One of the most common questions I’m asked is: “What’s China like?”

After that I went out for my last meal with Iuh. We went to my favorite novelty restaurant. It was a sad occasion. That’s why this photo is not very exciting even though I’m in a toilet themed restaurant:

When we split up for the last time I walked around for a little bit in Dongmen (the shopping district with the first Chinese McDonalds in it). It was kind of mopey. However I did get these two pictures of things that I think are awesome, that made me a little happy:

School is over and I have to clean out my desk, that means no more giant OWEN DENNIS sign:

Aright so Iuh and I were able to squeeze in one more meal which was a lot happier. We got this food. It’s one of my favorite Chinese foods in China. It’s peppers, a little bit of pork, cauliflower, and chives. It’s great. I have good memories associated with this food; mostly memories of me and Iuh because I don’t know what this is called and she was the only person I knew who could order it.

We tried to go see a movie, but it was all sold out. However I also saw this sign for what appears to be Russian Toy Story 3? After this we walked around in a park for a little while talking about colored hair and communism. It was a good time. Second last meal with Iuh was a much more enjoyable experience than first last meal:

So, starting to clean out my room before whoever (whomever?) it is that comes after me arrives. I found a bunch of science projects in my refrigerator. I’m just going to say right now, ahead of time: Oh stop it, you’ve found stuff in your fridge too, chill out. I just forgot to clean it. It’s not like it smelled or anything.

Here’s a 4 month old apple:

And yet, here’s another apple that was put into my fridge a mere week later:

Fascinating. I think the reason they’re different is because the first apple got some ice on it once because it was back near the cooling unit.

Remember when I made iced tea within the first week of my moving to China? Well I never actually drank it or emptied the bottle. It looks really cool:

Here’s an orange that shrunk from being able to fit inside my palm to fitting on the tip of my thumb. It was rock hard:

Nude Tanning

Here’s something I saw outside on my last day. I can’t explain it, but I can definitely put a big ol’ wtf on this set of photos. He was just lying there. No one was around except for me and him:

Goodbye Yantian…

Check out this big beetle:

This grid makes this cat look like it exists inside of a 3D modeling program [neeerrrrd]:

Whoop, another gigantic bug as long as my middle finger!

It was exciting and upsetting to leave Shenzhen at the same time. I mean this was my first home out of college. That’s a very formative year for a person. As much as I hated Yantian Gang I still found a certain charm to it. I hate the place but I think a small part of me loved to hate it. Plus I had these great friends who were open to talking about things that other people weren’t. They were curious and funny and they would help me when I had problems. I owe them a whole lot. The amount of me being a dumb foreigner that they must have had to put up with must have been mind-boggling.

For our last night together we went for dinner and then I gave gifts. I gave Helen a big bag of candy and May got a drawing and a little pumpkin-like vase. Then we found a wheel chair and ran around in it. After that we group hugged and I was very happy and sad. I’m afraid I won’t ever see them again. It’s so hard to keep in touch with people in China. I miss everyone I met over there. Probably the top thing I hate most about traveling is saying goodbye to the people I’ve met and knowing that, probability-wise, I might never see them again. It doesn’t help that China blocks so many of the ways that people can keep in touch with eachother (my blog, facebook, twitter, youtube, etc.). Sucks. We had a good last night though.

*SIGH*

So many goodbyes at once. Just one after another:

The next day, after my room was finished being cleaned (I have a host of excuses for the guilt I feel on leaving it looking like this)…

… I Hopped a Train to Hong Kong

Not after freaking out about my lost passport for a little while though. Also my luggage handles and wheels broke before I even made it to the bus stop. That’s what I get for buying the cheapest suitcase I can in a Chinese grocery store.

Eventually I made it to the Hong Kong side of the border. In the train station I switched out all my Chinese money into Hong Kong money and I met Wei, the person that got me interested in China in the first place. She looked different, spoke English better, but still held many of the strong attributes I originally associated with her.

Because I got to see Wei once more, years after I had originally seen her and long after we had stopped being able to talk, someone I thought I would never see again much less see in her home country, I have some hopes that I’ll get to see all my Chinese friends again in the future. The odds seemed so unlikely at the time of our last parting that it was a very surprising and unsual experience. I trust that I will see my friends again, but maybe not for awhile. Who knows when.

Wei guided me to my hostel in Kowloon and then we went out for dinner. Last time I came to Hong Kong I didn’t really get to explore and get out much. We just came to see Avatar and have morning tea. This time I got to just kind of walk around and I had Wei there to help if I needed it.

I give you: Hong Kong.

Cooooooool. It’s like all those stereotypical images of Hong Kong I had in my head. This is exactly what I thought Hong Kong was supposed to look like and I got to see it. Well, not quite what I thought it was supposed to look like. Most of my images of Hong Kong come from mid-80’s and early 90’s Jackie Chan movies. So… I mean I guess I expected more brown gradient tinted sunglasses, poofy hair, and Kumites.

One cool thing I found out about HK is that they have this card called the Octopus Card. It’s amazing. It’s like a rechargeable debit card that words on all public transportation and many many super markets throughout the city. It’s accepted all over the place. You know how in the future we’re supposed to have this magic card that we can just swipe anywhere and buy any item or any service? That’s Hong Kong. They have that. So of course what I needed to buy with it was a famously ridiculous Japanese ion supply drink:

I walked with Wei around town so we could go to lunch. This was the escalator to the top of a pedestrian overpass. Hong Kong is riddled with pedestrian walkways through random buildings and over other things. When she showed me her school the sidewalk went through and around all kinds of things. I’m glad she was showing me how to get there otherwise I would’ve been quite lost. Must be really hard to do urban planning in a city this dense and old.

These shops were actually quite pleasant to walk around in. The Influence from Britain and large amount of interaction with foreigners seems to have affected how people do business. For instance they’re not yelling at me or touching me or trying to get me to buy things, they’ll just let me browse at my leisure. I appreciate that.

Whaaaaaat is this fruit? I’ve never seen this before. How does that happen? How often do you see a fruit that you’ve never seen before/isn’t a variation on some other fruit you already know? It looks like a tomato… rhubarb… squash…

When Wei saw this truck she said I had to eat some of this ice cream. I tried it. It was amazing. It’s basically really really cold ice cream that is so aerated that it’s almost like whipped cream. It was very good. Wei said it was a local chain I think:

Some street stuff:

This was my first hint that people in Hong Kong are allowed to do more than people in other parts of the country. A Methodist church? That’s so specific:

Subway on the way to Wei’s. Say that ten times fast:

Her university. I like this building.

I wonder how many pictures I have of people taking pictures?

I didn’t take this picture very well, but I like how they show that the person is a man. A gentleman. A Frenchman:

Next day, I took this picture out a hallway window so I could see down. I like how they hang their sheets. It’s cool looking. I’d hate to drop it though, it’s probably irretrievable:

Obviously this is the floor of my building for hostels:

Or… multiple floors? I had to run down the stairs a floor to try and catch the elevator. There are two elevators, one goes to the odd numbered floors and one goes to the even numbered floors. The elevator kept skipping my floor because it would get overloaded on the floors above me. So I went down a floor to try and grab the even one. I wonder how many hostels are in this building?

The bottom floor of the building is filled with immigrant shops. Everyone down there was from mostly Ghana or India. I of course took this opportunity to eat some wonderful Indian food from this vendor. He was cool for some reason. Really chill guy I guess.

Helen told me about the light show on Hong Kong harbor that they have every weekend. Since it’s summer they have it every night. So I went down there to check it out. It’s “the largest light show in the world.” Which, yeah, I’m guessing it probably is. Basically, all the buildings on the opposite side of the harbor are set to be synched up to music that plays on the waterfront in Kowloon. So you stand on one side of the harbor and the other side has buildings that light up.

Here’s some people sitting waiting for the light show:

Here’s the light show. Even the biggest light show in the world is amazingly cheesy. Don’t care though, light shows are still fun:

Video of the light show here.

This is the star ferry, it’s the cheapest way across the port:

There was a wedding reception going on inside what I think was an art museum. I notice the white guys and the Chinese guys go to separate locations for their smoke breaks:

Ew is this an import brand? Gross word.

Here’s some vegetarian sushi, green tea noodles, and mango mochi I picked up. The mango mochi was soooo good. Wei was telling me about how people in Hong Kong are really into Japan (something most mainland chinese feel the opposite about). I could definitely tell because there were so many japanese import stores and Japanese restaurants. Maybe I should go to Japan. I just hate eating fish so much. It’s gross. That’s my top problem with going to Japan I think. Also that I just spent all this time learning Chinese makes it feel like it would be a waste to go to Japan.

Man Hong Kong is so cool.

AAAAAahhhh Twix! Are you kidding me? Awesome!

I stuck my hand out my bedroom window and took a picture right after Ghana made a goal during the World Cup. My building is not all hostels, apparently it’s full of a lot of people from Ghana that were quite happy wake me up with cheering when their country’s team scored a goal. The whole building was just cheering sounds.

Right after I took this next picture, a woman, maybe in her mid-30’s, came up and asked if I wanted a massage. She didn’t just openly ask though, she got real close and whispered it. I said no because… I mean duh. So I watched her leave. She didn’t ask anyone else on her way down the street, not even the other random touristy or not touristy looking white guys. I felt kind of good about that actually, a bit of a compliment really. That lady had standards and I fit them. Nice.

So the top way to get my blog blocked forever and ever is to post the following two pictures. This is what blew it over the top for me that Hong Kong is under a completely different rule set than the rest of China. Wei and I were getting ready to go on the star ferry and cross the harbor when she pointed out these pictures to me. I’ve gotten so used to not being able to read signs that I’ve started just not noticing them. So when she pointed these out I was amazed. Wei says they’re anti-government protestors. I’m not sure how to analyze that phrasing in comparison to home.

Freedom of speech is probably the right I care the most about (lol artist). As far as I’m concerned, if you have freedom of speech, the other rights will fall into place because you can talk about them. Therefore it’s the most important US right. Anyway, I don’t know what to think about the phrase “anti-government protestor”, I mean we would just say protestor. A protestor is a protestor. Most people would agree that if they’re mad at the government it doesn’t mean they’re anti-the government (except lately I guess, there’s a lot of unrest in the US right now and strong rhetoric is very common at the moment). I mean protesting is just something you’re supposed to do when you want the government to change. Doesn’t mean you hate them, just that you think they could do some things better. I’m sure that if I brought this up with someone here they would just say “well it’s different in China”. Maybe so, maybe not though.

Anyway, the top two things I’m not allowed to talk about in China are about to be shown in the following two pictures, in Chinese:

Going on the ferry across the harbor. I don’t know what it is about ferries that feel awkward. Maybe it’s because when I get on a boat I feel like I’m supposed to be like, getting on a boat to ride around for awhile and instead I’m just getting on to get off. I don’t know. I guess it feels like big boats are supposed to be doing something big and important but instead it’s just shuttling me around.

Star seats:

The docking station (is that what it’s called in nautical terms? I only know sci-fi terms in reference to anything having to do with a ship):

Here’s a cool building from where I just was near Kowloon:

Also what appears to be… a… transformer? A zord?

It was so hot that day that when I stepped out from the shade to take that picture and stepped back in I was covered in sweat. Wei was smart and stayed in the shade but I’m a tourist so I do stupid stuff.

We decided to go up to a mountain so we could get a good view of the city, but to get there we had to go through this shopping mall and head up the road a ways.

Oh hey, here’s on of the buildings that was all lit up in the light show last night:

Whoa, this building is awesome. God buildings in the US are so boring:

We opted not to go up the mountain when we realized how many people there were in line. Instead we got onto one of the coolest novelties about this side of Hong Kong, the thin double-decker trollies:

I of course demanded that we go sit on the upper floor. So there we were, windows open, riding around Hong Kong on the second floor of a trolly. Awesome experience:

Everyone on this bus was yelling and hitting their hit sticks together:

Here is a strinkingly well-composed photograph I took as I walked down the stairs to get off the trolly:

Alien tower:

Walking through the park, looking at the guy playing with his little toy boat in the pond. I can’t see myself spending money on a toy boat. It would only be useful to play with when I went to the park. I’m not at the park most of the time though so it would just sit in my apartment on a shelf somewhere… :-(

When we walked past the Hong Kong library I wanted to go in pretty badly. I wanted to see what their library was like compared to Shenzhen’s:

Oh I see it’s just as crazy. This is a library.

Their computers have little pen inputs so you can write in Chinese. I tried writing my name but it didn’t work. Apparently my name has too many strokes in it.

Out the window of the library:

Thanks for telling me?

They had those little signs on a number of different things. They had one on the entrance door handle too. Basically anything that people touch a bunch had these little signs on them. Didn’t have them on the books though. Do they not clean the books? Wait, do they purify the air in that place? I mean there’s so many people that go through there every day. Why did they have to tell me they clean that one thing specifically? It only makes me more concerned about all the things they don’t have signs on.

Anyway, the sun sets on my final day in Hong Kong:

Here’s that cool pedestrian overpass again:

I happened to meet some of the people from my teaching program in Hong Kong. Twice. Weird. They invited me and Wei to go see a movie. Just so happened that they invited us to go see it in the same theatre where I went to see Avatar with Helen and May. Lots of coincidences at once.

We opted out of seeing the movie and went down to the harbor instead.

I said goodbye to Wei and went back to my hostel to pack. Felt a lot more okay to say goodbye this time versus when we parted in Yellowstone. Here’s another shot of the bottom of my building:

Something I never showed you in the beginning was the size of my room in the hostel. It’s pretty spacious as you can see. Also yes, I did have a bathroom:

I figured out how to get on the express train to the airport. It was a huge hassle with my broken suitcase, but I still made it without missing the train or my flight. Goodbye Hong Kong…

… and hello airport Burger King? Why doesn’t US Burger King do this?

At the airport:

Maybe this awesome guy is where I got the idea for wanting red converse shoes and a suit coat:

The tarmac is made of brick. How’s that for unnecessarily decorative and labor intensive? Oofda (how’s that for a word my students won’t know?).

Hey… maybe that ship is coming from Shenzhen.

Goodbye China…

… and goodnight.

When I came to China, Shilin (better known as The Stone Forest) was one of the top, if not one of the only things I felt I absolutely had to see. Going to Shilin was on my bucket list. Okay I don’t actually have a bucket list but if I did it would include seeing Shilin, feeding a live chicken to a Tiger, and visiting space with two super models, Rober Downey Jr., and a build your own BBQ bar. Two of those things are now done. RDJ better get ready for an awesome cookout.

Shilin is basically a magical place where you expect to see mostly fairies. I’m talking about the awesome kind like Puck or the fairies from Pan’s Labyrinth, not the annoying kind like Navi or Nathan Lane. Shilin is a big forest of tall rocks and no horizontal surfaces besides a rock path. It’s very similar what you envision in your mind when you think “Stone Forest.” The whole place is basically real life Myst.

