rock shopping

Last Wednesday Maya and I decided to try and find this metal/hard-rock store in Hanoi, called Coi Xuong Rock Shop, that I had found on that metaltravelguide.com website. The address I had was "So 3 ngo 154 Doi Can," translating to "number 3 alley 154 Doi Can Street); I found Doi Can Street on our map easily - it's a big street not far from the Ho Chi Minh Museum and Memorial; hopefully the alley would make itself apparent once we got to that main drag. So we headed down there, away from the hectic tourist-dominated commercialism of the Old Quarter and into what turned out to be a cool, almost whitey-free, and very authentic-feeling neighborhood. The Vietnamese were still selling shit on the streets, but to each other, instead of predominantly to foreign sightseers. And the street was still jampacked with motorbikes but somehow their drivers didn't seem quite as prepared to mow you down. The vibe was not only a lot chiller but also more friendly - the locals were clearly less concerned with separating us from our money and more intrigued by our mere presence.

As we strolled down Doi Can, we saw an awesome designer respiratory mask hanging in one store and stopped in to buy it. Two little girls - one, maybe 8; the other, maybe 4 - were the only people manning (or "little-girling") the establishment. The older girl handled the transaction shyly, while her younger sister (I presume) waved hello, stared at us, then waved goodbye. Outside, kids were just getting out of school and swarmed the sidewalks, shouting "Hello!," waving, and asking us where we were from and what our names were.

When we finally found 154 Doi Can, the number marked a dark, narrow alley which would have been slightly menacing if it hadn't been for the red-cheeked old woman cheerfully eating at a small table at its entrance. We passed her and wound down a blind corner in the alley. On the other side we found door number 3, which looked exactly like the door of a residence and nothing like the door of a business - until I noticed the small cardboard sign with "Rock Shop" written on it in blocky marker letters sticking out from the wall. Maya and I exchanged confused and amused glances, then I knocked on the door. No response. I knocked again. Same result. Then I heard a sound behind us and turning around, noticed an open doorway into a very dark room in which a man sat in the shadows, smoking a water pipe. He was gesturing for me to ring the doorbell (which I hadn't even noticed). Almost simultaneously, a woman passing behind us in the alley, gestured likewise. I hit the bell a few times, but still no answer.

As Maya and I retreated, somewhat disappointedly, out of the alley, the old woman at the corner accosted us in Vietnamese, either having seen the doorway we were knocking on or guessing where we wanted to go from our look. Seeing that we weren't comprehending a word of what she was telling us, she held up all 10 fingers, and then 5 fingers. "Back in 15 minutes?" Maya asked. The woman didn't understand, but she then held up 6 fingers. "Back by 6?" I asked. The two gestures didn't jibe, since it was about 4:50 at this point, but we thanked the woman for her efforts in communication and decided to continue our stroll down Doi Can and then swing by again on our way back to our hotel.

A little farther down the strip, we noticed on the other side of the street this rather amazing-looking shrine, which was all the more striking because of the way it emerged from the otherwise urban landscape while still looking like it belonged there. I asked Maya to cross the street so I could take a photo of her in front of the structure. As she went to do so, I pulled the camera from the bag and checked its settings; next thing I know, I look up for Maya and she's crossing the street with an old, bent woman in some sort of ethnic, turban-like headwrap holding her arm, walking with her through the whizzing traffic. Maya will later tell me that the old lady's teeth were black. Once they reached the other side of the street, I fully expected the woman to disengage, but she kept walking with Maya arm-in-arm, chatting to her (as Maya would tell me) about god-knows-what in Vietnamese the whole time. It was only after Maya effectively communicated that I was standing on the other side, waiting to take a picture of her, that the old woman went off on her way.

Here's Maya and her friend in front of the temple:

A closer view:
Soon after this stellar interaction, we decided to turn back and stop by the Rock Shop alley again, with hopes that the owner had returned. But when we arrived, we gestured to the woman, who was still sitting and eating at the corner, if the propietor was back, but she shook her head. So we thanked her again for her help and started to head back toward our hotel, with plans to try again some other day.

We had walked maybe 5 minutes, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a middle-aged dude in a crisp white shirt on a motorbike, which he had apparently ridden onto the sidewalk. I immediately tried to brush him away, assuming that he was one of the "motobai" drivers trying to get me to pay for a ride. (I think I forgot to mention earlier that Hanoi is absolutely full of motobike taxi-drivers who are constantly harassing you for a ride by calling out "Motobai?!" or waving at you or grunting at you, etc.) But he was persistent and when I finally turned to look at him, he pointed back in the direction that we had come from and said, "Rock Shop," in halting English. "The Rock Shop owner is back?" I asked. He nodded, and with us following on foot, he sped off back toward the store.

When we finally got back down into the alley, door number 3 was wide open, revealing the living room and kitchen of a humble abode. The motorbike dude was standing in there waiting for us (he, it turned out, was the proprietor), and on either side of him were two racks of black T-shirts, which we soon discovered were metal and hard-rock tees from bands ranging from Nirvana to Death. The owner dude didn't speak English at all really, but this didn't stop him from flipping through T-shirts with Maya, phonetically reading out the names of the various bands: "Me-tal-lica. Se-pul-tur-a. Cra-dle of Filth. Link-un..." "Linkin Park," Maya would help him out occasionally. It was pee-your-pants hilarious. After a little while a whole group of teenage boys in their school uniforms rumbled into the shop, clearly shocked - and excited - to find two whities in the store. They talked to the owner in Vietnamese and he opened up this glass case for them so they could inspect a variety of spiked, black leather gauntlets. Maya asked the kids, though a combination of carefully enunciated English and hand gestures, if there was anywhere to see rock shows in Hanoi, but they all shook their heads and laughed. I ended up buying a Pantera T-shirt and a CD by a Vietnamese rock band called Flashback, who, we are positive, are gonna suck big time, but it was the only CD the shop had and I wanted to "support the scene, man." Plus it cost all of 10,000 dong, or about 70 cents. Here's a little video tour of the shop, which I shot after making my purchases - you'll see the mural that was on one wall of a band rocking out and the slogan "Heaven from Hell," written out in band names.



