- "you're going to want the small," they told us. "We'll take the large," we said, and were consequently served a massive crystal bowl filled with grape kool-aid, studded with chunks of fresh watermelon and, inexplicably, diced cherry tomatoes.

-- There was the hiking in a driving blizzard (Quoth the Engineer: "I kind of like this kind of misery -- so you can look back on it all later and say, 'do you remember when we asked the lord to take our lives from us, just to make the pain end?'") directly up a mountain to a crater lake, featuring a statue of China's own Loch Ness monster, which we climbed on top of like giddy elementary school kids before stopping in to the gas-stove-heated tent for ramen noodles.

-- And of course, the day-trip to the North Korean border, in which we, accompanied by a Chinese border guard, walked halfway down the bridge to the white line demarcating DPRK territory, and lined up our feet just inches shy of illegal entry into North Korean airspace, and then took pictures with the visiting South Koreans, hammered drunk at 3 in the afternoon, intoxicated on Chinese rice liquor and the joy of being South, rather than North Korean.

And none of that even mentions the round after round after round of glorious Korean food, or the market at which we went crazy buying toasted miniature almonds and candied ginger, and at which S bought the dried cuttlefish and then stored it in the vegetarian doc's room until the smell became so overwhelming that she dangled it out the window and dealt with the draft rather than the odor, or the 9 a.m. meat on a stick, or the strawberry waffles and milk tea, or any of the joys du moment which seemed to crop up so often on our scant 48 hour sojourn in Manchuria.

And despite all of the above, I was crippled by a complete inability to put any of it into cohesive paragraphs. I wrote four drafts of the Yanji blog. The first one was truly awful, and the remaining three were all fronted by paragraphs indicating that I was reaching the point of just throwing whatever I wrote on the blog and moving on with my life. But they were far too long -- page after tedious page, and all four of them made the entire Yanji experience sound tedious and annoying, rather then glorious and hilarious, as it was.

And suddenly three months have passed and I haven't posted a single thing on the blog. Plenty of blog-worthy things have happened, but every time I went to type them out I was cowed by the fact that before I could write anything, I had to finish the Yanji blog. Three months later, here we are. And since I have the world's worst memory, ever day I fail to write something more or less another day forgotten.

So I decided it was time to move past Yanji -- with apologies to Doc, now posted in Georgia's rebellious Abkhazia province: it seems that beyond what's above, no blog on Yanji will ever be written.

And now there's the resolution, that weekly there'll be something on the blog. I can't promise it'll be good -- language training goes until June, and sucks up all of my time -- but there's plenty of China that needs mentioning, and it's high time I get back on the horse that threw me.

Posted by Dakota on 7:57 AM link |

Monday, November 06, 2006

As a student in Nanjing, I was cold all the time. It was autumn at first and the cold was quaint, New England-esque with fuzzy scarves that cost a buck and fresh-roasted sweet potatoes that were sweet as candy and kept your hands warm while you ate them.

And then winter hit, actual bracing winter, with miserably cold temperatures and no heat inside, and the broken window in our sixteenth-floor bathroom that let the wind whip in while you were showering so any part of you that wasn't actually under the water was, at all times, miserably cold.

Another student in my program, teaching English under the table for cash to finance his trans-Siberian rail trip, asked his conversation class: What do you do in the winter? You know, for fun? He was expecting to hear sledding or skiing or what have you, but they told him: Sir! In the winter, we study late into the night, but it is so cold that some times we have to warm our hands under the desk lamp, just to regain some feeling.

I was cold, all the time: this is what I remember about studying in China.

And now it's Monday, the 6th of November. The temperature this morning was negative two celcius, twenty-eight or so Fahrenheit. I'm sleeping under a down comforter that keeps my body warm, but in the mornings I can see my breath in the bedroom. I'm cold, all the time: some things never change.