To get to Shilin the first thing I have to do is hop a flight to Kunming China:

The hostel I stayed at was awesome. It was built with all kinds of odd little gutters going down random places and little bridges going to different locations like patios on roofs and stuff.

This image is weird cause it looks like the guy playing pool is wearing a hat attached to the wall:

This man was painting things green. Even two stories up he was just kinda hanging around out of stuff painting things green:

That night I went to the local famous place to eat food. It’s a restaurant that was like 80 years old. Now normally I’d go “Oh that’s kind of cool, 80 years old” but in China? That’s amazing. This restaurant survived the Cultural Revolution. That’s a big deal. It’s a pretty amazing thing to have a restaurant that survives when most people in the country are going through mass starvation.

I had two different kinds of food in this restaurant. Kunming is most famous for a food called “Over Bridge Noodles”. The legend of the soup is that there was a man studying for the Imperial Exam back in ancient China. He studied all day and night very hard, by himself, on an island. The only way to get to the island was by a bridge. His wife would make noodle soup every day and bring it to him but she found that by the time it got to him the soup was always cold. So she poured a huge amount of oil on top of the soup so that it would trap the heat in the soup. It worked. The soup is basically made like any other noodle soup, then they ladle out a huge amount of oil on top, like half an inch thick.

The next thing I discovered at this restaurant was their dumplings. They’re like any old dumplings in the Kunming (in Kunming they’re usually fried unlike other parts of China where they’re steamed) but I wasn’t expecting them. These dumplings and their sauce tasted exactly like the dumplings my mom makes and like the first Chinese dumplings I had ever when I was like… 7 years old. Apparently the way that I thought dumplings were supposed to taste was the Kunming style version of dumplings.

I was SO HAPPY when I ate them. Memories of home, memories of my first Chinese food, not to mention just the good flavor of a slightly sweet and tangy sauce with a stiff skinned dumpling, were all flooding back to me. I ate these dumplings every night though I never got better at ordering them.

So the first day I tried to go to Shilin via the bus system. Unfortunately, I was told to “go to the end of the line” on a bus that goes in circles. Therefore I couldn’t make it to Shilin that day. There are a lot of old people on the buses in Kunming and you’re required to get up for old people and mothers with children on the bus. It was basically a lot of me standing and then sitting for one bus stop and then standing again:

On the return trip the circle the bus was taking me on, I stopped into an art store to pick up a new sketchbook. They had all the usual busts you could buy and practice drawing with. I spy with my little eye: something with a hammer and sickle.

I also stopped at a dumpling place nearby because I hadn’t eaten lunch. When they handed me the dumplings they asked: “Do you want a drink? *pointing at a specific one nearest to them*” and I was like “Yeah! I’ll take that one *pointing to the one that looked like orange juice*”

Turns out it was corn juice, quite the shock when I’m expecting orange juice. Yes, it tastes exactly like corn. It’s like drinking corn, but with no chunks, just the juice. It wasn’t sweetened or salted or anthing like that, just plain corn:

I sneakily took this photo just so I could get a picture of the man that looks like a cartoon character. Turns out I’m no better than the Chinese I guess, taking photos of odd people:

This picture…

… was taken by me sticking my hand out these holes. Coming from a place where you can freeze to death in winter, it’s still bizarre to me to not make every single opening in a building shut in by glass:

Oh yeah the world cup was going on so I went down and drank in the bar. I don’t know who was playing. Someone red and someone green I think. I stopped caring as soon as America and Britain tied. I thought that was such a funny rivalry and I was all for it. Especially because if the US won everyone would be like “YUEAHHH! USA USA USA WE REULE U SUK BRITAIN!!” and if the US lost we would all be like: “Eh. It’s just soccer, we really don’t care anyway.” Pretty much lose/lose for Britain. However they got a tie. That’s lame and boring and now I’m back to not caring about soccer.

Aw one of the hostel’s kittens:

Chight and Chagic, Chuff the Chagic Chagon, Ching Charthur and the Chights of the Chound Chable

So the next day I started up even earlier than before and went on my way. First I had to find Wal-Mart however so I could get some sunscreen. I tried following people’s directions, but it wasn’t working out, kept getting lost because they would say “that way” when it was really some other direction. Finding Wal-Mart isn’t as easy in China as it is in the US. In the US it’s big and obvious: giant one-level store, giant parking lot, big signs, and people you don’t want to talk about politics with for fear catching a negative IQ point or two. In China it’s hidden and elusive.

For instance I first had to walk down some alleys, then go up some stairs over a couple restaurants to a third floor bazaar kind of area:

Then here’s where the Wal-Mart is. I almost missed it amid all the other distracting sights. It was a maze to get over there. I only saw it after I went up an escalator and was coming back down.

I took a taxi from Wal-Mart to the bus station so I wouldn’t be late. During the ride down the highway I found out that all the buildings in Kunming have roofs covered in solar panels. I read that Kunming is trying to be a model green city in China. The solar panels must be a part of some government incentive. What a nice incentive. It’s much more pleasant and not phlegm inducing compared to the cities that run on oil and coal.

On the way to Kunming I chatted up a New Zealander who lives in Macau. Also this army unit was on the road. We couldn’t figure out what they were for. There was some flooding nearby, but that wouldn’t require canons and artillery. The best part about us going by the army was that at the very very front, maybe a few miles ahead of the rest of the convoy, the lead truck was stopped on the side of the road. Inside the truck were two guys looking at a map and wildly gesturing around. It made me laugh.

After that the New Zealander told me about when he was watching footage of soldiers helping at a flood. He said he was watching and everything looked perfectly normal, he just couldn’t put his finger on what was wrong. He eventually spotted it: all the army men that were helping with the flooding were barefoot. That sounds completely insane to me, especially in a country that’s not particularly known to be the most sterile and clean place and in a location where infection and disease is extremely easy to get no matter the country. Why didn’t they at least wear water shoes or something? Dunno. Strange. Take it as you will.

Eventually the bus came to a stop in a town outside of Shilin. I think it’s a town just for people that work in Shilin or in the little restaurants and souvenir shops just outside of it. They have some kind of neat looking housing. They seem kind of large for China, though it’s probably 4 people per apartment.

Just inside the park you get your first taste of what the rock formations in Shilin are like:

Here’s a cool pagoda:

This was the entrance to someone’s awesome house or office building or something. It looks soooo preeeeeetty *swoon*.

Now when I first learned about Shilin I saw pictures that showed it as a beautiful, natural scenic area. A place full of one-of-a-kind fantastical locations. Small elves and gnomes would dart in and out of the trees and crevices and try to hide from me and keep their homes a secret to the outside world, afraid of being seen by the tall ones they called “the strangers”.

So I walk in and the first thing I noticed was the striking scenery. Beautiful. Cool. Impossible. Otherworldly.

That feeling lasted for all of 1 minute.

Minute number two was me realizing that this place was full of loud, spitting, pushing people. On a weekday no less. China is always so crowded, especially places that are for tourists. Drives me crazy sometimes. How am I supposed to enjoy this lonely haunting place when I can’t be lonely nor haunted? How do I find fairies if I can’t find quiet pools of light because people are splashing and throwing trash in them?

Here’s me trying to hide my disappointment by cropping up, away from the people that are crowding everything on the ground.

As soon as you walk straight into the rocks there’s a right turn. I took it and found that it was a big built up square where people were playing instruments. Again I was excited by the rocks around it, but saddened by the fact that it was so artificial and had so many people. What people in the US consider to be “beautiful natural surroundings” are different than what they consider them to be in China. All of these photos in this square are taken after I waited a long time in order to get as few people in the photo as possible.

Oh cool! A path where nobody is on it! I’m going to go down this way! As soon as I did this a guy came running after me and telling me “NO! No no! No!” I was getting more and more saddened because this was telling me that I wasn’t even allowed to go off the paths on my own and explore on my own. I had to stay with the throngs of people. How am I supposed to enjoy this experience?

This is the square again. There were members of the local ethnic group putting on a traditional dance. The tour guides got everyone here to this spot all at the same time and were talking on their speakers in order to describe the dance to the tourists. It was very noisy. Fun dance though. I was able to get these pictures before the hundreds of other tourists showed up and moved me out of the way to get photos:

More tourists. There were so many coming down the stairs I couldn’t go up for awhile:

Ah, a moment before the crowds arrive. This is when I started getting that ol’ Myst feeling again. I can easily imagine adding a blue button or lever in center of that platform and BAM! I’m in a game. So fantastical and cool.

Shilin is basically made entirely of cool pathways. Cool pathways are totally my thing, I love cool pathways. Over things, under things, around things, bridges, catwalks, every kind of unusual pathway. I love them.

Aaawwww they’re back. Moment ruined:

Augh this was driving me crazy! People were running past me in order to get ahead of me so they could walk under this rock. I don’t think they were even into it, they just ran that way because they saw other people running toward it.

I saw one woman start down this secondary path on the left. Then she walked a few feet away from her boyfriend and the crowds of people, then came back. Her boyfriend took her picture in front of the opening, then they walked off with the rest of the crowds. I was curious why she didn’t walk down the path and go further, I figured it must be a dead end. So I started walking down the path:

Wait, this is just a path… there’s no end to it. It’s just like the main path but no one is on it because no one is on it. What I mean is, no one would walk down this path simply because they saw no one else walking down this path. I saw it happen a couple times. People would walk a few steps down the path, look around, not see anyone, then go back to the main path where all the people were. Check out the texture on this rock:

It was so cool that no one was on this path. I couldn’t see anyone, couldn’t hear anyone, it was just me by myself in a mystical stone forest. Now naturally that made taking pictures of me in scale with the rocks to be rather difficult. I was so happy to have no one around though. Here’s a picture of me really enjoying myself in my Godzilla dress:

There was no one around to take these photos of me. Also it’s a rock forest so there are no horizontal surfaces to set my camera on, the rocks are all vertical faces. Therefore I had to do things like hang my camera from little cracks in the stone, aim it in my general direction, then start a timer:

Check out this path through the stone forest:

Aright, seriously, you have no idea how happy I was to be here. Ohhhhhh man.

To take that photo I had to take off my watch and set it up on a stone I found. No level sufaces afterall:

Check out this cool spider I found. The web is made was taking up like a 3 by 3 foot area. Also because it was all damp out there was dew making it glisten. A big spider web in the stone forest is awesome:

The spider was, unfortunately, on the others side of the web from me. This is a shot I tried to get of the top of the spider by reaching my hand in between the support threads in an attempt to not ruin the web while taking the photo. Turns out the picture looks like an indie movie:

God… so awesome. I was running through this maze like a kid in something that kids would really like to run around in… like… a McDonalds Playplace or the Death Star.

I was much more okay with seeing people now that I knew I could still have the experience I wanted. Mostly I was just happy that I was getting exactly what I wanted and more out of my experience so any down points couldn’t actually bring me down because I was too pumped. I wanted to stay away from people so every time I found people or heard voices I headed in the opposite direction.

Ah ha, I see there were some Chinese people here recently:

So there was this pagoda that everyone kept trying to go to. There was a line down the path and people were pushing and shoving to try and get up to it. No thanks. I don’t want to deal it. I’ll just go the direction that is opposite that noise.

In my cool fun direction I get to have mysterious paths snaking through the stone forest. I didn’t have to deal with shoving, pushing, spitting, yelling, or people accidently photobombing my pictures. In fact, I never saw another person for about an hour and half. Yeeessss!

The best part of it was that no one could tell me “don’t step off the path!” I could do what I wanted and step off whatever path I wanted to, climb whatever rocks I wanted to, and explore any crevices I wanted to. I felt like a little kid exploring and climbing and stuff. There were times when I was running (Yes, running. I run sometimes.) up paths and down paths and then I’d see brambles like this and go climbing through them:

There was only the occasional reminder that I wasn’t technically alone:

Here’s a little pool at about chest height. This is the beginning of a new rock tower right here:

I see an opening over there to the right, but I also see that the path doesn’t go that way. All paths in this place are marked and that little hole under the rock isn’t marked. It was just kind of a tipped over rock and the stone underneath it was a little smooth. I thought it looked smooth from some kind of water erosion. I wonder what’s down there? Probably a stream or something:

Whoa what? A secret picnic area?? Are you kidding me?? Nothing gets me happier than finding secret places that no one else knows about.

There’s even a cool pit off to the side where you can break your leg and no one will ever find you:

Oh also there’s a stone bed?

Here’s my feet from said bed. It was extremely nice to lie on because the weather was hot and humid but the bed was dry and cool. While I took this picture I heard a couple of Chinese people walking by the opening to this secret location. I listened carefully to figure out if they would come down the not-real trail as well. They didn’t. They didn’t stray from their path nor did they seem to notice anything out of the ordinary at all. They continued past the opening without ever knowing I was there. Have I found the only place to be alone in China?

It’s more cool to lie on that bed when you realize that there are like 90 tons of rock suspended out in the air above your face.

Above my head was the graffiti from however many other people accidently came across this location. It’s not on the maps I’ve seen, it isn’t known by anyone except us. Way cool. I’m so happy I found this secret location:

I started walking down the path towards the Master Sword/Excalibur/my life’s MacGuffin:

You better believe I went through that hole:

Seriously, if I photoshopped in some elves or hobbits in there, would it even occur to you to question what you were looking at?

Look at them up in their pagoda loudly scuffling and bustling and experiencing what they’ve been told to experience. Meanwhile I’ve met one elf, a borrower, a rock biter, and a family of gnomes (Buddhist gnomes, I’m in China afterall).

Well I’ve found a momentary pause from the rock forest. I’m back near the entrance where all the people amass before departing on their tours.

What could possibly make me like the Stone Forest even more? Oh I know, lets throw in a grove of ferns, Owen’s favorite plant. It’s only the most mysterious (not to mention versatile for any mood you want to create) plant in the world. Ferns are right up there with weeping willows, white pine forests, hedge mazes, kelp, and anything found in a bayou:

Yes! There’s a little stone path so I can go be inside of the fern gully (pun intended)!

This location – people + mist + the ability to “make the monsters in my drawings real by using a drop of potion!” = my childhood fantasy come to life

…

At least I would always have these cameras to keep track of my creations as they wandered around doing mischievous things in the park/my home.

So once again I found a little bit of grass that was parted along the side of the path. I went that way and I found this cool spider web:

Also this location. I had to wait until the fairies stopped floating around before I could take a picture, there were too many of them and it was screwing up the lighting:

In another place where I was exploring I found this. This is the key to letting me stage an elaborate takeover of the park:

It started raining so I had to hide under a rock. It was cool though. Of all the places I wanted it to rain for a little while this was one of them. I would love to experience a good strong storm in this place.

Ah ha! A person… a police officer no less?