The one thing I wished I had captured in this vid - but didn't notice until after filming - was the portrait of Ho Chi Minh hanging on the living room wall right over one of the racks of rock tees. In a similarly absurd and amazing juxposition, we saw, as we walked back to our hotel from the Rock Shop, a small square dominated by a towering statue of Lenin; a group of Vietnamese teenage boys were practicing their breakdancing right in front of the monument, and honestly, they fucking ruled. So, as the sun went down, Maya and I sat on the curb and watched them B-boying, thinking what an awesome afternoon it had been - and how Lenin's jaw would be on the ground right now, if it were actually him and not just a statue, looking on with us.

travels and travails

Our getaway-within-a-getaway to Ha Long Bay really couldn't have come at a better time, because Sunday, just the day before we left, various issues and irritations that have been building between Maya and I over the month-plus of this trip so far came to a head. We ended up spending the whole afternoon in a heated, no-punches-pulled, and ultimately pretty painful argument/discussion. Travelling like this is hard - there's the obvious physical, mental, and financial strain - but there's also the emotional strain of being around one other person for 4 months straight and basically 24/7. Little idiosyncrasies and personality quirks that might have been simply annoying in everyday life become magnified, and every adventure and challenge that you need to hurdle together is not only an opportunity to work and grow together but also a chance to mess up, point fingers, and piss each other the hell off. It would be hard enough if you were just travelling with a friend, but in this case, we're travelling with the one person in the world who can make each of us happier than anyone else but also crazier than anyone else, and sometimes it really, really sucks. So Maya and I talked it all out, got everything on the table, and we're doing better now - thanks in no small part to Ha Long. As tough as this journey has been and almost assuredly will continue to be at times, if we come back home understanding more about each other, how to work out our differences, and how to work together better, it will all have been worth it.

ha long? not long enough

I just added a pic of Maya in her kitty respiratory mask to my last entry, so check that out. I've also added a brief post on blogging difficulties in China; you can read that here. Now a quick rundown of our two-day trip to and through Ha Long Bay...

Seen along the road on our 2 and a half hour ride to the Bay on Monday:
- Water buffalos grazing in swampy rice paddies. Two of them, with tall, white crane-like birds placidly sitting on their backs.
- A motorbike speeding down the highway carrying what looks like a whole chicken coop on the back, right behind the driver, a trail of feather flutters in the bike's wake.
- Tiny colorful cemetaries full of beautiful mini-pagoda shrines appear amidst palm trees and farm fields.
- Ghost-town housing complexes full of those tall, narrow French Colonial-style buildings, all shining new and empty, standing next to crumbling stone shacks, which are all very clearly occupied. When we ask our guide about it later, he explains that these are the weekend homes of rich Vietnamese. As for the tall, narrow construction style, that is due, he says, to the fact that even the rich Vietnamese can only afford small plots of land, so they expand vertically, building multi-floor homes to contain their traditional multi-generational families, with the elders living on the ground floor and the youngest on the top.
- Farmers in those iconic conical straw hats, toiling in vast fields, harvesting their crops by hands and with bent backs. We pass a long line of tourist buses stopped by the side of the road and crowds of pale, khaki-clad sightseers snapping photos of the farmers and their fields. Maya and I talk about how pissed off we would be if hordes of fat whities on vacation were taking pictures of us, grinning at how "quaint" we were, while we did backbreaking work in the hot sun just so we could feed our families and keep our stone shacks from falling completely apart. We agreed that we'd probably grab a clump from the nearest pile of water buffalo dung and throw it at the tourists.

Arriving at the Bay, we boarded a beautiful, ornate wooden boat where we would have our own cozy cabin. The ever-changing view from the deck as we moved out into the ocean was stunning. The Bay has over 1,000 islands of craggy limestone karst peaks and we wound between more than a few of them. Later we would stop and swim in the clear, cool, salty water (I jumped a good 15 feet from the roof of the boat into the waves); we passed floating villages where whole communities live on the water, among the cliffs, fishing and farming pearls; then we stopped at one particularly large island and explored a cathedral-like cavern, its name translating from Vietnamese to mean "Amazing Cave"; and that evening we had a delicious dinner onboard (cucumber and tomato salad with garlic and chili dressing, shrimp cocktail, fried spring rolls, a nicely spiced grilled fish...) Maya and I thought, eyeing the dramatic land/waterscape around us, that if the Great Wall of China had been like something out of The Lord of the Rings, this reminded us of Skull Island from King Kong.

(A gorgeous view, a silly face...)


After dinner we talked deep into the night with this really cool chick named Michaela from Switzerland, who was travelling alone. We shared our travel experiences thus far, discussed why we travel, and most of all, talked about the challenge of staying open to and connecting with the people of whatever country you are visiting when they are obviously so much poorer than you and so many are constantly asking you for money or sometimes, even worse, trying to scam you. Around midnight Maya and I went to bed, and after a somewhat restless sleep in our cabin, we woke early to catch the sunrise.

All in all, our trip to Ha Long Bay made for two of the most fun and romantic days of our journey so far.

good morning, vietnam (part 2)

Sorry for the delay (and the cliffhanger ending of the last post) - just got back from Ha Long Bay, which was amazing, but more on that in a bit. First, back to your originally scheduled programming already in progress... The next morning we woke up and found ourselves not only alive but completely mosquito bite-free. To be honest, as we've learned since, there's really no reason to get (too) hysterical about the little winged blood-suckers in Hanoi - 90% of the Dengue cases in Vietnam this year have been in the South of the country (Hanoi is in the North), and the city is not considered to be malarial. In fact, there hardly seem to be any mosquitoes around at all...certainly less than we encountered while in Kyoto.

After retrieving our Permethrin-"impegnated" clothing from the balcony rail (and checking out the amazing view of the city from said balcony), putting it all on, and covering ourselves in sunblock and bug replellant, we stepped into the now sunlit Hanoi. Our no-longer-dark alley had been become a bright, busy gauntlet of tiny food stalls, whose face-stuffing patrons spilled out into the narrow street, seated at what looked like little children's plastic picnic furniture, only smaller. We tiptoed through this strange smorgasmord and hit the main strip, intriguingly named Hang Bong; this seemed, at first, to be like any trendy tourist-centric shopping strip - then we noticed the traffic. Think of it this way: Hanoi is basically like one big motorcycle rally, but instead of burly, bearded Hell's Angels-types in black leather and denim, it's all little Asian people and their families (kids, grandparents) in their street clothes (flip-flops, high-heels, mini-skirts, etc.) roaring around like daredevils with a death wish on their bikes and scooters. Almost no one wears a helmet - a few people wear hard-shell safari hats - but more than a few wear these awesome designer respiratory masks - in colorful prints and/or with cute animal shapes stitched on them - over their noses and mouths. (Maya and I agreed immediately that we had to find out where we could buy such things.) If we thought crossing the street in China was a life-risking adventure, crossing the street in Hanoi literally involves overcoming the most basic animal instinct of self-preservation and stepping into a nearly continuous wave of honking and rumbling motorbikes, then stopping in the middle of the street, hoping that the vehicles speeding straight at you will veer around you, then taking another step, and again throwing that same prayer to the heavens, repeating this process until you reach the other side of the road. One time as we stood paralyzed with fear at a particularly insane block, a random older Vietnamese woman stepped up, took Maya by the hand, and led her/us through the torrent of motorbikes without a word, depositing us at the other curb with a quick grin before continuing on her way.