The temperature tomorrow is expected to be a balmy 2 degrees celcius, nearly 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Tomorrow is the 7th of November, and it puts us a single step closer to that most glorious of days, the 15th of November, when the city of Beijing allows buildings to turn on their central heating.

They say that not allowing heat until it's officially winter is a policy to save energy city-wide. But I can tell you this: on the day that the heat in my building is turned on, my apartment will be warm enough that you can bake bread in my spare bedroom and roast vegetables on the sofa. Until that day comes, you can find me in the bedroom, sleeping in a sweater and fleece-lined gloves.

Posted by Dakota on 9:32 AM link |

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Pakistan, late July: the movers came, saw, and boxed. All of my clothing was tossed in a fast-arriving shipment, packed into two metal crates and sealed with padlocks. Don't lose the keys. We're giving you six for each box, so you have ample copies. They're not replaceable if you lose them. The ball is in your court.

Pakistan, Mid-August: Last day at the Embassy, headless-chicken-esque in my sprinting to accomplish everything, the packing, the cleaning, the recommendation letters for my domestic help, the passing off of things to other people, and at 4:10 in the morning after an all-night organizational romp, the phone ringing and the embassy driver asking where I am, we need to go to the airport. I sprint to the main gate where he's waiting, leaving my key ring in the office.

Six of the twelve keys are on the key ring, but no fear! I've got six more, three for each box, keys-a-plenty!

Beijing, three weeks ago: arrived to mid-50s weather, made colder by the soul-sucking grey of the seemingly ever-present pollution. I have forgotten what winter is; I am freezing.

Beijing, today: the Embassy informs me that -- Halleluiah! -- my fast shipment arrives today! I, still freezing and overjoyed at the prospect of a sweater, sprint home after class. I run to my predesignated hiding spot and grab my six keys and sprint to the boxes to see what's inside. Three months after packing, the contents have become like Christmas, and I have no idea what's inside.

Beijing, today, exactly 49 seconds after arriving home: I realize that each box has not one but two padlocks, that the keys were divided into two groups of three not to make separating them easier, but rather because they were for two different locks. This means that I'm able to open exactly fifty percent of the locks on each box. The keys to my sweaters (and thus, my happiness) are sequestered in Pakistan, possibly the most inaccessible place in the world.

I weigh my options. I move towards writing an email to Pakistan -- help! You've got the key to my happiness! -- but decide that there's got to be, if not an easier way, at least a faster way. Hacksaw! I decide to find a hardware store.

This presents some questions: How do you say "hacksaw" in Chinese? Why is it universally known that hacksaws can be used to cut through metal? Where exactly does one go to buy hardware in this country? Why, dear god, am I such an idiot?

I trek to a nearby fertilizer store to ask if they know where I can find a hacksaw. We have the following conversation: "I have this thing [I show him a padlock]. I need one of these things [arm furiously saws in the air] to cut… cut it. Do you know… where is this thing?" He tells me: A hacksaw? Yeah, I've got one right here. And he hands me a hacksaw. Just like that!

I ask the logical follow up: How much do you want for this? He tells me: I can't sell you that. I don't know how much it costs. But I'm willing to pay as much as you… I told you, I don't know how much, so I can't sell it. How about a hundred kuai? I don't know.

You can maybe see how this would be frustrating.

I switch tactics: Can you call someone? He: Oh. Yeah. And he does. Suddenly my pro-offered 100 kuai is waved away. Hacksaws, apparently, cost only 10 kuai, a buck twenty five even.

Let me tell you a little something about hacksaws: it's not as easy as they make it look in the cartoons. Hacksaws, you see, are collapsible. This is to allow the user to attach whatever size blade he wants, making it longer or shorter as need be. This also means that when you're really getting your saw on well, with a sort of lumberjack-esque (and very satisfying) VRRRR-err VRRRR-errr sound coming out, the saw will suddenly fold in on itself, sending the blade flying toward your hands or face, and generally frustrating the hell out of you.