Aw cool he brought his motorcycle! I wanna ride around the stone forest on a motorcycle! Hell I just want a motorcycle in general. In fact, I have wanted one for a long time and the motor cycles in china are exactly the kind that I like. They have that old school slightly stripped down style. I love the motorcycles that are as simple as possible. Seat, tank, motor, handles, two wheels:

Yeah you saw me see yo’ motorcycle.

Outside of the stone forest are like stone fields. It’s basically large grassy areas that occasionally have big rocks jutting out of them. There are usually more people out here. This road is like the outer road of the park.

As I was walking down the road I heard the sound of small engines. I was excited because I thought it would not be beyond the China to include a go-kart track here. I would totally pay to do that. I mean they had a slide down the side of the Great Wall, why not a go-kart track through the stone forest?

Turns out it was a pretty large group of people mowing the lawns.

Eventually I found a sign that I simply had to follow:

However first, check out this amazing toilet I found, in a park, in China. It’s not a squat toilet, it’s a western toilet, and it has a self changing plastic toilet seat covering. Amazing.

Here’s a picture of a bathroom!!

Anyway back to walking down paths that you would see in Myst:

I found a path leading off the main trail, so I went for it and found some very nice looking places:

What is that out there? Looks like I’m going toward a little building! I can’t wait to find out what it is! It’ll be cool…

Oh… well…

This is when things get really Mysty. I was having such a good time. It’s like I was living in the videogame. It was awesome.

At one point, looking for the eternal mushroom (which I never found) I turned and ran into this wall. I read it and thought “What? Elephant on a platform? What is this I don’t even-”

Then I turned left and unexpectedly saw this:

I like the way they meshed man made with nature made. It’s so cool looking. Again, I’m getting all giddy all the time enjoying the fact that I could find a linking book around any corner.

I took this picture specifically to try and play with the photomerge utility in photoshop. Turned out pretty sweet. You can click to take a look:

Aaaawww… people… :(

Everyone who walked past this felt the need to climb on it and take a picture. I felt like I wouldn’t want to do that simply because I wouldn’t want to be the one who accidently broke this extremely old tree root. Not a fear shared by anyone else however:

They put barbed wire around the tree near the top to stop people from climbing up even higher and taking a photo. This bothered me only because I was afraid it would girdle the tree eventually which would destroy the whole reason to protect the tree anyway:

This is near a random place among the rocks where they were selling bottled water and such. It’s the only one I found within the stone forest and not outside it.

I like this tree texture. There were a lot more trees in this area than other parts of the forest. It added a lot of variety to what I was seeing:

Ah ha! I found the wires through the park that power the cameras! You thought I wouldn’t make a massive blueprint for my elaborate take over but you were so wrong China:

These plants were in a sort of stone pot almost. It was about chest height and the center of the rock had been worn down a little. Then these plants were growing out of it. It was exactly like a big potted plant:

I went down the middle path there and then strayed off of it into the depths of the jungle:

Where I saw oh my god it’s as biG AS MY HAND WHAT THE FFFFUUUUUUUUU-!!

Also there was this vine growing down the wall that I thought was kind of cool. It reminded me of really long gigantic centipede with all it’s little legs sticking into the rock.

Now I exit to the outside of the rock forest again among all the people on tours. I found it interesting how hard it was to find people that didn’t go on a tour. I only ran into a couple people the whole time that weren’t part of a tour group or were also out doing things by themselves.

This whole area is essentially people taking pictures of themselves posing in front of stuff. In this first photo I’ve caught two people doing it at the same time:

There’s that pagoda again:

Followed another path off the main path. Found another awesome motorcycle and a police station:

There were some workers out in the field. I don’t know what they were doing out there, picking something in the grass. These are the local ethnic groups iirc. I feel like I learned that information at some point but I might be making it up.

I wanted to go out there on the grass but there was a little fence that had a sign saying not to. Also I was surrounded by people so I couldn’t do it without someone seeing me and getting on my case. Also there were plants in the way. See?

Obviously the only solution to not being allowed to go on the grass is to find somewhere else where I can sneak onto the grass:

What’s this? It appears to be a path that lets me get onto the grass but it’s covered in branches. I don’t see a sign that says not to go through though and I see a little path off to the side. I guess I’ll just go that way since I haven’t been told otherwise.

Well the path off to the side led to an unofficial toilet (sorry, no pictures) but it also led past the unofficial toilet to me being quite happy.

Ahhh… Nice lush grass that I get to be barefoot in.

You never get to be barefoot outside in China, not unless you want to step on broken glass, nails, poop, or you can’t afford shoes. In fact, people don’t even go barefoot in their own homes, they switch to flip flops they keep by the door. Alone, in lush grass that had no little branches or rocks in it, barefoot. Nice. Maybe those workers were finding all the little sticks and rocks so that I could enjoy my 10 minutes of barefoot pleasure? Pretty sure they saw me but didn’t say anything:

On my way back in from the barefoot bonanza I saw this gross dead millipede looking thing:

Some stairs behind a shop. This whole park is full of “Hey… it’s cool in there…” moments.

Another moment where you too can dress up in local traditional dress! I remember there was a little girl there that kept pointing me out to her parents and then hiding behind them. Cute.

I started to feel it was time to exit the park. I saw this tree on the way out. I don’t know what it was for though I’d certainly like to:

Found another path I’m not supposed to go on to go on:

Awww ruined/abandoned looking buildings are cool!

Some sort of electric power station?

The power station must be for all these lights. These lights are all set up to point at the rocks at night I think. This area was boring, I left pretty quickly.

Back on the main path I saw this building. I went in it but it was just some sort of backdoor parking lot and gift shop. No one was there except employees who seemed to be all of one race (not Han Chinese). Maybe this is where I got the impression that the laborers in the park were the local ethnic group?

The gift shop near the entrance of the park:

So before I left the park I decided to follow one last path off to the side (it was above some closed doors, a very abandoned looking area). I found a pagoda! Clearly people are supposed to go up this path and enjoy themselves but no one was there except for me! Weird. Why does that happen? Everyone flocks to the same spots. Why take the same photos as everyone else and have a bunch of random people that are in the photo with you because everyone else is there with you?

This is the view from the pagoda. I was a little jealous of the other people in their popular pagoda this whole time until I found my own personal pagoda that was higher than their pagoda. Awesome. Nice view too. It’s just as good as the other pagoda I’m sure. Hell I’ll look up a picture from the other pagoda on the internet real quick to make sure… Yep! Just as good and no one is there.

Okay well I guess at the other pagoda if you look all the way behind the pagoda you probably don’t see what appears to be employee housing… with satellite TV? I don’t know.

I saw these phones a couple times. I wonder what the Chinese says. S.O.S. is a pretty universal term thus why they might choose to use it. Maybe the Chinese literally says “save our souls”.

Look at them in their crowded pagoda; meanwhile I’m all alone and happy on my higher horse:

Finally I walk down from the pagoda and exit the park. I was as happy as a good analogy.

After I got off the shuttle bus I headed to the regular buses. On my way there I was hounded by like 15 different taxi drivers that were standing around waiting for tourists from Shilin. I had to walk through a massive group of 30 of them who waited at the entrance to the buses. They yelled for me to follow them to their taxi and I knew that if I wasn’t firm with them immediately, they were just going to chase me. BTW the way that they yell for me here is to call out “Foreigner! Hey foreigner!!” in Chinese. They don’t understand why I get a little bothered by it. To me it’s like yelling for someone by going “Hey black guy! Black guy come here!”

So I turned to all of them en masse,and yelled to them with my hands out in a I’m-not-gonna-deal-with-you gesture and said in Chinese: “I don’t want this I don’t need a taxi. I’m taking the bus.” And they didn’t chase me down. They mostly looked at me bemusedly and let me go on my way. One of them said something in Chinese that I didn’t understand that everyone else laughed at. I wish I understood more Chinese so I could understand when someone was laughing at me, versus with me, versus at the situation, etc.

On the bus I saw an ad for something I’ve never seen an ad for. I found it to be rather interesting that this was something you need to advertise. I find it more interesting that they chose a picture that could easily (possibly more easily) be made without using the product they’re advertising:

Aw last day in Kunming. Kitten time:

My next post will be about my final days in Shenzhen and how cool Hong Kong is. Look forward to it!

The whole reason I was able to go the Shanghai in the first place was because of the Gao Kao, the most important test in China. It’s 3 days of testing. They’re tested on 3 subjects a day with each subject lasting about 2 or 3 hours (iirc). My only regret was that I wasn’t able to stay and watch them take the Gao Kao. I probably wouldn’t have been able to however, I’m assuming that there were no cameras allowed and it’s most likely anyone not involved with taking the test couldn’t be there. I’m just curious as to whether they had like guards with guns and stuff. It doesn’t seem like it would be out of the question. I meant to ask Helen to take pictures for me while I was gone, but again, I doubt they allow that.

Here are some tents I saw that have something to do with the Gao Kao:

This is a sealed door. I’m pretty sure they would put these over the doors while the students were testing in order to prove that no one entered or exited the room while the test was occurring:

Inside of a room with desks spaced apart so they can’t copy eachother:

Outside of a class with the student’s photos so they could identify themselves. Also it helps against confusion about all the Wangs, Chans, and Lis.

Here’s the room full of all the student’s boxes so they wouldn’t be in the classroom where people could cheat.

Here’s a sign. I can’t read it. I can only break apart the first character. It looks like it has a field in it and a knife. So… I guess it’s about scythes? Why is that next to the bathroom? Chinese is hard.

Last day of class, students taking photos of me as I talked:

Why I like being a teacher #351: Kanye West teams up with Kanye West and they kill Hitler:

Then I had to say goodbye to all my students. That sucked. I didn’t really want to, I like them and I’ll miss them. They were so much fun. My last day in some classes were kinda weird however. There were some kids from Malaysia that came to look at the school. They would sit in the class with us and take my course. I wasn’t sure how to address them so I just kind of called them “Malay Kid” when I needed to call on them. Actually a few of my class photos have those random kids in them. Kinda funny.

Also we’re back to having the rainy season again. Animals and bugs have started to come out.

Here’s a spider on a big web I saw. The web was removed the next day. Probably because the web was out in the middle of where you would put your head to see off one of the school balconies. This leads me to believe it was either removed purposely or traumatically:

I found that I kept having to chase toads out of the street. Sometimes many of them at a time so they wouldn’t get run over.

Last day of Chinese class. So many last days at once. I hate last days of things.

Remember Johnny’s? My favorite hamburger place in China? Well it eventually went out of business and was replaced by a waffle house. I kept refusing to try it, but I was still curious what a Chinese waffle tasted like and this was my last chance. So I went there and got a mango flavored waffle:

Here it is. It was rather flavorless. I wish the hamburger place hadn’t gone out of business.

I preferred this food I got with May and Helen and the Chinese French teacher. We were really hungry late at night so we went down to Yantian Gang to get some food. We didn’t go to the first place because they were trying to charge tons extra once they saw me. It’s so obvious when they change the price because of a white person. They get all nervous and they glance around and stuff when they say the price. We went somewhere else and I got wontons. Slight difference between China and the US, the Cantonese call what we would call wonton soup as wontons. If it’s not in the soup it’s just a dumpling like any other dumpling.

Look at the size of this slug! It’s huge! Also it’s not slimy at all, it’s kind of dry. It feels kinda like well-hydrated, hairless skin.

Found another slug outside:

So there was a road near the school that I always felt like walking up but I never got around to. Helen and May said there were oranges up there that we could steal so we started going that way.

We didn’t go through this gate, but for some reason I really like the look of it. Somehow it seems like a gate I would see in a movie that takes place in South America.

So we were walking along and there was this man and his wife coming down the road toward us. Then the man went off into the woods and started climbing this tree:

He was Cantonese so I couldn’t understand a word he said, but May is also Cantonese. So she was chatting up the woman while the guy was up in the tree, breaking off branches and throwing them down at us. Then the woman started to pick off the seeds from the fallen branches and May was all excited to see the seeds. The woman offered up a few so that Quentin and I could try them (when we ran into her later she also handed us some bananas she had just picked; nice lady).

First however, there was a giant spider that May had to scream and run away from. He was a nice spider, he kept trying to run away back under the leaves that he was pulled from as I chased him with my camera:

Here are the seeds the woman was after. It’s a numbing spice. You put it in your mouth and chew and the inside of your mouth becomes cold and numb. It’s like little quick doses of Novocain. It’s way fun. I kept a bunch and brought them back to the US. I told customs I had them but they didn’t care. Kinda odd. They also didn’t even check my backpack full of electronics (Wii, headphones, computer, three hard drives, DS). I was kind of mad at them for not giving me a hard time.

Anyway when the seeds dry out they look exactly like peppercorns. Probably because they are actually some kind of… you know… peppercorn. I read a few months ago that a bunch of chefs in the top restaurants in New York just found out about this spice. When I read that I was all like “pff… old”:

I don’t quite understand what this place was. Some kind of farm thing. They had a ton of plants growing all kinds of fruits. Things like oranges, bananas, and other fruits I didn’t really know. This was a guy walking around spraying pesticides. Yet again, these are images I only associate with South America, not China. Therefore I was getting a strong movie-about-illicit-trades vibe.

I don’t know what these plants are but the flowers look kind of cool and alien. Especially the corkscrew looking thing they’re each hanging from.

Check out all these ants. There were tons of ‘em.

At the end of the road there was a graveyard. Instead of using gravestones they use trees. I liked it. Graveyards take up a lot of space so I’m not sure how they work in China. I don’t think people get buried here. I think it’s more like urns and such.

Anyway this lot was empty, but it still had all the trees in it waiting for dead tree owners.

When I was walking along outside of the school I kept seeing these flying bugs of some kind. They were enormous, bigger than June bugs, and they moved much slower. They flew like a broken single piston engine helicopter trying to carry a grey whale… or… a something something carrying something heavy that can’t quite carry it and is struggling and slow enough that you can watch it go by because it’s actually a gigantic horned beetle:

I took this picture upside down so I could get as close as possible. Turns out it looks like he’s falling on you from above:

It was dead. That’s the only reason I was able to get this close. Otherwise I would be too freaked out that it might try to ram me. There were a ton of these bugs one night and I saw them crawling around on the ground and flying past me and stuff. They were pretty cool.

These are all the lol cats outside the cafeteria that were waiting for the garbage to be taken out:

My 8-Bit Starcraft shirts arrived! This allowed to me to give one to Helen and Charlotte. Also I got buttons. I was pumped:

Awesome. The shirts turned out just how I wanted, even mi-

AAAaaaawwwww nooooooooooo…

Neon orange on olive green with a beige yellow accent? AAawwww that’s disgusting looking. Thank god no one else bought this shirt. I changed it so it doesn’t look like this anymore. When I did the coloring online I was matching the preview of the image on the front with the preview of the accents so it would look cool. Turns out I should have read the actual color names instead of just looking at the preview. Now I can’t reorder it because it just so happens that they stopped carrying the color shirt I want. AAaaawwww…

I got some of my money back though so now I gotta get a new 8-bit Starcraft shirt before I head back to China. Maybe I’ll get an eggplant colored one or something. Also I really like the ones that have the piranha plant looking design with silver so I might try that. Dunno.