But motorcycles and scooters aren't the only things to dodge in Hanoi; we would also get to dodge swarms of women in conical straw peasant hats, carrying two baskets hung from a pole over their shoulders, and aggressively hawking bananas, pineapples, and papaya. And then there are the dudes who pop up out of nowhere with a bag full of books that they are determined to add to your personal library - most of the books are travel guidebooks to various Southeast Asia destinations, the rest seems to be war-themed literature like Catch 22, and according to our guidebook, they are all photocopied-and-hand-stitched-together bootlegs (in fact, just today we found out that the reference copy of Lonely Planet: Vietnam sitting in the lobby of our hotel is just such a bootleg. It would be totally usable, except that it's missing pages and the photocopied maps are unreadable).

After breakfast at a lakeside cafe comfortably tucked away from all the madness of Hanoi, we scurried over to the Kangaroo Cafe, the only westerner-run tourist cafe in the city, which had been recommended to us by our friends Sarah and Alex. (Taking bootlegging to new heights/lows, there are two fake Kangaroo Cafes run by Vietnamese.) There we booked the trip to Ha Long Bay that we just returned from. Maya, still jittery from last night's misadventures and from today's street-crossings and vendor-harassment, was eager to talk to the cafe's Australian owner, Max, and get the straight dope from him on just how wary we should be of Hanoi's scam artists, outright thieves, and, of course, those damn "Mozzies," which is how Aussies apparently refer to the blood-sucking bugs. Max, it turns out, is quite the character. An orphan raised by a Jewish and Irish couple and turned ex-pat in Vietnam (where he has starred in more than a few movies and is referred to in some guidebooks as "Vietnam's Tom Selleck" - probably because of his 'stache more than anything else), Max is maybe even chattier than Maya and full of opinions - mostly good-humoredly negative - of other ex-pats, of tourists, and most of all, of his homeland. He alleviated the majority of our fears, and, much to Maya's and my surprise, he invited us out to drinks after he closed the cafe that night: "Just meet me outside the shop around 9:30," he said, "we'll hop on my bike and go somewhere nice."

We passed the day rather (happily) eventlessly, walking through the city, taking out some money (3,000,000 Dong! the exchange rate is about 16,000 Dong to 1 dollar), and buying soft-sleeper train tickets to Sapa for later in the week. After dinner, we walk through a massive night market where we stumbled on a woman selling huge piles of those designer respiratory mask we'd seen on many of the Hanoian bikers; Maya bought a particularly cute one with a little cat's head cut-out sewed to its left side for $1 (the woman was insistent on receiving U.S. currency). Here's Maya posing later with her mask:


The traffic around the lake area was absolutely insane. It was Saturday night, which apparently meant that all the young people would go out biking and drive faster, louder, and more recklessly than ever. The headlights of their vehicles shining in the dark as they sped around the lake traced out what could easily have been a massive nighttime race track.

At 9:30 we meet up with Max, who is just closing up the cafe along with his all Vietnamese staff. They invite us in behind the closed doors, and we all talk and laugh. Then he takes us back out front, and we all get on his scooter - Maya sandwiched between Max, driving, and me, hanging on for dear life to the back - and launch into the frenetic Saturday traffic. We're just going a short way to Max's place to drop off the bike, then we're planning to walk to an unnamed drinking spot of Max's choosing, but even that short, maybe 5-minute ride, we almost get in an accident, as another bike tried to sneak at high speed around our right side, nearly clipping us. Then, as we ride down the tight alley running back behind the majestic St. Joseph's cathedral and down to Max's home, we discover that a food stall has set up one of those kindergarten tables full of customers right in front of his door. He slows down, berates the people there in Vietnamese, and then, when they don't move out of the way, he rides right through their table, knocking plastic seats and food all over the place. Maya and I hop off, fully expecting the situation to explode into a full-on brawl, but the older woman running the food stall runs over and moves the customers (who simply look stunned), apologizing the whole time. Max doesn't seem too perturbed by the whole thing; "They do this all the time," he says, resigned to having to drive through people's dinner to go home at night.

After dropping the scooter off at - or rather inside - Max's pad, which proves to be quite swanky, we walk a few blocks through barely lit Hanoi, past more busy food stalls, as well as stinking piles of garbage and over a open gutter full of god knows what. Next thing we know Max has led us through a doorway and into what seems like a completely different universe: It's the opening of a new nightclub/ restaurant in Hanoi - Max knows the owners - and the place is fancy as all hell, pumping with too-loud house music, and looks like it could honestly have been transplanted from Soho or Chelsea! It's packed with young and obviously swinging white ex-pats, including one couple dressed as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Max clearly feels almost more out-of-place than Maya and I (he claims to be the most unpopular person in the Hanoi ex-pat community and says that he fully expected to get into an argument with someone as soon as he came in), but the three of us are more than willing to enjoy the free food and drink and shoot the shit in the corner - where, in a rather grimly humorous reminder of the real world outside and, perhaps, of the future of the club, Max and I spot a mouse scurrying down the wall.

When I tell Max that I had been working as an editor of a rock magazine in the States up until embarking on this trip, he gets rather excited: He's a big music fan, plays guitar and sings himself, and is good friends with the guys from the Aussie band Midnight Oil. He recommends that we skip this joint and check out a venue he knows that sometimes features live music. So we follow him out and down a few blocks to what proves to be a hopping dance club packed with drunken Vietnamese men and women. There's American pop music - Britney Spears and such - blasting from the speakers and everyone (besides the three of us, of course) is singing along. Max points out the stage, which honestly looks more like a stripclub catwalk than anywhere a band would play, but he says that the platform rotates and moves up and down and that there are mini-elevators on the side, which sounds like a performance there would be pretty cool to see. But, unfortunately, there's no live music tonight, and in fact, the club closes at midnight, as does pretty much the rest of the city. So we down our drinks, head out, and decide to call it a day. As we approach Max's corner, he points us in the direction of our street, and then, almost mid-sentence, bids us a quick farewell and vanishes like a ghost into the night. A fitting end to a surreal day.

good morning, vietnam (part 1)

Let me preface this story by saying that we are alive and well and Vietnam has turned out to be very cool. (Please keep this in mind as you read this entry). But like China, where our first day had us wishing we'd never had the mad idea of taking this trip and had just stayed home, living safe, if mundane lives, our first night in Vietnam made us "want our mommies."