I attempt to re-install the blade myself and meet with little success. I return to the fertilizer store and explain the problem: your stupid hacksaw keeps collapsing on me. I've been gone from the store only about twenty minutes but there's a new guy manning the booth, and he doesn't understand at all what I'm trying to say. Vocabulary words I'm lacking: Hacksaw. Blade. Collapse. Padlock.

I: There is a problem with this thing. He: You should take it back to where you bought it.

I try a different tactic. Can I buy a new blade for this here? Yes, of course, he tells me. Can you install it for me? Yes, of course I can. Back in business.

I return to my apartment. I work up a good sweat, sawing (VRRR-err, VRRR-errr) with great intensity. I make it through one half of the padlock, and am very excited.

I realize that I have been sawing on the side of the lock that isn't clamped down; had I sawed through the other side, the lock would've sprung open once I got through. I have in essence just wasted 30 minutes of time sawing like a madman to have exactly zero effect.

I am less than pleased.

I switch boxes so I can switch locks; I can't face the one I've just wasted time on. And for some reason, this one goes easier. I am making great progress, despite the sweat pouring down my face. I saw through, the lock snaps open, and it is the single greatest moment of triumph of my entire life.

I return to the other lock. The blade is visibly dulled, with teeth missing, but I am determined to break through. Three minutes later, the blade snaps.

I return to the hardware store, silently lay the broken blade pieces next to the saw, and hand the man ten kuai. He doesn't speak while he attaches the new blade. We silently nod our thanks to each other, and I return to the task at hand.

Suffice it to say: I have never enjoyed a sweater as much as the one I'm currently wearing.

Posted by Dakota on 9:56 AM link |

Current Location:
The People's Republic of China.

Stop by any time: everyone's welcome.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem to Be Born

Comments and requests for dates should be directed to email.

And here I am.

And for all you random folks out there whom I don't know, for the love of god, email me. I'm abroad, know no one, and look forward to hearing from you. I'm especially looking at YOU, whomever YOU are who's Facing The Sun all the way from Kenya. And Sweden. And Canada. And whatnot.

Books Tackled, 2006:

1. Jarhead, Anthony Swofford
2. Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, Dennis Covington
3. A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
4. A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, Anonymous
5. Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism, Dawn Prince-Hughes

This year's movies, in chronological order:

1. Kung Fu Hustle
2. A Wrinkle in Time
3. Pi: Faith in Chaos
4. My Big Fat Independent Movie
5. The Winter Guest
6. Voices in Wartime
7. What Dreams May Come
8. Farewell My Concubine
9. The Ring
10. Like Water for Chocolate
11. Sahara

Orange Lifesaver.
In Passing.
Foxy Librarians.
Naked Translations.
Open Brackets.
The DC Bloggers Site.
Linguistics Blogs.
The DC BlogMap.

Foreign Service Officers by day, Bloggers by day as well.

The Diplodocus
(Islamabad, Pakistan).

The Permanent Mission of Joshie
(Zagreb; Libyaward).

Prince Roy
(Chennai; Taiwanward).

Sue and not You
(Tbilisi, Georgia).

Life on the Mekong
(Vientiane, Laos).

FSO Globe Trotter
(Lahore, Pakistan).

Vice Consul: Diplomatically Transformed
(New Delhi, India).

Adventures in Good Countries
(Japanward).

Our Man in Tirana
(Tirana, Albania).

Anne's Blog
(Kazakhstan; Greeceward).

Blogota
(Bogota, Colombia).

Furnish Worldwide
(Curacaoward).

Tasman's World
(Dhaka, Bangladesh).

GlobeHoppers
(Lome, Togo).

World Adventurers
(Seoul, Korea).

Aaron Martz
(Switzerlandward).

A for Adventure
(Chennai, India).

The Excellent Adventures of Nickie P
(Paris, France).

Permanently Disco
(Dhaka, Bangladesh).

Consul At Arms
(Kingston, Jamaica).



Five Random DC bloggers. Asterix indicates recently updated.