Next I’ll talk about Shilin aka The Stone Forest; a place that shouldn’t exist. You’ll like it I guarantee it. It’s impossible not to like.

Who says all my posts have to be so painfully long?

So it was the weekend of the Gao Kao and I had a job interview in Shanghai. So I was like “I’m gonna go to Shanghai and go to the Shanghai expo and stuff!” So I did! It was cool. Shanghai is nice. It’s kind of like Super New York. It’s got all kinds of stuff in it, lots of subway lines (“Just as many miles of subway track as New York in only 15 years! It took New York 150!”) etc etc. In fact, the interview went so well that I am in fact going to be staying at that school next school year. It’s a university. Should be fun I hope.

Anyway on my way out I got to see the garbage shed filled with a lot more pounds of garbage than normal so… I guess… here’s a picture of garbage?

Violent J was at the airport waiting for me to board my plane to Shanghai. Pretty cool. I enjoyed seeing him again:

Here’s the plane with purple seats:

So Shanghai is the most populace city in the world. It has 19 million people in it not counting who knows how many people that are just staying there at any given point in time but aren’t registered as living there such as tourists, people like me, illegals (yes, china has an illegal immigrant problem too) and so on. For comparison New York is number 15 with 8 million. This was the line to get a taxi at the airport:

Eventually I was able to hop into a cab and get a ride downtown, which was like 2 times as expensive as they said it would be. Pretty sure it was because the taxi driver was taking the long way to get to my hostel in order to rack up more money on the meter, something I was told would happen if I looked like a tourist in Shanghai. You definitely look like a tourist when you’re at the airport and showing a driver a photo of the Chinese characters of the address where your hostel is. I didn’t care though; I liked seeing everything. China has cool architecture most of the time. I think it helps that I was in the populace southern area of China where you have more options with your building designs unlike the frigid north.

One of the cool (and actually more horribly horribly intensely aggravating) things about China is how unplanned things are. They kind of just add things on wherever they need them to be. Like this pedestrian crosswalk above the road which was probably built before the highway above it:

I wish I understood how those sticks stay stuck up against those cables. I don’t get it. Also US should go back to investing in public transportation like we had before the car companies bought all our trollies and destroyed them. If you’re going to be environmentally safe you should put your money where your mouth is and get more people riding public transportation. To do that, we need more public transportation options. I’m in love with subway systems for instance. Trains are a great investment.

Anyway these are three photos of me trying to understand this trolley. It seems to go against gravity with suspension and tensile strength somehow, I don’t get it. How do the poles stay attached when the trolley changes lanes or streets?

Isn’t English cool? Free hug through forest:

This is the area around my hostel. It was a little arty mixed with residential mixed with touristy. An odd mix. One street would be touristy, the next one arty, the next one full of little neighborhood street vendors:

There was also a big pile of sand for some reason. Here’s a kid doing what kids do:

Also because there were some pretty things nearby people had to come here and get their photo taken:

Nicest hostel ever? I got the private room because I didn’t want get a room with some guy who sounds like a lion as he sleeps the night before I had a job interview. Here’s the room:

Also a drama on television showing the trials and tribulations of the Chinese during WWII. There are a lot of movies and television shows in China that take place during a time of invasion and occupation with Japan being one of the top bad guys. I’ve found people here often love sushi, Japenese TV shows, movies, comics, games, etc etc but they hate Japan… somehow. Well, not Japan, “Just the people that did those things to us.” You know, the 6 dozen or so old men that are still alive. Then it turns into “well the young people don’t even try to know about their past and they don’t care about what they [the Japanese youth? Who’s they?] did.” To which I can’t help but see that as a giant black pot calling a kettle black. Especially with the amount of times I’ve found that they’re not aware of their own invasive past, what bad things their own people have done to their own people in the more recent past, and so on and so forth. Ironic.

Anyway, DRAMA:

Here’s the view out of my window. There was a guy above me hanging bedsheets and stuff:

There was a man that would sit outside near the hostel. He was blind. He appeared to be people watching however. He wasn’t begging or anything like that, he would just kind of go outside and sit and people would come by and chat with him. Kind of pleasant old man:

Oh also my hostel has non-sweet sausage as a food option. Except then they put super sweet ketchup all over it. I thought it would be better but it was kinda meh.

Around midnight I was hungry again so I went out walking and exploring. I found a place that was packed with people in the residential area a few blocks away from my hostel. Everything was closed except for this restaurant. Real hole in the wall kind of place. They had a system where I had to look at the Chinese, then order it, then pay, then they would give me a wooden block with a Chinese character on it, then turn around and trade it to someone else to give me the food. It was confusing and since I couldn’t read anything I just kind of watched other people order until someone ordered something that I thought looked good. So I gave it a shot. They of course laughed at me the whole time and spoke unintelligible Chinese at me. No idea what was being said. However I got this food and it was delicious:

Shanghai Expo

The Shanghai Expo is something Americans aren’t really aware of. Don’t know why, probably because it doesn’t really mix with certain aspects of American sensibilities. For instance you are supposed to purposefully show off as much as you can. That’s something people do within our culture, but I’m not sure how much it’s done on purpose to show up other people and our government isn’t being on “showing off” per se. I don’t know, showing off and how it pertains to American culture is something for another post, I have to think about it more. I just feel that when putting on a big happy positive face and trying to show off good things about the US isn’t something that the government does very well or ever really tries to do at all.

Also, the fact that if it’s not American also makes it so that Americans don’t care about the Shanghai Expo. See the movies we have offered in any multiplex theatre for instance. Other countries make movies too and they have movies in their theatres from around the world. Why don’t we?

The Shanghai Expo is the World’s Fair. Yes, they’re still doing the World’s Fair. See how much people in America care? There has been a lot of argument and discussion over whether putting on a giant 6 month show was the best use of gov’t funds. The amount of infrastructure they’ve built to take care of this event where millions of people will attend is pretty big but at the same time there was a ton of money for other things around the fair that are arguably unnecessary. Especially when the theme of the show is “better city, better life” and it’s all about self sustainability. The whole park is full of what I would certainly consider to be wasteful spending in both the short term and the long term (water elements and such take energy to run for no real reason thus being a waste).

It’s a gigantic show where every country in the world that can afford it or doesn’t hate china comes, sets up a pavilion, then shows off all the cool things their country has to offer. This is basically the only time that most Chinese people would ever have the chance to learn or interact with anyone from another culture so it’s a pretty big deal within China. Their internet doesn’t work, they never meet anyone who isn’t Chinese, the only time many of them learn about people not from their culture is when they’re taught in class about other places or they see it in a movie. Most of their knowledge of other cultures goes off of what they hear from friends or see on TV or hear in music. Again, might not be a big deal in the US because we meet more people from more cultures on our way to work than the average Chinese person meets in their entire lifetime. In fact many reviews I’ve read of expo has people from Europe and North America finding the whole thing kind of okay, kind of neat, whatever and many Chinese people finding it to be AMAZINGLY COOL.

In fact I was talking to one man about it and he was talking about all the honor of having the show in Shanghai and I said:
“That’s really kinda cool. It’s so strange though because it’s so huge yet I had never heard of this before a couple months ago, same with some british guys I was talking to. No one in the US knows this is happening either…”
Him: “What? That’s crazy. What about when the US held the fair? You had the same thing and must have been greatly honored by it.”
Me: “When was that?”
Him: “1962”
Me: “… yeah… well… I mean that was 50 years ago… :-/ Hey this is great food! Love it. What’s it called?”

Anyway the whole expo is a good opportunity for countries to put their best foot forward toward the rising nation of China in a very Chinese fashion (put on a giant show and try to show off as much as possible). So it’s rather showy for being showy’s sake which is something that has annoyed me for probably my entire life. However I was still curious and it was such a big deal to everyone in China that I too decided to go.

Getting tickets is easy if you’re Chinese because you just walk into any place that says they sell Expo tickets. Of course, the way you find out who sells expo tickets is by hearing who sells tickets. I remember even the expo site was kind of confusing on where exactly to find expo tickets. So my friend Helen called one of her former students (who is now married with a kid) and had him grab me one and deliver it to me the day of the expo. Calling in favors is pretty nice. The ticket was like an electronic plastic card thing that could track entry and exiting of the park and what pavilions you entered and stuff. Pretty nice, very high quality:

lol jk this is the actual ticket:

Then I got to be introduced to the subway in Shanghai. It was more crowded than this most of the time but this was the only time I was actually able to fit my hand down my side, into my pocket, and grab my camera:

Accidently overshot the stop I wanted to get off at and ended up out here where there were like 40 guys on motorcycles and in rickshaws asking if I wanted a ride anywhere:

Are they selling clothes or cars? Confusing ad is confusing:

So finally I get to subway station where the expo is being held. These guys check to make sure you are at least holding a ticket before you go in:

This is the section where everyone decides to run to the gate so no one gets ahead of them or something. The psychology of “I MUST BE THE NEXT IN LINE” is extremely strong here. Drives me crazy. You’re not going to get there any faster. If you do get there faster you’ll only have an extra 5 minutes or so in the park. Annoying.

Just so you know what it’s like for me to try and read Chinese I’ll translate this sign for you:

Middle something 2010 something Li something something something something with a roof.

Also I don’t think that’s actually Li, it’s probably something else.

Here’s what was waiting outside the expo before you got to the security lines:

Not many things make me feel more ridiculous than having to walk through long empty queue lines back and forth like an idiot:

Another big funnel tower thing. One thing that was cool about these funnels was at night they had little LEDs all over them so they turned into giant round televisions with waving flags and stuff circling around them:

Oh come on you guys, could you make yourselves look more like a zoo attraction? How about eating a cheeseburger or shooting a gun or something?

Finally… THE EXPO!!!

This is the China pavilion:

You apparently had to have some kind of special extra ticket to get into this one. I walked up to the line and I wasn’t sure if that was the deal or what. I really wanted to see the inside but I found out online later that tickets are sold to it like weeks in advance or something. Anyway I asked the women if I needed a ticket or what was going on and she was like: “Do you have a ticket?” and I’m like: “Well, no, I mean I have an expo ticket. Do I need one for the china pavilion?” and she suddenly turned crazy: “you nnneeeeeD A TICKEEEET!!!!!?!!!!!” and I’m like: “… k… bye… :-|”

Look at the scale of those people against the building back there:

It was so huge. I tried to stand back as far as I could and see how much of the building I could fit into the frame. Here’s a really sweet Dutch angle version of the China Pavilion.

Also this sculpture was out in front in between what appeared to be a parkinglot and the China Pavilion. I don’t know what’s going on in it however for some reason I thought it was German or Swedish in origin:

Here’s a building from some country that I forgot; it’s either Middle Eastern or Asian because this was the Asia section:

This is the water fill up spot. There were too few of these throughout the park. People were pushing each other out of the way to fill up their water bottles. My friend Taylor has a fear of mob mentality and when I see people shoving eachother out of the way to fill up water bottles at what basically amounts to a really big carnival it makes me uneasy:

There were so many people in the park that along the main stretches of walkways they made two layers of road for walking on. I usually stuck to the lower half. Good thing it was the morning on a weekday.

Love the kid in the bottom of this picture. I didn’t even realize I got a photo of that happening until I went through my photos for this post. Putting your shirt up like that is very normal for Chinese men who are feeling overheated in public. That boy will grow up to be a fine Chinese man (… Chinaman? I can I say that?):

So I was curious as to what was going on over here. Turns out that all those little jets are actually cold-water misters. They put little poofs of cold mist out into the air to cool the area down. I’m a little confused as to how this fits into the non-energy wasting theme of the expo but it was still pretty neat:

Outside the India pavilion was an Indian music and dance performance:

South Korea had a cool looking pavilion. They turned their written language into colored tiles and put them all over. I like the way Korean looks as a written language. Lots of circles and focus on circular design, it’s cool looking:

Someone got in a fight over letting in a stroller or something in one of the lines. Lots of yelling and throwing of fists. Heat + Crowds + Stress = Fights.

This is the flying saucer building. I think it’s called the Expo center or something I don’t know. I just know it looks like it could lift off at any second:

The only pavilion I really wanted to see was the Japanese pavilion. I wanted to see how a bunch of people present themselves to a country that hates them. Also I wanted to see flying cars and robot butlers which I’m sure must be in there:

That’s when I found out how real the rumor of “there are long lines at the Expo” were. The lines for many pavilions were between 2 to “over 5 hours” depending on the pavilion/country’s popularity. Yes I mean it. People stood in line for at least 5 hours to get into some of these pavilions.

Look at this line:

Hold on let me go around the block:

Turns out I couldn’t actually find the end of the line. That’s how long the line was. I found out Japan was one of the “over 5 hour” lines. That line, when stretched out and not snaking all over the place, was probably at least a mile long. Clearly I had other, better things to do. Especially since if it’s awesome and in Japan I’m sure a video of it has been put on the internet and I can see it online.

Poor bored back door Japan guard:

Saudi pavilion tries to be like UFO pavilion:

The double-decker road:

I actually could never find the end of any line ever. I could never figure out where lines ended. I could see roughly where they started, but I had no clue where they ended so you could join in the line. I really didn’t want to get into any lines because, I mean, I was by myself with nothing to do. That’s horribly boring for a half hour experience inside some country’s self promotion building.

Here’s another line I saw but I have no idea what it’s a line for. When I looked at the end of it there didn’t appear to be anything there. It looked like it was just a line to nothing. At what looked like the beginning of the line was an intersection to a road, that’s it. Seems pretty popular though. Reminds me, again, of when I used to play Roller Coaster Tycoon and I could put queue lines to nowhere and people would go in them just because it was queue line.

Here’s a video of a rushing mob because a space opened up in front of them and you can’t let anyone get in front of you in the queue.

Once again, I’m pointing out that I have no idea what this is a queue for. There didn’t appear to be any at the beginning of this line, it just looks like it’s a line to nothing as far as I’m concerned and it goes for at least a kilometer. Though I’m sure it must go to something right?

This lady jumped out of line to do something real quick:

Oof, bad move. Looks like she’s in trouble now. The guy isn’t yelling but he’s talking and you can tell she’s in trouble because people are looking at her as she’s getting talked to:

Requires a lot of police to keep the line in order in the spots where there are no railings to keep the queue properly:

I found the end of the line! Maybe this is what the line is for… Hmm.. something something with a person in it, four more somethings, 8, three more somethings, then something with a mouth in it… :-/

The sun! There’s too much! Turtle formation, now!