We arrived in 'Nam around 10:30pm Friday night, an hour late, which was no real surprise considering what a bureaucratic nightmare the whole flight from China had been - a "special gate" where we couldn't check in until 45 minutes before take-off, a long transfer in Ghuangzou from and then back to the the same plane, etc. Maya and I had been pessimistically predicting all ride-long that our checked-in luggage would be lost and/or the car that our hotel was supposed to send to pick us up from the Hanoi airport would be M.I.A. , so we were very pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the luggage carousel and found our bags just making the circuit, and then lumbered exhautedly out of the terminal exit to find a dude with a sign that said "Maya Geist" waiting.

The guy seemed nice enough and his English was good though very heavily accented. We jumped into his extremely new minivan and headed off towards Hanoi. The driver made some small talk while we eyed the dark landscape passing outside the windows: a wide, shimmering river, some crazy-looking tall and gaunt French Colonial buildings, shanty-town shacks full of workers busy through the night, a massive flower market bustling with activity... At some point Maya asked the dude "Is your hotel far away?" and he responded that it was only about 40 minutes from the airport, but then he added something which we couldn't quite catch due to his accent, but which we both thought sounded like, "But I am not going to the hotel, I am taking you to my friends," followed by a laugh that in context sounded rather menacing. Maya and I exchanged perturbed glances, then I thought about his statement a bit and figured that what he must have said - better have said - was something to the effect of, "But it is not my hotel, it's my friends'." Either way, between the strange nighttime world we were passing outside and the mysterious conversation of our driver, Maya and I started to feel slightly on edge.

Then we wound through the tight, serpentine, and, though it was barely 11pm, almost completely abandoned streets of Old Quarter Hanoi (the tourist center), and pulled up to an almost pitch-black little alley. The driver made a call on his cellphone, then said that we should get out and that people from the hotel would meet us there. We did so rather hesitantly, and a few people did walk out from the dark alley, including two giggling young Vietnamese women strolling arm in arm, who we would never have guessed were from the hotel but they seemed to know the driver, and he, them, and they came over to us, began reaching down for our bags. "Uh, that's OK, I'll take them," I said, grabbing my heavy-as-fuck bag in one hand and tucking Maya's only slighty less heay-as-fuck bag under my arm. The girls didn't seem to speak much English, but they gestured for us to follow them down the dark alley, which we did, their incessant giggling and arm-in-arm strolling making them seem like a pair out of a horror movie. The alley only got darker the deeper into it we got, and then it hit a blind corner, around which Maya and I were both convinced we were gonna get mugged.

We didn't. Around the corner lay our hotel, which had a beautiful, cozy lobby. One of the girls checked us in and led us up four flights of spiral staircase (the building is one of those same tall, narrow French Colonial structures we'd noticed on the ride over) to our room - which looked perfectly comfortable, until Maya noticed that the door to the balcony was wide open. Now, as I've mentioned in a few of my very first posts, this year Southeast Asia has experienced its worst outbreak of the mosquito-spread Dengue Fever in 10 years. And that isn't the only mosquito-born terror to plague the region: there's malaria and Japanese enchephalitis, among other lesser-known but just as fucked-up diseases. Maya quickly closed the door, but we both could see the the seal was far from bug-proof, and when she pointed this out to the girl, the young woman only pulled a curtain, which was clearly even less bug-proof, over the doorway. "No problem, OK?" "No, not OK" Maya said and tried to communicate the issue to the girl, who only stared back with a blank smile and nodded, "Yes. Yes," clearly understanding nothing. After she left the room, Maya and I just looked at each other. It was too late to try and find another hotel, especially since, judging from the disquieting quiet outside, Hanoi was already well past its bedtime, so we decided to slather ourselves in bug-repellant cream and forge through the night.

We also decided that while we had a balcony, we should put it to use. You see, in preparation for the trip and the mosquito-spread infections that we knew we would be dodging throughout Southeast Asia, we had brought with us a few cans of this Permethrin shit, which is basically this bug-killing toxin that you're supposed to spray all over your clothes; thing is, the shit is so poisonous, you have to do the spraying outside, then you have to let your clothes dry for at least two hours before you wear them, and if you get any of the stuff into you eyes, mouth, or even onto your skin or the clothes you are wearing at the time, the warning label on the cans tell you to seek out immediate medical attention. Needless to say, we were almost more afraid of the Permethrin than of the mosquitos.

So Maya and I put on the medical respiratory masks and the rubber gloves (that we brought along for this exact purpose) and headed out onto the tiny balcony to spray our clothes. What followed was a comedy of errors, except that we - and especially Maya - were deathly afraid of the shit so it wasn't funny at all at the time. We could barely spread out our clothes without them dangling dangerously over the railing; it took me forever to figure out the damn spraying function of the Permethrin cans - turns out you have to pump the top of a can 5-to-10 times before the damn thing can spray, and the litany of progressively more terrifying health warnings; and there was a swirling breeze which would periodically hit us, turning any directed spray of the insecticide into a cloud of noxious fumes seemingly eager to consume Maya's and my heads. By the time we had finally finished "impregnating" our clothes (the rather disturbing term that the cans' labels use to describe the process), we were both dead tired and we flopped onto our bed, convinced that if the mosquito didn't kill us overnight, the poison we had just sprayed all over ourselves certainly would. (To be continued...though we're off to Halong Bay tomorrow so it might be a few days before the next installment. Remember, patience is a virtue.)

the great (fire)wall

Now that I'm out of the country, a quick note about blogging in China. When I first arrived in Beijing and tried to update this blog for the first time there, I discovered that for some reason I couldn't seem to load my blog's URL on any computer in the city, including the laptop that Fish's luxury hotel had provided him with (at no extra charge!). Soon after I discovered that I also couldn't view any pictures on flickr.com, where I had been posting our photos before embedding them in the blog! Then I found out that I also couldn't load wikipedia.org anywhere! Turns out China has all these internet firewalls set up around the country, which block a variety of sites that the government has deemed dangerous (flickr.com, for instance, had just started being blocked right before Maya's and my arrival, and the word on the street was that this was because someone had posted old photos from Tiennamen Square on the site. Rumor also has it that a couple of U.S. companies helped China set up the firewalls in the first place). What makes the whole thing even more fascinating is that just about all the Chinese people know how to get around the firewalls - there's a variety of sites, like stupidcensorship.com, that enable you to load the blocked sites within the country. It's a telling phenomena - China is full of rules and restrictions, but few are actually enforced or difficult to get around. As Eveline said (much to my surprise at the time, but now that I've spent a month is China, it makes some sense), "I feel more free in China than I did in America."

a few things we will and will not miss about china

Will not miss:

All the Chinese people, even cute teenage girls and cuter old women, hacking and spitting huge glops of phlegm everywhere.

Split pants - I think I had mentioned these infernal inventions before. Basically, they're little kids' pants but with a long split through them right from the top of the butt crack to just over the pubis, and just about every baby and small child in China wears them. This means that you not only get to look at every baby's and small child's private areas as you walk around, but you also frequently get to watch them peeing and pooping right along the sidewalk or into street drains or, as previously noted, onto sheets of newspaper in the park. This is, after all, the whole point of the split. You also get to see things like dads carrying their kids - in split pants - on their shoulders, the tikes' nether regions nicely smushed up against the back of poppa's neck.

Waiting for our rice to be served. For some reason, even though China is a country of rice eaters, whenever you're in a restaurant and you order rice, the wait staff will never bring it to you until you almost literally harass them for it. Everything you ordered will come right from the kitchen as it is finished, but the rice - even if there is a big rice cooker readily apparent, sitting right next to your table - will not be served unless you beg!

Seeing pictures of turtle soup on retaurant menus. Also, seeing dog, snake, worm, duck tongue, intestines, balls, tendons, webs, etc. on menus.

The hard-as-fuck beds.

Being shoved and shouldered by random passers-by on crowded streets and subways - the only plus being that you get to do it back to them or to other people without compunction.

Random Chinese people staring at you. Staring and pointing aren't considered impolite in China, but big facial expressions and gesticulation are, apparently. And since Maya and I are not only white foreigners, but I'm a tattooed "walking freakshow" (as Maya has described me) and she is constantly making faces and gesturing with her hands, arms, and whole body, sometimes it has felt like we can't go anywhere without all the locals staring at us - which gets old fast.

Crossing streets through a chaotic torrents of taxis, auto-rickshaws, buses, bicycles, motocycles, etc. which requires us to walk out into traffic, tackling one rushing lane at a time, and try not to flinch when a vehicle passes within inches of our bodies. (This will get much much worse in Southeast Asia, though, so I guess it's good practice).

A particular will-not-miss of Maya's - watching Chinese women squatting and peeing/shitting. Many of the public bathrooms in China, sometimes even those in nice restaurants, are not only Asian squat toilets, but each hole in the floor doesn't have proper walls around it or a door in front of it. I'm still successfully evading the squat toilets all together, but Maya doesn't even have that option, which means that she has ended up in some uncomfortable situations. I'll let her elaborate: "I'll just describe the weirdest one, but there were definitely a couple others worthy of retelling. One afternoon we went to a moderately fancy restaurant, and when I went to the restroom I fully expected it to have actual stalls with doors and walls and such, if not western-style toilets. Instead, I encountered our waitress squatting over an Asian toilet with only a small subdivider separating it from the only other toilet. So I squatted, and the subdivider turned out to be so small (in both height and width) that my face stuck out beyond it - and right next to that of the waitress (who was there apparently for the long haul). I was feeling extremely uncomfortable, but she just gave me a blase look then stared ahead, while I couldn't even concentrate on peeing at that point, but since I really needed to go, I closed my eyes and my ears and pretended I was in my happy place (which, at that moment, was my bathroom at home)."

All the scam artists, street vendors, and rickshaw drivers harassing us endlessly (though this too will only get much, much worse once we get to Southeast Asia) just because we're white and presumably rich.


Will miss:

Tea (autumn pear for me, ginger for Maya) and toast with blueberry jam every morning at the cafe, called either Dessert in Cafe or Sweet and Bitter (there are 2 signs outside - it's confusing) down the street from the 7 Days Inn.

The chicken and green papaya soup at Jiang Jiu Yun Nan Restaurant right across the street from the 7 Days Inn. We've eaten this shit almost every other day for the last couple weeks, and it will be our last meal in Beijing.

Subway rides for 2 yuan - approx. 30 cents.

Chinese metal and punk bands. And their fans, headbanging in group hugs and skipping "Ring Around the Rosie"-style.

Chinese young people's crazy hairdo's - awesome 80s-style mullets, weird grey-blue dye-jobs, ridiculous bleached blonde, sky-high pompadours, puffy afro's, and the sort of huge, frizzy curls that have been the bane of Maya's existence but in China are highly coveted and proudly worn by stylish teens (guys and girls).

Renting a motor boat and driving, rocking, drinking, and relaxing on the lake right in our 7 Days neighborhood.

Random Chinese people walking around in their pajamas at all hours.

Random Chinese people playing games in the middle of the sidewalk at all hours - badminton, jumping rope, hula hoop, hacky sack, cards, etc. Also, random Chinese people dancing in the middle of the sidewalk: Three nights in a row last week we ran into a group of old ladies in our 'hood, performing some kind of Tai Chi-like fan dance while walking in a circle to drony Chinese music buzzing from a small boombox.

Our whole 7 Days neighborhood, which really is, based on our time in China, the best 'hood in Beijing - it's got plenty to do, good places to eat and drink, a rock club, a metal record store, lots of toy stores, ceaselessly fascinating back alleys, a gorgeous lake, but it also has families and old folks around who keep the vibe chill and comfortable.

The random kindness and genuine smiles of the otherwise gruff populace. These are so much more meaningful in a country where they seem to be so rare.

All the awesome English translations on signs and menus! Some of them were so hilarious as to induce instant laughing fits. Example (on an entrance sign to the Ancient Observatory): "Half price admission for children under 1 meter tall, and deformed man."

Text-message updates on the bloody ghost.

Hanging with Eveline.

And now we fly out to Vietnam, where hopefully we will find many more things to miss.

great things to those who wait

A couple of days ago Maya and I climbed the "wild wall," which is the rather cheesy way that the unrestored sections of the Great Wall are referred to. During our first week in China, we had visited the Wall at Mutianyu and Maya had been pretty underwhelmed, mostly because there were too many tourists bustling around, plus there was the cable-car ride up and the flume-ride down, which all conspired to give everything an almost amusement-park vibe. Myself, I had enjoyed the experience just fine, being overwhelmed by the sheer Tolkien-esque proportions of the structure and the mountains around it. But we both agree that exploring the "wild wall" far surpassed our time at Mutianyu. It was just us, about 20 other hikers (from New Zealand, Scandinavia, London...), and our guide - a darkly tanned, deeply wrinkled old Chinese man who didn't speak a word of English but grinned at us with obvious sympathy as we huffed and puffed around while he clambered up the slope to the Wall and around its grand rubble, sipping from his canteen of tea and sucking down cigarettes, without breaking a sweat, it seemed. The mountains around us were cast in autumn colors; the air; fresh and cold; the path, treacherous; and the Wall seemed maybe even more majestic here than in its restored form, wearing its tenacious old age proudly on its worn face.