Here’s a cool sidewalk design I liked:

So there are these VIP entrances for people who pay extra to get into the pavilions. There’s always a guard at the end of the entrance to let in people who have the extra pass. Now even I know about this VIP thing and I’m as out of the loop on this stuff as possible. However, knowledge of the VIP system and how it works is not enough to stop people from hounding the guard all the time. The amount of pity I felt for this guard was immense. Watch as he deals with the constant badgering by the same group of people he has probably been saying “no” to for the past half hour (including even more people joining and asking because of group psychology).

After leaving the poor guy I went toward the UFO thinking “I’m gonna go up to the top, that sounds kind of nice.”

Here’s a siesta on my way. People do this a lot here. Just kind of fall asleep in some random public place:

Out in front of the UFO building was a giant area with mist things. Again, I’m not sure how this is energy efficient, but it was still kind of neat:

How do you pose with something that doesn’t have a form? There is always a way:

Those funnel things were like 6 stories tall because they start underground. Imagine that thing as a giant TV. Pretty cool:

Great pose:

Beneath the UFO were a bunch of shops and stuff like this decent one:

I don’t know why I thought I would be able to get to the top of the UFO building. I asked someone where the entrance was and they just pointed this direction. So I go this direction only to find that I guess they’ve completely given up on lines for this building:

Once again, I quit and walked somewhere else. I decided to walk along through the upper floors near the funnel things. I went on the upper avenue toward the non-asian countries.

“WTF Chen? Can we go? No one’s even here…”

Inside a gift shop. I can’t read it without turning “SH” into “Shit.”

Random sculpture:

However what’s more cool is this guy I tried to covertly get a picture of. I LOVE HIM:

The upper avenue is pretty open on such a sunny weekday like this. No one dares step out into the open sunny part, too hot and “it will make you black”.

My feet were really tired at this point but every single bench I went to had someone sleeping on it. Annoying siesta annoys my feet:

I didn’t know the Czech Republic was known for it’s graffiti? I <3 graffiti though. I wish I could do that kind of thing. Doesn’t come naturally to me, the style is too abstracted and I’m too rigid in my thinking.

Yeah I’ve noticed:

The line to Sweden I believe:

Pictures with white people! A tall blonde Swedish woman is pretty much as far from Chinese as you can get:

France:

“Carribean Community Joint Pavilion” made me titter.

Wait shirts and shoes are recyclable? I never thought about doing anything with them except for donating to Goodwi- wait, did they actually expect to have people throwing away shirts and shoes? Is it common enough to go to a park or expo and throw away your clothes that they needed a sign to point out which trash can they should use?

The Netherlands “Pavilion.” This one was pretty fun and ridiculous:

Underneath the weird curly walkways they had this astro turf area with fake hollow sheep. Everyone went here to cool off from the sun and to eat ice cream:

This is my mango ice cream (which was really really good). I was actually taking a sneaky picture of the woman back there who was angrily talking about someone with her friend. Her friend kept shaking her head and saying the Chinese version of “yeah, that’s sucks… yep… sucks… yep…”

You know what? I think I will. Thanks for the suggestion!

This kid is pretty cool:

The most famous pavillion at the show (besides the China Pavilion) is probably the British Pavilion. It’s pretty crazy looking:

There was a wall that was obscuring my view of the pavilion, so I kind of jumped with my camera above me head to try and get a picture. When I landed I looked at the picture I got and I was surprised to find this character in it:

[Also yes, "me" was a typo, but I laughed when I read it while editing so I kept it in there.]

Well we can’t find any real white people so I guess this will have to do. This is the Austrian pavilion iirc. Upon first glance I did actually think this was a real person:

What’s this? USA USA US-… well… it kind of looks like a shopping mall… That’s awfully boring. I want to go in really badly but again, the line is about 5 hours long. No thanks. At least I could understand where the end of this line was.

Is that… is that a BBQ sandwich? Well I now know where I’m going for lunch.

Seriously… that is such a boring corporate looking logo. It’s like it was designed by Microsoft. Could they have been more bland? I was a little saddened as well that my food was coming from KFC/Pizza hut, I wanted something more original. Anyway, don’t care, it’s just what’s on the inside that matters:

That’s right, I found out that they had CHILI DOGS!!! Thank you Sonic the Hedgehog TV show for turning me onto this classic American delicacy that I still appreciate to this day:

You have no idea how happy I was to eat this entirely mediocre chili dog. I was freaking out. I was smiling and giggling and having a great time:

Yes hello everyone, I’m a real life American eating at the American restaurant…

Yep, here I am. You’re making me uncomfortable now…

I got very tired of not going into any pavilions so I saw one that had no line, went in, and I found out it was Nigeria’s. I saw little mention on the walls about the amount of dead wealthy princes they have. I guess they like to keep that info just for me so we can split the fortune with less people. Be ready for my new blog post in a couple weeks about how much money I will acquire once this transaction I’m working on goes through:

I also went to Lithuania. They were blasting really loud and techno music from their doors:

Apparently Lithuania is home to the world’s biggest hot air balloon. They had a replica of the basket for people to go in. Also I ate Lithuanian food. It was kind of like Russian food. It was like boiled stuff with other boiled stuff in stewed stuff.

Canada lol:

Mexico’s pavilion also looks awesome. I love this one. Viva la Mexico. I actually slept on the grass beneath these bizarro trees. When I awoke a girl asked me for my autograph, no joke. She wanted to keep track of all the foreigners she saw and where they were from:

Seriously people sitting next to me? Seriously? You can’t even pretend like it’s going to decompose or something, we’re on a roof of a building. The amount that people litter here drives me crazy sometimes:

See that? That’s a taco. Hell. Yes. 9 months of no tacos and I got one served to me by a real life Mexican in China. Well… I was clearly seated by someone who was Hispanic, my actual waiter was Chinese… whatever… it’s a real taco and I could see the other Americans in the restaurant were just as happy to have tacos as I was. This restaurant was filled mostly with Americans:

Oh yeah, I’m still in China… :-/

After my nap and my taco, I decided I would be willing to go to a pavilion that had a line that was more than 10 minutes long. I felt like I had to at least see one big name pavilion. I really wanted to see Japan but that just wasn’t happening. Had to choose something else. Crazy Netherlands it is!

For the Netherlands they figured out a genius plan to get Chinese people to move in a single file line. They made the lines into a funnel. They started really big so about 5 people could stand side by side, but by the end it was only big enough that one person could fit through the fences at a time. There was no bottleneck, it was just really really gradual so no one realized what was happening so that no one would lunge forward to push people out of their way to get ahead in line. I laughed when I figured out what was going on. Smart. Totally worked. I loved it.

Hallo off-the-air Netherlands!

This part was horrible. If only they had used the line psychology from before. The worst thing to do in China ever is have a limited number of spaces for a lot of people. They go CRAZY with pushing and shoving to get to that limited space. There were 4 holes in a wall so that you could look at something on the inside:

I never got to see what was inside because I eventually flipped out at all the pushing and shoving. I got about 3 feet away, but maybe 4 people were in between me and the little viewer. Everyone was touching me and pushing me and shoving me and I couldn’t take it anymore. I remember that I threw my hands up in the air and said:

“FINE!! Fuck it! It’s just a fuckin’ hole in the wall! Let me outta here! God FUCKING damn it!!”

People of course looked at me confused. Probably should have used the only Chinese curse word I know (Cao, falling tone) but it wouldn’t have been as satisfying.

I want to get famous enough as an artist to be featured as a country representative just like Armin Van Buren. That’s cool. I can’t imagine the conservative ol’ US putting out Moby or RJD2 or some other DJ as a representative of the US. I can’t imagine them deciding that any popular musician is someone worth promoting as a good representative of the US. That’s a little too risqué isn’t it? Dancing and having fun is anti-family values.

This is some kind of wind car. Some kind of horror movie wind car. Some kind of Soylent Green wind car.

Spain made the outside of their building out of wicker panels or something:

Chyeah no shit:

The whole expo is cut through the middle by a highway. On one side of the Highway are all the Asian countries and on the other side are everyone else. Also yes, the Asian countries are on the east side of the highway and everyone else is on the western side. Must keep that highway there to keep us separate.

Belgium lol:

They had some cool pacific islander war dances going on:

When I saw this in the ground in a random spot it got me curious about what was in this location before the Expo. I mean the Expo is huge and in the middle of Shanghai. Like almost exactly in the middle. There must have been something here before they scrapped it all and remade it for the Expo.

The lights on the bridge changed and raced around and stuff:

Army of attractive women?

At night the acrylic tubes on the British Pavilion turn into something that works like fiber optics that showing the light from the inside.

Inside Peru. This is the pavilion where I realized what exactly was the reason that people were coming to these pavilions. There was a “passport” you could buy at a gift shop. In each pavilion they would put a stamp on the passport to show that you’d been there. I figured out that 80%-85% of the people that would come into the pavilion came in, rushed through as fast as they could, and went straight to the person to stamp their passport. It pissed me off when I saw this because I couldn’t help but think about how much culture they were missing. Most people in China will never have the chance to go to another country and learn about another culture’s people or history.

So what would happen is people would run through the exhibits just for a stamp to show people at the end how many countries they had visited. I couldn’t help but think about how well that fits into their culture. Being show-offy and collecting the most of something. I got the most stamps, look how many I got, isn’t that cool? Did you learn anything? Yes, how to shove people out of the way of the stamp lady. Made me sad at their missed opportunities to learn about these other places (which is what people say is the whole point of the expo). I felt affronted.

I went through and learned about gods and traditional farming methods:

Oh also I had FLAN! YES!

USA Pavilion

Aright USA Pavilion. Let’s do this. You know, for a country that prides itself on creativity you sure have the most boring looking pavilion of any pavilion at the Expo. Even at night it continues to look like a SoCal shopping mall:

I didn’t know how long the line wait was and if it was too long I didn’t want to do it. So I saw a guy wearing a USA Pavilion t-shirt talking to a guard. I asked him how long the line was.

Texas accent: “Where you from?”
Me: “Minnesota”
Texas Accent: “5 hours.”
Me: “AAawwwww dammit…”
Texas Accent: “How many people are with you?”
Me: “Just me.”
Texas Accent: “Aright I’m just kidding, 15 minutes. Go under this bar here….”

Yessssss. VIP treatment because it’s my country! Obviously everyone who saw me do that in line was eyeing me with hatred but I didn’t care because I felt special. I let them push ahead of me a little though so they could feel better about it.

So the way the US pavilion works is it takes groups of about 100 to 150 and we all go through the exhibition together in a big group. Of course people were freaking out and running to get to the front of the group in the first section as you can see them doing in this picture… wow that’s a lot of corporate advertisers on the wall back there…

So the first part of the America Pavilion was a sort of group leader teaching 150 Chinese people how to say “Aloha” and giving a very light explanation about Hawaiian. It’s the Hawaiian American word for hello!

Then there was a video shot in New York showing various people trying to say “Hello and welcome to America!” in Mandarin Chinese. Of course it doesn’t work and hilarity ensues. This goes on for like… 10 minutes… it’s too long for this extremely one dimensional joke, but whatever.

Look they even got Tony Hawk to say something in Chinese! No one recognized him:

USA PAVILION WELCOMES YOU!!!

So after the movie is over I’m all like “Yeah cool! Yay! What will we get to see next?! Something cool and unexpected by Chinese people I hope! Something they wouldn’t learn in class in high school or from newspapers or movies!!”

Oh… It’s another movie… Using footage from the last movie. It takes place in New York… again… Well there’s Hillary Clinton I guess. I mean she’s pretty important. She’s on a triptych screen next to TONY HAWK!! who they still don’t recognize. No one in China skateboards; in fact it’s something that struck me in my first few weeks in China. Why do they keep hawking the Hawk?

Ah HA! Here’s someone Chinese people recognized and immediately cheered for when they saw him, KOOOOOOOOBBBBBEEEEEEEEEEE Bryant!

Wow even the big O got in on this one. This was a 10-15 minute movie that took place in New York and was all about diversity and creativity and how we’re a nation of immigrants. It was kind of… lecture-y:

So the movie ended and it was time to move on to the next room which was awes- are you kidding me?? Another movie??? Yes. Another movie. I can’t understand a lot of Chinese, but I can understand a room full of groans, rolling eyes, and the mandarin for “Too many movies.” It was another movie that was all about community and working together through our diversity to overcome adversity. It also took place in New York.

Also at this part some water mist sprayed from some part of the theatre on to the audience:

40 minutes of movies lecturing us about diversity later they emptied us into this room that was filled with advertisements from American companies:

Microsoft multi-input Minority Report device that had a timer that only let me play with it for 2 minutes:

After the advertisement room was the gift shop where they had things like this that people kept smugly commenting on:

This was probably one of the most insulting things that I had witnessed toward my country and myself. The US obviously did not care about this event. It’s like the biggest thing ever in China, bigger than the Beijing Olympics, and the US didn’t give a rat’s ass. This was probably one of the best ways to show a good side of the US in a way that fits into Chinese culture and they blew it.

Three videos of New York and then a room full of corporate sponsors? Are you kidding me? Is this all the US has to offer? Apparently, from the viewpoint of the US representatives in charge of this pavilion, yes, it is. All it did was solidify the stereotypes that people here have of what the US is. Because that’s what people here think. They think “New York, basketball, white people, scary black people, and shopping.” I guess the pavilion doesn’t include guns or cars. Otherwise that’s it. It doesn’t include anything else? I mean not even any other part of the country? Hell it didn’t even include LA, the other super self-important city in US.

Apparently the US has nothing to offer in terms of other separate cultures within the US. You wanna talk about diversity? How about a southern BBQ cookout? How about mentioning any native American tribe? I mean those are different depending on the tribe and where they’re located. How about all of our natural wonders which can be found all over the effin’ country? How about our abundant wildlife? Something they have absolutely none of in China? How about the Smithsonian? How about the fact that we don’t even have a national language or that by 2011 non-white births in the United States will outnumber white births? How about flight? How about landing on the moon? How about our insanely vibrant art scene Lady Gaga couldn’t exist without? How about the US’s contribution to music? Rock? Rap? Blues? Jazz? Country? How about our contributions to film? How about our contributions to technology like the invention of the assembly line? Penicillin? Tang? I dunno. Seriously. This is just off the top of my head. This whole thing was clearly handed off to some dude in New York who was obviously New York-centric. New York is important, but it’s absolutely not the center of the world.

I found the whole thing to be insulting not just to the Chinese that had to stand in line for 5 hours for a half hour of lectures and a bunch of advertising, but also to the entire US population of the US that doesn’t live in New York.

I told all my students when I got back not to go to the US pavilion. They were completely shocked that I would say such a thing about my own country’s pavilion. I told them it was worthless, didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know, and was insulting.

I was quite angry.