livin' on a prayer

So, besides helping old men with their English, what have we been up to since returning to Beijing? Quite a lot, actually. Let me first rewind a little bit from Maya's post: While we were in Datong, we talked to these two girls from France who were part of our tour group, and they told us that when they were in Beijing, they actually had a taxi driver pull over to the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere and tell them that if they didn't pay him more money, he was going to just leave them there. So they got out of the car, and, as promised, he left them there. Hearing this horror story, Maya and I both thought, with some relief, that while numerous people have tried to scam us while we've been in China, all in all, the taxi drivers we've ridden with have been not only honest but actually relatively helpful. You can probably guess where this story is going... When we got off our of bus back from Datong to Beijing on Thursday afternoon, we had no idea where we were and we didn't have a hotel booked for the night - we pulled out our Beijing map and were immediately assailed by numerous cab drivers eager to take us wherever we needed to go. All seemed to know just a single word of English - "Taxi!" - except for one person, who also stuck out of the crowd because she was a cute Chinese chick instead of a grizzled, chain-smoking Chinese man. She started asking us in ridiculously good English where we wanted to go. She even offered to help us find a hotel. If there was one thing I (and Maya, at least, I thought) had learned so far about China, it was that no stranger here offers to help you without expecting something in return. And that the only Chinese people we've met so far that spoke this good English were either scammers or metalheads (this chick was no metalhead). I whispered to Maya, "Don't talk to her," more than a few times, but Maya's a very sociable being and she started talking to the girl, asking her if she could show us on our map where we were. The girl did so, and when Maya mentioned an area where we might want to go to find a hotel, she mentioned that she had a cab and would take us there. I said to Maya, "Don't talk to her. We don't know if her cab even has a meter." (There are a lot of unmetered car drivers who are constantly offering you rides, always for more than the fare should be.) The girl must have read my lips or something, because she immediately said that her car had a meter, and since Maya persisted in talking to her, I finally relented, plus my sense of morbid curiosity was kicking in, and I decided we might as well play along with this girl and see what her scheme was. So we follow her away from the bus terminal and to the edge of the highway, where a white car pulls up, driven by another Asian chick. "My sister," says the original girl. This "sister" gets out of the car, and this stocky, buzz-cutted Chinese dude appears, seemingly from nowhere; he gets in the driver's seat, while the "sister" opens the trunks for our backpacks. I know better than to go for this - "We'll keep out bags with us," I say. So we slide into the backseats, our packs in our laps, and look for a meter. At first we don't notice it, and Maya's like, "You want to get out?" I'm about to say yes, when we finally locate the meter. Then, much to our surprise, the original chick pops into the passenger-side seat - apparently she's going to ride with us(?) - and we set off. She starts talking to us as we rumble through the rush-hour traffic, asking where we're from and why we were in Datong. I can see on Maya's face that she is finally coming around to the fact that there is obviously something awry. "Where is this going?" I mouth to her while the girl upfront continues to small-talk. Maya notices it first: The fare count on the meter is increasing by leaps and bounds, at a much, much faster rate than any cab we've been in so far in China. For the time we'd been riding, the fare should have been maybe 12 yuan; the meter already read 35, and as Maya looked at it, it jumped up to 36, 37, 38... "That meter is moving way too fast," she said to the girl. "We're getting out." The girl protested, but Maya and I were both adamant: We're getting out now (we could see plenty of legitimate taxis in the area that we could easily hail). "There's a subway coming up," the girl said, "How about we drop you off there, and you give us 50?" "No, maybe we'll give you 40 and you stop the car right now," Maya generously countered. "No, 50." After they went back and forth like this for a while, the girl finally agreed to just pull over and let us out - along the highway where there was basically no shoulder and bumper-to-bumper traffic all around. So we got out, and the girl lept out, too, expecting her money, but we weren't planning on giving her shit. While Maya argued with her, I took out my notebook and wrote down the car's license plate number. "I have your license plate number, and I can report you," I said. At this point, the driver comes bounding out of the car, as Maya will later tell me, with a rather murderous expression on his face (thought I doubt he would have actually done anything with so many witnesses around); he starts yelling to the girl (and us) in Chinese and, according to Maya, looks like he's about to start throwing fists, while the girl holds him back and tells him that she's taking care of the situation. She says to us that we need to give her some money, any money, right now, and when we decline, suggests to drive us back to the station! She also says something like, "We took you all the way here, we deserve something," and gets agitated. Maya decides the best way to shut this all down for good is to give these con artists a little money, so she pulls out a 20 yuan bill - not too much more than the fare for our trip thus far would have been - and gives it to the girl. "You really shouldn't do this to people," Maya says to her. The girl stills feigns innocence, but probably eager to cut her losses, she takes the bill, gets back in the car, and they drive away. As for us, we find a legitimate cab almost immediately, and safely inside, I give Maya an I-told-you-so look, and we both chuckle at the experience. "I hope you learn a lesson from this," I tell her. "Trust no one," which is a mantra we had been repeating since our first day in Beijing, "except for Brandon," I add. "And maybe Eveline. Maybe."

Friday night after our return, Eveline took us to check out the notorious Sanlitun bar area/"meat market," and the shit was pretty out of this world. Or rather, it was out of what you would think China's world would be: Just imagine the scummiest frat party strip you can, pack it with sleazy European and American ex-pats and some equally sleazy/slutty-looking Chinese, then throw in some ridiculously underage kids (like 15-years-old max) hanging out; a crippled, shivering elderly dude panhandling out of his wheelchair (and, as we passed, being chatted up by a drunk white girl apparently wearing a dangerously strong pair of beer goggles); and dive bars with mixed drinks for sub-Mars-Bar prices like 5 yuan (less than a dollar) each (Eveline theorizes that the liquors in said drinks are knockoffs). This area, incidentally, is where the drug raid I had mentioned some posts back had taken place - kicked off after some pseudo-celebrity from Big Brother: Australia or something O.D.'d on heroin in one of the clubs there. As much as I'm not generally in favor of the Chinese police raiding parties and busting heads, somehow the idea of the military cops cracking down on this shit doesn't make me feel so bad...

Another night Maya and I went to this punk show at a club called Mao Livehouse, which is in easy walking distance from our place at the 7 Days Inn. We paid our entrance fee (50 yuan, I think), walked passed the bar, around a pool table, and in through another door into the cigarette smoke-choked performance space, which was packed with Chinese rockers and hipsters, and more than a few white crust punks, including one in maybe his late-30s with a face full of tattoos. Onstage, we were amazed to find a Chinese skinhead band (we're still not sure how that works) with a beefy singer in full skinhead regalia: crisp white shirt, suspenders, high-waisted, peg-legged pants, and shitkicker boots. The band's bass player was also particularly awesome looking - the lanky dude was wearing an "Oi" T-shirt and completely gratutious aviator sunglasses that poorly disguised the homemade bandage - a napkin and an X of electrical tape - over his right eye. The band (have no idea what their name was) blasted out songs called "I am Skinhead, I am Punk," "Skinhead Girl" (a cover of The Specials' song), and the enjoyably irresponsible sing-along "Drinking and Driving." They ended their set with an extended ska jam session complete with confetti falling from the rafters! The next band - I think they were called Unsafe - featured a white singer and white guitarist and a Chinese guitarist, bass player, and drummer. As they soundchecked, the Chinese guitarist warmed up to a variety of Slayer riffs, and when he cranked out the opening notes of "Dead Skin Mask," Maya shouted out, like the true metalhead she is, "Sla-yer!!!" As if taking her cry as their cue, the band all joined in, playing the intro to the song, building to a feedback-soaked crescendo, and then blasting into their set of original material - which was thoroughly entertaining Oi punk augmented with some Iron Maiden-esque dual guitar harmonies and thrashy riffage. When we left the show, around 11:30, and walked back to the 7 Days Inn, Maya and I both felt strangely as if we were walking back to our home. We've stayed in this same neighborhood for most of our month in China, and it's our favorite area in Beijing, and it really has come to feel as comfortable and familiar as a second home. In two days we leave for Vietnam, and we will definitely miss our 'hood here in China.

A few days ago Eveline took us to a Korean hair salon to get Maya's hair semi-permanently straightened. Maya has been talking about getting it done for a long time, but the process is extremely expensive in the States (like $500 or something). Eveline's friend, coincidentally also named Maya (her last name is Rock!), had visited her in Beijing in August, and Eveline had actually taken her to get her hair straightened while she was here because it's much, much cheaper (think $80 or so). When Eveline mentioned this to our Maya, she decided to jump at the chance, and thus Eveline may be the only person in the world who has taken two Mayas to get their hair straightened in Beijing. As for the process itself, it was excruciating. First, Maya got her hair cut by this "Korean master" while the rest of the salon's staff - about 5 people - stood around and watched. Then one of the staff members brushed this follicle-relaxing chemical gloop into her hair, after which a shower cap-like thing was put over her head and a crazy rotating drying machine called the "Beauty Caller" was pulled up behind her and made to do its magic for 10 minutes or so. This process was repeated a few times. Then two staff members simultaneously straight-ironed her hair, then one of them brushed in more of that goop. Her hair was machine-dried again, then washed. Then this process was repeated. By the time, Maya was finally done, the ordeal had taken over 5 hours and we were both completely exhausted (her, much more than me, I'm sure). But she does look good:

Now, finally, an update on the subject that all of you really care about: Eveline and the bloody ghost. Though their last interaction had been awkward and not particularly romantic, Eveline has understandably felt an urge to keep someone she can refer to as "the bloody ghost" in her life, and so she texted the dude this weekend, inviting him to her friend's art opening. He declined, explaining that he had band practice. A few days later he texted her asking how the opening went, and she responded that it had been fine, how was band practice? She fully expected a mundane, barebones reply - something like "Practice was fine" - as has been the nature of their correspondence so far. Instead she got nearly a paragraph's worth of Chinese characters with two English phrases sprinkled in: "Pop rock" and "Bon Jovi"! Eveline (remember that she's basically functionally illiterate in Chinese - which has compelled her to ask friends to translate most of the ghost's texts for her before she could write back) roughly read this message to be "Practice was good. It was with a pop rock band I play in that sounds something like Bon Jovi, which I personally really like." After some deliberation about how to respond, she finally wrote back that this was cool and that she liked Bon Jovi, too - which isn't entirely untrue, since Eveline has been rumored to sing a mean version of "Livin' on a Prayer" at Beijing karaoke. The bloody ghost then wrote back that they should get dinner sometime. We all decided that the Bon Jovi thing must have been his "test": If she would have responded that she didn't like Bon Jovi, he wouldn't have invited her to dinner. But she had passed - though last I heard, the ghost has yet to set a date, time, and place for their meal. Eveline thinks his lack of initiative may be a "cultural thing." All I know is Jon Bon Jovi would have sealed the deal already.

"lou-is vui-tton" (maya's first blog)

Ok, here it goes, my first blog entry EVER, so try not to be too judgemental! (Praise is appreciated and expected.)

The coolest "interaction with the locals" episode just happened to us, and since I was the one doing most of the interacting, I get to describe the incident.

We were underground, waiting for the subway, when an old Chinese man, his smile showing only one front tooth on top, came up to us to examine the tattoo on Brandon's right arm. (Throughout the trip so far, Brandon's tats have gotten lots of attention from the locals, all of it good, and have led to some interesting interactions). He pointed at it, and when Brandon raised his sleeve for him to see the whole picture, the old man looked awestruck, said "picture" and proceeded to rub Brandon's arm as if he expected the image to come off by rubbing it. Then he asked us in broken English where we were from, and when we said "America," he made a fist and said "Ah, America, strong". We thought that it was pretty funny, but that that was the end of our brief encounter: Our train has arrived and we thought the old dude was staying on the platform, but he came into the car with us and stood right next to me. He had some bags with him, out of which he took a ratty, old copy of a Discovery magazine, showed it to me (I had no idea where this was leading, so I just smiled nervously) and then read "Dis-co-ve-ry" while apparently looking for encouragement from me. I said, "Yes, Discovery" and smiled, thinking, "OK, where is this going?". He then read all the cover lines in the same fashion, looking for me to correct his English pronunciation. We then went on to the Table of Contents and, the best thing of all, the ad pages. This is all going on with the rest of the Chinese commuters onboard looking at us in bafflement, trying to figure out how we know each other and what is going on. As I was sounding out "Louis Vuitton" in the one of the ads for him, both Brandon and I could barely suppress our giggles, like, this old Chinese dude will ever have any use for knowing how to say Louis Vuitton correctly! Anyway, throughout this exercise, when he would mispronounce things, I would pronounce them correctly for him, and because the train was pretty noisy, sometimes I would practically have to shout all kinds of brand names to him, while he dilligently tried his best to repeat after me. Sometime is the middle of this, the situation somehow struck me as being incredibly familiar, almost, deja-vu-like, but I couldn't really pinpoint why... until later, after the whole thing was over, and I told Brandon how familiar it felt, it struck me that I used to do the very same thing with my grandpa! He had never learned to speak English, because he came to America when he was 80 years old, but he did learn to read, and sometimes when I would come over to visit him (in his 90s at the time) he would read random English words from newspapers or magazines to me, expecting me to correct his pronunciation and showing off his language skills in the process. (Anyway, my grandpa passed away recently, and I miss him a lot, and this experience with the old dude was really touching and made me feel really good.) So, back to the story, (because it only gets better). I complimented him on his English, and he said it wasn't so good at all, and that, as far as me and Brandon could understand him, a long time ago he had been an artillery commander in North Korea or something like that and that is where he learned English. Then, he thanked me for the English lesson, and asked me some crazy thing about dialing mobile phones in Beijing, which took, like, 5 minutes for him to explain and for me to understand. After that, he looked at me and Brandon and asked "You have baby?" I laughed and said "No," and he laughed and said "Hurry up!" at which both Brandon and I cracked up to his even greater amusement. Then he realized that his stop was coming up, and when I complimented him on his English again as part of preparing to say our goodbyes, he, unexpectedly, in an attempt to showcase more of his English skills, started singing "Row, row, row your boat"! It was unbelievable, so endearing and just totally awesome! I looked at Brandon, and he was beaming, like, Damn, this rocks! As the old dude was singing, all the onlookers kept watching us even more uncomprehendingly, but with obiviously amusement. I actually sang a little with him (to help his pronunciation, of course), I just couldn't help it, I actually wanted to give him a hug (but stopped myself)! Then his stop came and he told us both "Best luck with your trip" and smiled widely and said "Bye bye" as he walked off the train. Brandon and I just looked at each other in total disbelief at the awesomeness of what has just transpired. Maybe the Chinese aren't so bad after all (just kidding).