So angry in fact that the next pavilion I went to was this one:

My camera then ran out of batteries. However, in the Canada pavilion they had a section on Canadian industries. They also had a big section that was devoted to arts and interactive environments. They had bicycles that you could get on and ride through a 2D and 3D mixed media animated world sponsored by the Canadian film board and a section explaining the significance of the Canadian Film Board in the arts. They also had a big pool of water with projected special effects in it so when you put your hand in the water it would react different ways.

This is Canada’s pavilion. We were treated like individuals and adults and they let us explore and discover (which is the best and most concrete form of learning). It wasn’t a half hour lecture on diversity like the US’s pavilion. I’d be pretty excited to go to Canada if this is what I saw. Even their pavilion itself had cooler architecture than the US. What a sad state of affairs.

After Canada I explore a little more. I went to Azerbaijan for instance. I always use them as the butt of my my jokes in the 8-Bit Starcraft comments. Did you know Azerbaijan has 9 different climate zones? Huh.

Last Day in Shanghai and the Job Interview

So I was pretty sunburned from the Shanghai Expo and I had to go to my job interview. I awoke early and left early, but I still ended up being late because I got lost. Here are the photos of things on the way to the interview.

Lol banker’s hours suck no matter where you live:

So apparently the number one mode of travel two and from the school is via rickshaw. My soon-to-be boss put me in one, told the guy where to go, then off we went:

Sooooo happy to travel by rickshaw:

Obviously I’m not allowed to go that way:

Bike parking:

Outside my hostel window:

These cats woke me up multiple times during the night. Here they are fighting during the day. I get so used to fluffly lazy things on the couch that require me to change their litter box that I often forget how cats actually are a primal species that will fight over territory and kill eachother if need be.

This was a local guy who did something. His statue was all over the place where I was staying. I think he was a teacher. Lots of people took photos where they would walk up and make it look like they were shaking his hand:

YES! Airport, I love you!

Okay, end of super long post. I’m kind of rushing through these posts because now that I’m in America I wanna show America stuff. However, we still have Shilin and Hong Kong to finish up.

Seeya!

So here’s some snails I found inside of a giant plant near the cafeteria. I didn’t even realize that plant had any sort of fruit attached to it:

Oh no my favorite art store! Argh noooooo! I’ve been having to use the back pages of my sketchbooks now. Hate doing that.

I’m sure you’ve heard about the “incidents” involving knives, random middle-aged men, and students in China. Pretty much has everyone freaking out. The whole thing confuses me because it’s like “So-and-so killed 5 students and 8 adults” and I’m just kind of… how do you kill that many adults with a knife? Like I understand it if it’s with a gun, but these people did it with knives. In one case it was a guy with a hammer. You can run from a knife, you can block a knife, you can hit a knife with a chair, etc. Can’t do any of those things with a gun. If a knife wielding person was going against four people, maybe even just two people, the knife will lose. It’s not an instant kill weapon like a gun seems to be.

Anyway the opinion from Chinese people I’ve talked to and the newspapers on average is “well they just went crazy and did it” but… I can’t help but think there’s more to it than that? IIRC like two of the guys were super depressed but couldn’t afford medication or something. I mean there’s so much pressure on people here to be a certain way and do certain things, even if you really really don’t think that those are right for you. I can find it easy to believe that someone might just snap.

You also have all the Foxconn suicides (which are not the only suicides, just the most well publicized because it’s a supplier to those damn foreigners and it’s owned by Japan even though it is actually a Chinese company founded and registered in Taiwan). The reason people keep pointing to the suicides at Foxconn is that there is really no mental health services involved. They basically have a constantly rotating staff, so much so that you never really learn who your roommate is because they’ll just be gone tomorrow. This is hard for all social creatures such as humans, but I can’t imagine it being easier for people who are in a society that puts so much importance on those interpersonal relationships. It seems very uncommon for people here to ever seem to do anything by themselves (something that annoyed foreigners doing business here all the time like “damn make your own decision dude, it’s your job”). It’s always with a friend or at least a colleague or someone. That independence streak of wanting to go out and do something yourself is very low here.

So what the newspapers have been saying and what I completely agree with is that there is an extreme lack of mental health services here both official and unofficial (which is what the newspapers don’t mention). Just venting occasionally is frowned upon here. People always have this sort of layer between themselves and their friends. It’s always there, no matter what. There is never complete openness and ability to talk about absolutely anything with anyone. It is seen as ideal in this society to let things build up inside of you, don’t cause trouble, don’t speak out, do things in a subtle way (which is never totally satisfying and often leads to misinterpretation) instead of confronting them head on and doing something about it. Something as simple as talking directly to the person you’re mad at instead of talking to someone else is frowned upon. I remember a couple of times that I was going absolutely crazy because I couldn’t go yell at my boss about being stupid and, frankly, disrespectful to me because I didn’t know who the hell my boss was. I always had to do it through someone else and then she would get the brunt of his wrath instead of me. That’s bullshit right there. Don’t shoot the messenger, yell at me about it unless you’re chicken.

Buckaw buck buck buck!

Anyway I’m certainly not excusing the actions of school stabbers, I’m just annoyed that when the subject comes up people just dismiss them as crazy without even asking for a moment: why? Why have so many stabbings and suicides happened recently? Why are they happening more and more? What is driving them to do this? Yes you have to be not-normal to do those things, but something set them off. Especially because most of them were seen as “normal” with families and well paying jobs and stuff before they somehow just turned “crazy” one day. What’s that about? That doesn’t “just happen”. If it did “just happen” it’s awfully strange how it’s “just happening” more and more.

I mean certainly my reasons could be wrong, but they could also be right. The confusion of what is going on culturally in this society mixed with the massive amounts economic and social pressures don’t exactly make for calm seas. If I said this to someone here I would be dismissed of course because I’m not Chinese so I don’t know what I’m talking about. Outsider’s opinions are the worst opinions (the exact opposite of home).

So in order to make people feel more safe the government has upped the amount of police at school campuses. We haven’t had a school attack since. Or… have we? State run newspapers aren’t exactly the best places to get news that might not be good for the state. It’s like asking me to list my faults, don’t particularly want to do that.

The junior campus of my school is important because it’s literally across the street from the police training station. If someone goes crazy and stabs someone at this school that would probably be the worst thing to happen to the government here ever. There are like 5 police officers at the gates of the school, and one of them usually carries around a long metal pole that I think is supposed to catch people and hold them against a wall.

The police seemed pretty alert. If they saw a guy just standing on the street watching the kids (honestly, I think “watching stuff” is the national pass-time here) they would go ask him what he was doing and if he was picking up a student. If not, they would tell him to move along. Frankly that’s a good thing. What kind of weirdo watches a bunch of 13 year olds leaving campus when they’re not your kids? That’s weird. We’d do that at home too. They never asked the women this of course because women wouldn’t kill children.

Man I’m getting tired of making sure my blog remains el blockoed in China:

Here’s the one police officer at my school. Why does my school get less police officers? I really like this photo though. I asked him if I could take a picture and he was like “yeah!!” and I was like “awesome!” BTW I know some people who were hanging out with their police officers at their school and they let them stick fight with the police clubs. Police here are so relaxed:

Aright so on to some less morbid stuff. Have I ever shown you how hard it is to find proper cheese in Wal-mart here? Here’s the “milk” section:

Well there’s the mozzarella and some other sort of spread. There are many, many, many processed cheese options. That stuff you see in the top right is what most people here consider to be cheese:

Oop, there’s what I was looking for. This is its normal placement by the way. When they run out they put it back right here again:

Here’s some students practicing magic behind the school:

I found this encouraging remark as the desktop in one of my classes:

The backs of each of the classrooms usually have some big mural painted on it. This was the one in the same class. Avatar mixed with national pride. BTW, what’s the difference between nationalism and patriotism? I can’t figure it out, they both seem to be talking about the same thing but one is positive and one is negative. Kind of like how in ads they’ll say “adds moisture” instead of “adds wetness”:

That sign is the countdown until the Gao Kao, the largest and most important test in China. They try to compare it to the SAT but I mean… it’s just not comparable. The Gao Kao actually affects whether you’ll even go to college whereas the SAT is like “well… what college are you more able to attend?” It’s really just a new version of the imperial testing system. If you fail the Gao Kao it’s like… death. You’ve brought so much shame to yourself and your family. You were your family’s one hope to rise out of whatever social or economic situation they were in and you blew it. There’s no brother or sister to pass the torch on to; it’s all you. Way to go loser.

So they have this big count down sign that they put up a long time ago (as we all know, the more pressure you apply to someone the better their work will be). The senior 3 students are taking their picture in front of it. That sign, and I’m not being sarcastic, is a big part of their life right now:

Speaking of signs here’s a new one that they just installed. It made me laugh for some reason. *BONK*:

There was another singing competition. They do that a lot here, people love to sing in China:

The students were sorting newspapers for some reason. It looked like they were going through and taking out a certain page from each paper. Dunno why. No, I highly doubt it’s a vast “keep that info from the public” conspiracy. I should’ve asked but I didn’t, I must have been in a rush.

Kittens at night near the cafeteria. I wonder why I always see more feral kittens in China than puppies:

Almost the End of School

So here’s a comic:

Hahahaha man… love it… I’m laughing just thinking about it. I remember this joke fondly. Maybe this is why some of my students hate me. I remember one student saying: “Nooooo why would you do that?”
Me:“Cause it makes me laugh”
Charlie Brown: “Aaaaaugh”

Anyway the test was fun so they quickly forgave me. My tests are always fun, I don’t know why they keep getting scared of them. My tests are the only ones that ask for creativity (something they always say they wish they could have more of on tests). The idea of it was to take the ending of any movie they wanted and change it into something else. They could change it into being something better, something worse, whatever. Didn’t matter as long as everyone spoke.

So here’s some photos from their presentations. Yet again they bring out guns in class (that I then got to play with):

This one was like Frankenstein mixed with The Ring or something. The one problem I have with these presentation style tests is that I don’t get to really appreciate the story because I’m spending too much time trying to figure out their names so I can grade them. They always do good things like change groups or not wear a name tag or write it with yellow highlighter on white paper:

This is one of my favorite classes. It’s my only class where I almost always fail to finish the whole lesson because they’re so talkative. It’s great. In this picture they are about to start hitting people with pillows and magic wands and calling it “God’s love” (much to the chagrin of the only Christian in the class):

Same class, this was Iron Man 2: Iron Man versus Russian Iron Man. Apparently the rivalry between Iron Man and Russian Iron Man started because of a painting competition. A long time ago they tied for first to win the prize candy bar. However, there was only one candy bar so they fought over it. Then, in college, they fought over a girl they both fell for. After the flashbacks were over they said: “Whoa wait! This whole time we fought just for candy and a girl!” then they hug it out. Very touching.

This picture was taken right in the beginning when they’re fighting. A quarter of a second after this photo was taken my student on the left knocked over that clock on the wall resulting in a floor full of broken glass. He’s actually in the process of knocking the clock down in this photo. Another teacher burst into the classroom like “What’s going on??” or something. I don’t know what they said. They might have burst in saying: “Owen is an irresponsible teacher!” or “Russian Iron Man don’t hit Iron Man!”

Other highlight moments in the redone endings:

- “I’m Snow White and I like apples. My mother abused me and now I live with seven short guys.”

- 2012: Cusack to scientist: “I have something to tell you. The earth is going to be destroyed you know?”

- Romeo and Juliet: Juliet’s Father: “No no, you can’t love Romeo. Go home… *long pause*… and shut up.”

- “Scissors Edward”

- Ghandi: Ghandi goes on a kung fu killing spree to save his homeland.

- Snow White: When she’s kissed by the prince she wakes up to the Popeye theme and haduken’s the queen.

- “Oh no, Domboldore! He is dead!”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes I’m serious!”
“Oh no, my friend Principle Dumbledore, he has died!”

- Slumdog Millionare: “I have no money, I cannot save Latika! How incapable I am!”

- “Snow White and little men”

- Frog Prince: Magic person turns them into humans: “Now you’re human beings again!”
“Really??”
“Yep.”

- I don’t remember what preceded it, but someone jumped into a scene yelling “Coincidence!”

- “Snow White and the Seven Littles.” In this version of Snow White they travel through the lands very quickly and easily by using the “Whatever door” which transports them to wherever they want to go. Pretty cool.

- Titanic: Rose and Leonardo DiCaprio have sex (complete with noises behind the podium and throwing clothes upward). Rose throws her ex-fiancee into the sea. He comes back as Frozone from the Incredibles and causes icebergs to crash into the ship. Then Ye Wen (Also known as IP Man aka Bruce Lee’s kung fu teacher) and Ultraman try to fight him. They fail. Then the Titanic turns into a Transformer and fights him and wins. Rose falls in love with the titanic and marries it.

- “We cannot be married! We are from different worlds! I am a human being and you are a King Kong!”

- “I don’t need babies, I don’t need money, I don’t need diamond, I just need King Kong.” Then King Kong killed Adrian Brody with his armpit stench (King Kong played by a small Chinese girl).

- I don’t remember the movie it was supposed to be, but Kobe Bryant was talking smack talk to LeBron James: “Ah! How rubbish you are!”

- Some world war two movie I didn’t know. First off, someone with an accent trying to imitate someone with a different accent is hilarious. Second is the Italian guy in a Nazi camp making this very Italian analogy: “Oh they make me do so much work! I’m as thin as bamboo!”

- “Foldemore!”

- Romeo and Juliet: “I want to dead!” and then “To be or not to be is a question!” Then she tried to slit her wrists with a potato chip but it didn’t work. Then she tried to hang herself with a noodle. Eventually the priest put her out of her misery.

- Zombieland: Someone in the midst of being eaten by zombies: “Oh my god! Here is an emergency situation!”

- Snow White/Avatar: The evil queen and the prince’s hair accidently touch and they fall in love, forgetting all about snow white. Then they commit suicide. I don’t know what was up in that class, just about every presentation included suicide… :-/

- Romeo and Juliet: Romeo doesn’t like Juliet because she’s ugly. At one point, after partying, he says: “Oh what a great night. I always have such great nights.” Juliet wants Romeo to love her so she takes a sexy potion. Romeo is really really impressed and says this to show his appreciation: “Oh Juliet! You have changed… A little…”

- Spider-Man 2: In this production Doctor Octopus is played by two people standing front to back toward the audience while waving their hands in the air like an octopus (sort of imitating Kali).
Spider-man to Doc Oc: “You should go back to the sea and I, spider man protector of justice, will defeat you!”
Oc: “Shut up!” *does the V sign with her fingers*
Then he kills Spider-Man with pesticide and absorbs him into his skin to add more arms and become more powerful. This is perhaps one of my favorite takes on Doc Oc.

- The Ring: Girl starts climbing out of the TV. Then they freak out and turn off the TV and she gets stuck half way out. Then they leave and she’s stuck there, bored and sad.

- Chairman Mao and friends crash land in South America. They go to a brothel. Mao only cost 1.5 rmb but his friends were much more expensive. This made them all nervous because maybe that meant that that particular prostitute was more diseased. Then they got on another plane to try and go to a hospital but the plane crashed again. They decided that to get proper medical care they needed to get to the US.
“I can take you to US”
“Oh okay thank you!”
“But there are only two ways to get there…”
“What are they?”
“You must snip your JJ.”
“What? I don’t want to snip my JJ! What is the other option?”
“You can be dead.”
“Oh, well in that case I will snip my JJ.”
Then Mao snipped his JJ and was able to escape to the safety of the US. Then they concluded the presentation with “This was a true story”.

Your wtf is as good as mine.

- Sleeping Beauty: This was actually a political satire, something pretty much impossible to find in China but that I saw happen twice in this particular class (one of my older classes). Sleeping beauty wakes up thanks to the hard work of the prince going through all sorts of ordeals to get to her. She says upon her awakening: “Thanks to the leadership of the party we have found eachother again, I’m alive!”

They ask me for comments after these presentations and it’s like… what am I supposed to say? Especially for the ones that mention political leaders. What do I say to those last two? Can I even say “good job”? Yeesh.

Moving on, I found out only now at the end that I’ve had this posted in my cubicle the entire year without realizing it:

lol I’m an English teacher.

At one point all the students started moving boxes into the teacher’s offices. The Gao Kao was happening that weekend so they had to clear everything out of the classrooms. Every student has a box and our office was the designated recipient for the freshmen classes:

This is what our office started to look like after only 3 or 4 classes of the 20 that were going to use the space. I kept telling the students “Take whatever you are going to need for the rest of today’s classes and your homework.” And they would go: “Okay.” Then they’d leave for awhile and comeback looking lost and confused and trying to find their boxes at the bottom of some stack because they forgot something.

I specifically remember one student where she came in and her box was at the bottom, so I moved everything (which has to be done carefully because the boxes are stacked so high and they’re so heavy they break the boxes underneath them). Then I said: “Okay, do you have everything you’re going to need for class?”
“Yes.”
“For today’s classes, tomorrow’s classes, and for your homework over the weekend?”
“No.”
“Well grab whatever you’ll need for that.”
“But that’s later, I don’t need those things yet.”
“Well by the time tomorrow comes this place will be filled with boxes and you will not be able to get to your box again.”
“But I don’t need it yet.”
“I know you don’t need it yet, grab it now so you won’t have to come back later when you won’t be able to reach your box. It was hard enough to get to it now.”
“Okay. I guess that makes sense” and she grabbed a couple more items.
“Do you have everything? Including things for your homework this weekend?”
“No.”
“Well you won’t be able to take the box home so you should grab your homework now as well.”
“Okay. I don’t know where my pencils are though.”
“Then you’re going to have to borrow one from a friend.”
“Okay.”

This is the gesture I was making in my head: \o_O/

The whole thing was exacerbated by the fact that someone somewhere said “The boxes can only be in the front of the office.” Which, frankly, if I had understood that sooner I would have just said “fuck ‘em” and guided the students to the back of the office. They ended up filling my desk with boxes. Again, this picture is after 3 or 4 classes with about 16 left to go:

This was the last day in school for the seniors. Once they took the test the following Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, they no longer had to come to school. I happened to walk into the school right as the Senior 1’s put on a big performance for them for good luck and stuff. Also the headmaster was there wishing them luck and saying “Add oil” which is like add oil to the fire to do better. It was like a concert and the whole school attended:

They also cast off some wish balloons. The first one didn’t work and got stuck under a bridge but the other ones worked:

Empty classrooms always make me feel weird. They have my whole life. Don’t know why. It’s like when there’s a street that ’s empty and you decide to walk down the line in the middle of it. Feels weird:

After the concert people began making trains and running around the school yelling and stuff.

At one point I was walking around and a whole bunch of my students started walking toward the stairwell. I didn’t know what was happening so the class leader (I think he’s the class leader, the guy with the glasses on the right) said: “Mr. Dennis! Come with us! We’re going to make a big Chinese 3 for the seniors!” and I’m like “Aright!”

This is us down in the courtyard making a Chinese 3. A 3 looks like three horizontal lines stacked on top of eachother. One guess as to what 1 and 2 look like.

Have I ever told you about “Aluba”? Aluba is an ancient African tribal game where a bunch of people pick you up and make you air-hump vertical objects. Wait, you’ve never heard of that? It sounds like a completely made up story to justify humiliating your friend and make them air hump something? No no, look it up dude, it’s totally true:

There’s a guy that replaces all the water in the school by carrying these all over the place, two at a time, using a stick on his shoulders:

I don’t know what these cords are for but I liked them:

When I did the punk rock lesson in class I showed my students a picture of a 3 year old with a Mohawk. I said “Do people in China ever do this?” and they said: “NOOOOooo, of course not!!!”

I saw it again last week but I didn’t get a picture.

Speaking of haircuts here’s Helen after I got mine:

We went out to dinner and Charlotte (Helen’s daughter) brought a really difficult ball and cup that had 4 different solutions. Bigger cup, medium sized cup, beveled out hole the size of my pinky nail, or catching it on a peg using a hole drilled in the ball. That’s right, I’m including a section of my blog to talk about ball and cup. What of?

We had wine in a manner that would make my family proud:

Oh yeah, also blood soup. In case you were curious it’s not like blood poured in water. What they do is the take the blood and fry it. Apparently when you cook blood like that it congeal into being exactly like red tofu. It’s the exact same texture and shape as tofu. It’s bizarre and creepy mostly because I mean it’s not like a thin layer of blood, it’s like 2 inch cubes of blood. There was a pretty deep pan filled with a lot of blood somewhere in the back kitchen.

I like this sign (Look I got these vitamin pills see? They cure everything. They’re beneficial I tell ya, you need these. Like nothin’ you’ve ever had before. Cureall, a life saver, they’re good for I tell ya.):

but I especially love this sign outside the police station:

It’s more fun because the rest of the sign the spelled fire correctly. Freudian slip?

After the dinner we went to May’s house where I found out that dishwashers are different in China. They don’t use water. This makes sense because the water isn’t actually clean so using it doesn’t exactly work. What they do is they heat the dishes up to 400 degrees in this thing. This explains to me why they have so many more clay and metal dishes in the store versus various microwave safe plastic compounds like back home:

Here’s some fruit that tasted like blackberries:

The elevator in May’s building had this picture in it. It made me laugh. I can’t think of many ads in the world that feature bare feet so prominently:

Science Teacher + Gym Teacher

So one day I awoke to what sounded like a whole lot of yelling. I couldn’t get back to sleep because people kept going “wooooo!!” and I couldn’t shut it out with a pillow over my head so I grabbed my camera and walked out my door.

I saw someone across from all this commotion that I knew spoke English so I asked him what was going on. He said “It is a marriage.” He explained it was between one of the gym teachers and one of the science teachers. Apparently they were playing some kind of wedding trick on them. They hid the shoes of the bride and they couldn’t leave until they found them.

I don’t know this man’s name. He’s one of the gym teachers. He doesn’t speak English but he is always wearing a smirk and he always looks like he really really wants to talk and joke around with Quentin and me, but our language barriers cause problems. Rumor has it has like 4 girlfriends or something. IIRC he’s also the kung fu teacher. We call him Mr. Badass and this is the only time I’ve ever seen him without sunglass somewhere on his head or a popped collar. While waiting for the groom to find the shoes most of the men went outside to smoke:

They found her shoes! Yay! Now they can go to the party!

Video of the groom carrying the bride out of her apartment…

… and then down 5 flights of stairs:

Aftermath of her apartment:

I went up to my room to see where they were going and I found I had the perfect vantage point to see them hop into all their matching wedding cars and drive to lunch:

Obviously I’m not the only one interested in watching:

After this I went to the Shanghai Expo so look forward to a post featuring the most people I’ve ever seen in my life. Crazy, crazy, amounts of people.

Also I’m currently in Hong Kong which means I was finally able to pick up a legitimate copy of the Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach. Love it so far. First CD I’ve bought in like a year and a half. Physical media is such a cute novelty. The Gorillaz album reminds me of what I’m doing right now art-wise. I’m making a concept band, still in the early stages of working on it. Here’s a link to The Guitar, it recently got put in DA’s prints of the week list which is pretty cool:

Galactaron: The Guitar

Keep checking back! I’ll be home soon and I’m currently a month behind or so and blog updates about China will still happen even when I’ve returned.

Bye!

Honestly I’ve never become a part of that website because for years I held the misconception that it’s mostly filled with anime, Goku, wolves, half wolves/foxes/coyotes/lions/panthers/horses/zebras half humans (furries and variations thereof), tracings of Avatar promo images, Jack Sparrows, and Heath Ledger Jokers. Okay so maybe it wasn’t exactly a misconception, the misconception came more with that there was nothing else of value on the website. Turns out there is. I’ve found a number of artworks I enjoy, helpful photoshop brushes, and tutorials. So anyway, I know I’m late to the party in joining (so late that the building is closed and all the streamers are cleaned up) but there I am.

Also I noticed when I posted some of my work to Deviant Art that apparently, since coming to China, I’ve made more fanart than I’ve like… ever made ever. I made Star Wars and Donkey Kong Country stuff in 4th and 5th grade, but after that not much of anything. In fact I’ve been actively against doing it for years.

Maybe since coming to China I’ve been trying to keep some sort of level of comfort level up. I always think of things that keep me calm and real and Owen and I keep drawing those things I guess. That’s just what I’m thinking about. Like I made Zelda fanart, Doctor Who fanart (I’m a real Doctor Who fan btw, been watching since I was 5; not like these new fair-weather Who fans… pff…), a number of Mario related things, etc etc. 90% of the stuff on the deviant site is “inspired by” something else. Strange. Maybe I’ll get over it soon and get back to making stuff up? Hope so. I’m so bored of my “style”. Wanna try something new. Luckily DA is pretty good for finding new artists to look at.

So anyway, if you’re on Deviant Art add me to your watch list or buy a sweet poster from me or favorite which pieces you like. I’m still in the process of adding things from my website to it, but it will be updated faster than my website because it’s a quicker process. It’ll probably include things that I don’t consider portfolio quality so you can experience more by going there as well.

Plus you can leave feedback on the work there instead of it being a one way street with me showing and you just having to look. It can be a dialogue! Yay!

Moving on.

In Chinese class my teacher made me draw the human body so we could name body parts together. I only remember “head”, “hand”, “foot”, and “teeth”. There’s really no rhyme or reason as to why some words are easier for me to remember than others:

[Edit: Oh yeah and “penis” “boobs” and “butt”; I guess there is some string of logic there]

In the bank I saw this sign on the wall. Beware of clowns:

Walking up to my apartment one day I looked out across the cafeteria’s roof and I saw one of the local cats sleeping inside of the razor wire barrier. Is it comfortable in there? I guess if you’re constantly stressed about predators or something then sleeping inside of razor wire might make you feel more safe:

Still have these leftover in one of the classrooms. Merry X-max to you:

I like this photo because for some reason every time I look at it my eye skips over obvious oddity and I do a double take. PS: I don’t know what’s going on, this was happening while I was sitting at my desk and I just… I don’t know…

So one day our bus was stuck in traffic on one of the elevated highways. I never realized until we were stopped that all the clear plastic noise reduction panels had a texture from the manufacturing process on them. They’re pretty cool looking. It was really hard to get good pictures:

Someone down in Yantian Gang selling bamboo:

I guess a bunch of parents and school administrators were showing up so they put up this poster of the English speaking competition I had to judge. This is the real reason we’re at this school. They want to show us off. We are here solely to provide face and honor. It’s like pokemon; they kind of just want to collect us to show off to people.

Regardless, see that girl on the left in the middle? She won. What was that? Who’s student is she? Oh I don’t rememb- oh wait she’s mine. B-)

The bugs have been coming out now that it’s warmer. Here’s a pretty big moth and a cicada (soooo many cicadas… shut up cicadas!):

So there was this big built up calcium deposit on the stairway in my building. Even calcium cannot escape the twihards:

Nothing like working construction on a highway overpass with semi’s whizzing by underneath you at 80mph without a helmet amirite?

Okay now seriously, the reason that I kept posting all those boring pictures was because I wanted to put off showing this one. Love it. This is what I wanna be when I’m 90 years old:

I’ve been in China for 10 months and I’ve never been able to get a picture of these guys. In many (most?) apartments in China there is no central gas, so people have to order from vendors. This means you basically have these explosive electric bicycles whizzing through traffic mere inches from being killed or killing someone else at any given moment:

I don’t know why I like these buildings so much but they’re pretty cool. Down on their second floor the have cement bridges snaking back and forth through a park; also impossible to photograph:

Some workers coming from somewhere… Where do they come from? There’s nowhere to work nearby. :-/

Why don’t we have this store in the US?

Why don’t they have this store in Britain?

There must be some pretty insulting things we have like that in the US to Chinese people. Probably this shirt or this one. I love those images. Genius. Unwittingly enough “mao” actually means cat in Mandarin. Tried to explain the party one to someone here, they didn’t think it was funny.

Clearly when making jokes you should…

Hangzhou? I Don’t Even Know Zhou!

I stole that headline from Kazimer Iskander. I’m sorry. Normally I would be original about it but I just liked it too much. I’m not going to pay him for it because that’s the kind of person I am; a deadbeat.

Anyway in the airport I saw something soooooooo cool. I didn’t understand what I was looking at at first. It was a TV playing some really bad animation that makes me die a little every time I watch it (thus of course I can’t stop watching it). So I’m looking at it while I’m standing in the security line at the airport. While I keep blinking and having to look at it again and refocus my eyes on it because it felt like something was wrong.

Turns out it was a glasses-less 3D television. Pretty sweet. I was just watching it from the wrong angle. When I walked forward and changed my viewing angle by a couple degrees I understood what was happening and it worked.

Pretty awesome. Too bad about the viewing angle thing. I wish they were showing something less awful on it. Here’s a picture of the TV but I mean it’s not like you’re gonna see anything:

So after the plane ride I got into a taxi and drove to my hostel. On the way I saw a little bit of my local area. I don’t know what this character means, but I’ve noticed that when Chinese people write pinyin (the spelling of Chinese characters with letters so that you can sound it out) they always forget to put the tones. Frankly, “shi” is possibly one of the most used words (with its various tones) in Chinese. As far as I’m concerned this sign could be saying “yes yes yes yes yes” or “accident accident accident” or even “reality reality reality.”

What a confusing language:

Hanghzhou is supposed to be the most beautiful place in china. I think the phrase is something like “Above is heaven and below is Hangzhou.” So it’s pretty much like a haven for lovey dovey couples (who are really really into PDA in china), women posing for photographs (for themselves and I think for online profiles), and couples posing for pre-wedding photos. Lots of posing.

It’s much better and more real than what Quentin saw. He saw a service where people would pose in wedding photos in front of a blue screen, then they would get an album of them in front of like the Eiffel Tower and the pyramids and stuff (Quentin: “Look at what we would have looked like if we spent our money on a vacation instead of photos!”)

Here’s the hostel I was staying at, the whole reason I went to Hangzhou was so I could go to a job interview (which I ended up being a good candidate for, but I didn’t want to live there and the students were not advanced enough for me). I highly recommend this hostel. Very nice staff. They said I was “The best guest they ever had” and I was like “What? Why?” and they said it was because I would just sit and talk with them. They’re really friendly but no one ever talks to them, they just walk into the hostel and walk out. Go talk to the staff, they’re nice:

I was right next to West Lake so I walked around a little bit at night:

So the morning of my first day in Hangzhou I was awoken to the sound of me wanting to smash something. I found out, when I woke up, that my room was the back wall of a playground for a preschool. Not a big deal if I felt like waking up at 6:30 in the morning to happy Chinese children’s music blaring as LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE.

My camera has become so much a part of me that I’ve grown the ability to take pictures and video as a second nature.

The video I took as soon as I woke up.

The video I took half an hour later.

Every morning. This was every morning. Is this what having children is like? Why are kids so horrible? Why can’t they walk quietly to the playground and sit on the slide and read a book? Maybe they could go learn to knit; that’s a nice quiet activity that doesn’t wake me up before 7am.

Here’s some pictures of them playing in front of a creepy nationalistic mural instead of cartoon characters. But then, they grow up to be nationalist and we grow up to be consumers… interesting:

Just so you understand how close exactly they were to my sleeping quarters, here’s a couple pictures. My window wall was their “resting place” where there were chairs to sit on. They were good enough to bounce their toys off the wall occasionally:

All this did was convince me more and more that I cannot be a primary school teacher. Though I must say, some of the teachers were kinda cute. Clearly we can see how I weigh my job opportunities:

I decided to stay in Hangzhou for a few more days after my school said “oh by the way, there’s no more school for the rest of the week.”

Of course, not less than two days later I got this phone call:
“Owen hi.”
“Hi.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Hangzhou”
“School is tomorrow.”
“… what?”
“You have to be here tomorrow because school will be started.”
“Nope.”

Here’s the inside of the hostel in the morning. Nice place. Also a picture of the bunk room I obtained after I thought I had a few extra days to kill. There was a really nice girl in there with me that spoke great English and she was able to tell me about shanghai and stuff.

Out the window of my new room:

At the end of the hallway there was a sort of metal balcony that you could hang your clothes on I guess. I spilled something on my shirt so I cleaned it and hung it out to dry. I could see the alley way and what appeared to be some sort of junior high school next door.

I guess this hostel was once somehow attached to the area with the kids?

Here is one of my walks around Hangzhou/West Lake during the day.

They have these bikes you can rent. Pretty cool system. Grab a bike, check it out, ride it to one of the bike stations around the city, drop it off and you’re now wherever it is you want to be. Nice. This sort of thing can only work in a warm climate where you can do this year round (or almost year round).

Just in case you can’t read it it says: “S.W.A.T. Even cops call 911”. What does this mean exactly? I mean it sounds like maybe it’s supposed to be badass or something? 911 isn’t the phone number you call in China. In fact I don’t know what the phone number you call in China is because from my limited interactions and from what people have told me there’s really no point in calling the police. I keep hearing stories from Chinese people that makes them sound rather useless.

For instance my friend had a stalker. She called them up and they were like “Who is it?” and she’s like “I don’t know, I don’t know his name but I have his phone number” and they go: “Well when you figure out who it is tell us.” So she had to do all the reverse phone number lookups herself, figured out where he lived, all those sorts of things about him just from using the internet. Wtf is that? Not quite as helpful as all the happy signs around the city make them look. I would think it would breed vigilantism.

Here’s something cool: around West Lake (I keep mentioning West Lake, it’s the lake right outside my hostel, it’s like the biggest attraction in Hangzhou and a frequent tourist stop among vistors to China) they would build the buildings so as not to hurt the trees. Here’s one of the better ones. Most of the time the tree only took a few inches out of the top of some building but this was one of the trees that went through it:

I think this is the leftover of an animation festival? I think in fact that Diana Chao went to it?

Does this mean that exploding briefcases are allowed in other parts of the city?

I think I was in some sort of art area. In fact I have the feeling like I was right around the art school that Diana went to. I’ve read that it’s like the best or second best art school in China. There were lots of galleries and supply shops around. Also this neat building was up on a hill:

If you are drinking while riding a sweet chopper with a blitzed out of her mind and inexplicably blonde/redheaded hooker that you found in China…

… and should you cast off your beer cans and play chicken with a car…

It will result in a massive canary appearing out of the sky causing massive destruction via musket ball.

Don’t drink and drive.

Speaking of driving this was on the outside of a BMW lot I walked past:

More trees and stuff:

I told you about all the couples that come to Hangzhou to have their photos taken right? I took photos too cause I’m a major creeper:

In Hangzhou there was even a Muslim praying area. It was really nice. They take care of it and clean up. They even have a lock on it so no one comes in and does things like vandalize it or, in my opinion, make it less important by posing in front of it for pictures. I didn’t want to take this picture because I thought it was disrespectful, but I did at the same time because I felt it was something important in China that you don’t get to see displayed in public very often. Religion is very hush-hush here. I took the photo using the “I’m not taking a photo, I’m just crossing my arms” method. They didn’t see me watching until later so I think I’m in the clear.

I felt bad because I was quietly watching them, yet when other people walked past they were curious to see what I was looking at. When they did they were really loud and talking about the worshipers and it felt very rude. Once again I have come across the cultural attitude of “other people must respect my culture but I in turn will not respect theirs.” This happens a lot unfortunately. Kind of like when Americans say other countries must be more like America (use the same system of government etc) but more on a personal the-person-you’re-talking-about-is-standing-right-next-to-you kind of way.

When I saw this boat on the right it was really weighed down heavily on one side. For some reason all I could think about as I saw it was squeeling car tires as it turned. Made me laugh.

Sigh.

I’m so boring:

You know that sort of temple kind of thing I kept seeing up on the a hill near the lake? This is it at night. Pretty neat looking.

While walking around in the park they light up the trees. There was a small amount of mist making the lights look all laser-like.

Check out this awesome centipede I saw on the ground. As long as my hand. Also I want to direct people to go onto youtube and check out “Centipede Eviscerates mouse.” In fact, here’s a link. It’s a high quality video my friend Nick Bachman and I made of our pet centipede Father Christmas. You’ll see footage of it featured in the Val Kilmer epic movie: “The Thaw”.

This is Xiaohu. It means “Little Tiger”. He was the hostel’s dog. Pretty fun dog. It had an underbite that made its tongue stick out when it closed its mouth.

It was late spring when I went to Hangzhou so there were still some flowers blooming.

I found this picture in the public bathroom of the hostel. This is a chamber pot. How exactly does this chamber pot work? I mean I can clearly see the glory hole style way of urinating, but what about the rest? What about a woman? They never cover how chamber pots works in historical epics:

Random picture. I take pictures like these when I suddenly have a small surge of “oh yeah I’m in China.”

The Leifeng Pagoda

Remember that giant tower that was lit up on the edge of the lake? I decided to go officially check it out. I was all excited to go see it. I was thinking “oh man I’m going to see some old tower and it’s gonna be cool!”

Here we go! Walking toward the tower!

Here we- wait… wait what? What is that?

Oh… Well… I guess this is what we’re doing… outside… up a mountain… toward an ancient Chinese tower…

Now I walk inside to find all kinds of ancient scriptures and artwo-… what?

So what happened was this tower was destroyed about 90 years ago. It was partially destroyed before that by the Japanese in the Ming Dynasty (burned all the wood so only rock was left). They rebuilt it in 2002. I read all the stuff they had in English about it. They said it was “to bring back scenic beauty” to the area and to “focus on our own culture”. Reads to me a little differently. Hu Jintao even came to the unveiling iirc.

Why build it again? They didn’t even build it to look the same, they built it like three times bigger and out of different materials with a completely different design except for the fact that it’s octagonal. Unless the wooden elements that the Japanese burned made it look more like this new version?

There doesn’t seem to be any real purpose to this 1998 Godzilla version except that maybe they wanted to show off something in that spot? Seems like it might have been to bring in tourist money and more country pride. It’s making a lot of tourist money too. Totally worked. I mean I think about the ruins that I’ve gone to with my parents in different places and it’s like… well… there’s another hole in the ground. I don’t think many people would come to see that (and from my experience, they don’t). This has a giant sparkling light on the top of it though, acts like a bug zapper for tourists.

Hell, people were throwing money at the ruins.

Here’s a kid throwing money. I’m guessing there’s some luck thing here I don’t know about. I’ve never heard of so many different “lucky” actions that are centered around money and somehow receiving it by you doing something or hanging something on your wall or touching something.

Maybe if you throw money at ruins your ancestors will receive it and then it changes the timeline and gives you more money now?

Or they were throwing money because it was the cool thing to do, like I did.

The ruins were being supported by bamboo. Looked cool to me. All those sparkles you see on the ground are 1RMB coins:

Ewwww… who is this guy? I was told there’s a thing in China where the more facial hair you grow the wiser you are. Makes sense in a way. Still… ewwww (In case you don’t get it at first glance, he’s not crying):

So in China most of the time if you want to take your picture in front of something you have to do it at the same time that someone else is taking their picture in front of it. It’s really awkward.

BUM BUM BUM!!

Here’s the elevator to go up. The photo was taken after I got down but you never would have known if I hadn’t told you. How often do you think I mess with continuity in these posts? Hmmmm…

Whenever I walk around at tourist destinations I notice that I’m the only person taking pictures of the people.

So they have the flow of this whole pagoda down really well. You take the escalator up to the building, then inside there’s some elevators that you take to the top of the building. Then you work your way down. So here we are at top.

Here’s the View from the Top starring Gwyneth Paltrow:

One of the handicapped elevators to the second floor. I never see handicapped anything in China so it’s always worth noting. It’s like how I’m at a high school that has more students than my high school and yet I’ve never seen a handicapped kid here. Actually, now that I’m thinking of it, in the 10 months that I’ve been here I’ve never seen a handicapped child anywhere in China. Hmm.

Here’s the outside of the second from the top floor. There’s nobody here. Wth? Not the top so it’s not as important I guess. You get no obvious difference in view… :-/

After going down another floor I saw some real awesome stuff. Gigantic, stylistically done dioramas carved from wood. Each one was telling part of a story, but I think I might have been going backwards? I don’t know. Even though I went over it again and again in different directions I couldn’t figure out what was happening in the story or why what was who what? I’ve found Chinese stories have a different sort of structure than western stories and they all build on other things that are old that I also don’t know about so… it really doesn’t make any sense unless you know the history/social values/rules of magic/various gods and deities/etc etc of the myth. Often they seem to go like “and then and then and then and then” and it doesn’t have a perfect beginning middle and end that builds off of previous things we learned earlier in the story, it just kind of stops… :-/

Cool carvings though:

When I saw this set of sculptures, I accidently stumbled onto something that makes me really happy. When I walked up to it, I found the Chinese version of my college clique. They walked up at the same time, pointed to the character and to their friend and said: “haha ta shi ni!”

That means “haha that’s you!”

A joke that’s still funny even cross culturally. FYI they were pointing at the happy bearded guy in the center:

Pretty epic woodcarving battles:

Check out these sea creatures, I like them a lot. Love Crabman more than Snailman I think but Fishman’s fish hat is pretty sweet.. I also like that Turtleman is connected to his shell by his hair:

Here’s a picture for a better sense of scale (complete with the pointing so you know what to look at):

When I see this sign I think about how in Rollercoaster Tycoon I could stop people from going to certain parts of my theme park by putting up signs that said “do not enter.” There’s no other way down the tower. I’m happy we’re people and not a computer simulation because otherwise the tower would fill up with people on the 4th floor and collapse.

I feel like a dork in this photo. I had to stand around for like 6 or 7 minutes before working up the courage to get someone to take a picture for me. Everyone was so in their own zone and yelling at people for getting into their photos or bumping them or all kinds of stuff that happens when you have overcrowding. Couldn’t get an older person to do it because they seemed the most stressed out. Couldn’t get a man to do it because every time I talk to a man in Chinese I can’t understand a word that he’s saying.

Felt like little lost child trying to get someone to take my picture…:-(

These must have been the stairs to the pagoda before they built a Super Pagoda around it.

Now that you’ve had your picture taken in front of what some might consider to be a large façade, how would you like to have your photo taken anywhere in China??

Way easier than going there and experiencing it yourself imo:

I walked away a little bit and I found a Buddhist area that was pretty sweet. This is something I really wish I could see more of. Spirituality is something that is almost entirely gone from China. It’s unfortunate because it’s such a strong part of their culture but over the course of 60 years it has been abolished or seen as, at most, a cute sort of novelty with only a few true believers left. You can see that there is still some pining for it by watching all their movies. There is a lot of spirituality in them even though most modern Chinese themselves don’t practice or believe in it at all (outside of luck bringing actions). At least they still set up some areas for those few believers to do their religious things. That’s good I guess.

Inside the building are these prayer mats (I don’t know what else to call them, meditation mats? Honor pillows?) to give respects to what is in front of them:

What is it that is in front of them? Inside an ornate box is a real piece of Buddha’s hair. Damn that’s cool. They found it in the mausoleum under the pagoda. That’s the same as having a real piece of Jesus or Mohammed’s hair just sitting in a box. As far as historical importance goes, that’s a pretty damn important piece of hair:

Seriously, I’m getting more and more convinced on this Hangzhou trip that children are horrible little creatures. Check out this lion dad’s face:

There were some people coming to light these painted prayer sticks on fire from this oil lamp. It took them awhile to light them properly. I think the oil got a mixed with the water from the rain earlier in the day. I asked if I could take their pictures so that I wasn’t intruding on them. They said it was okay:

What the did is they got the sticks to start smoking. Then they went and bowed toward the large box kind of sculpture (altar?) and placed the smoking stick into a pot that had other smoking sticks and sand in it. I’m getting more and more interested in the religious aspects of China. I should head to northwestern China sometime.

Leaving Hangzhou I realized I should take a picture of these odd houses. The entire airport around Hangzhou is filled with houses like this for miles and miles. I remember when I flew in I noticed it as we were landing (that’s the only reason I know it goes for miles). There’s tons of them in various shades of mauve and puce and yellow:

The last photo I have is not of Hangzhou, it’s of their in-flight reading material. What does your perfect housewife do in her perfect home? Why she glues her hand to her face out of boredom of course:

The time draws near for my triumphant return to the United States. I have too much to get done before I come back, but hopefully I can get this blog up to date before it happens. We’ll see.