hanging with buddha

First of all, if you haven't noticed already, I've added some video and photos to my previous post, so check that shit out.

Secondly, and more importantly, Maya and I got back from Datong Thursday night, and it was an eventful trip...though it actually started out rather blase: After 3 overnight hard-sleeper trains, the 7-hour ride from Beijing to Datong was totally same-old same-old to us and we sat around, with the locals, feeling bored and, disturbingly, somewhat at home. There were two German or Austria guys in the bunk area next to us, and it was clearly their first hard-sleeper experience as they bumbled around, unsure of their bunks or where to put their luggage or how to deal with all the Chinese people bustling around them. We must have had the air of pros, because they almost immediately started asking us for advice; Maya was eager to dispense her recently acquired wisdom, and when we went to bed an hour or so later, we lay down feeling pretty fucking cool, and with a real sense of how far we've come since our first hard-sleeper ride. That didn't mean we got any sleep - both of us tossed and turned all night - but it still felt good.

Datong, when we finally arrived at 6:30am or so, was not nearly as apocalyptically polluted as we had expected - and we were actually kind of disappointed. It was a proper shithole though, especially considering that it is supposedly one of China's top 3 tourist-destination cities. Sketchy-looking dudes smoking cigarettes paced around the square, and all the dirty shops on the streets around seemed to have a sad, scuzzy little cat tied by a string around its neck to the front door, presumably to deal with an epidemic mouse problem.

We found a relatviely cheap hotel close to the station that let us check in despite the early hour and that seemed spotlessly clean. There was a catch, of course: as soon as we lay down to try and catch a quick nap before taking off on our 9am tour to the nearby sites, we discovered that our room was retardly loud: the nearby trains blared their horns every 5 minutes or so, workmen started drilling and arguing (or just chatting - Chinese people basically always sound like they're fighting even when they're having a totally friendly conversation), and there was a weird office of some sort right across the hall with its door open and two men and a woman working noisily at a desk inside, the phone ringing every 10 minutes or so.

Feeling more exhausted than before, we walked back to the station to meet up with our tour. There, we and maybe 14 other backpackers from around the globe were crammed into a tiny van - everytime it seemed like the vehicle had been packed to capacity, progressively tinier new seats were mysteriously folded out of some hiding place; by the time we hit the road, we were all jammed in like sardines.

We drove through Datong, where we passed everything from fancy-as-fuck hotels to craggly old peasants leading mule-drawn carts overloaded with teetering towers of scrap metal, often on the same block. Once out of town, we wound by tiny potato- and corn-farm towns that were basically just rubble: as Maya put it, "At first you think it's a pile of rocks, then you realize you're looking at a town." The landscape reminded us of the America Southwest - all vast plains cast in the shadow of distant mountain ranges and split by narrow canyons. Perhaps what amazed Maya and I the most was that those canyons were riddled with the openings of clearly man-made cave dwellings, many of which looked like they were in better, more lived-in shape than the stone shacks around.

As surreal as the ride to them was, the sites turned out to be fucking mindblowing. Here are some photos (which, of course, don't do the places justice): First up, the hanging monastery, which, as the name suggests, literally hangs high on a cliff face.

The "support" beams, which you can see below, are actually just for decoration, and if you reach out and nudge them, a few of them even wobble in place!







Then, the Yungang grottoes, where a seemingly endless number of caves have been cut into a cliff face and ridiculously detailed and, in some cases, massive Buddhist statues carved inside.

When we returned to Datong around 5pm, we ended up having dinner with a few of our fellow backpackers: a Danish dude studying engineering at Beijing University, and two women who were, well, fucking insane, but in a good way. The first, an Irish woman, had just been teaching English in Mongolia, living in a yurt for 2 months. She's currently traveling China on the way to her next gig - teaching English in Laos. Over dinner she revealed to us that before Mongolia she hadn't really traveled outside of Ireland or even her town in Ireland. When Maya asked her how she dealt with having no electricity and outdoor, hole-in-tundra bathrooms, she explained that it really wasn't that different than her house in Ireland, which she had built herself out of mud and lyme, powered by solar panels, and with a compost toilet! Everyone at the table was astounded. The other woman was Austrian, and she had been all around the world many times over already (everywhere but Africa, it seemed) - she would work (also teaching) at home for a year, then take a year off to travel. We picked her brain about Southeast Asia, where she had been many times, and she would say, in a thick accent, that every place there was "easy, very easy," before eventually adding that things could occasionally get "tricky," like when she was motorbiking around Nothern Vietnam and the locals would knife her tires! Tricky, indeed. Hanging out with these crazy women and many of the other backpackers and ex-pats we've met so far, Maya and I have sometimes felt like we're joining a club that we're not sure we're prepared to be part of. Or that we necessarily want to be part of, to be honest. But only time and experience will tell.

The restaurant we were eating at was a local hole-in-the-wall, staffed - as all such places in China seem to be - by young kids: in this case, dirty-faced boys who looked all of 12. They were facinated by us, and we were fascinated by the bill, which, though the five of us had gorged on a virtual banquet and downed at least 10 4os of beer, cost all of 122 yuan - or less than $20 total!

The next morning Maya and I took the bus back to Beijing, which was purported to take only 4 hours. They played kung fu movies on the TV monitor upfront for the entire ride, which was awesome, as was the landscape that we passed - majestic mountains, rolling dunes, and serpentine canyons speckled with those same strange cave dwellings, numerous stone towns, and ominous factories pumping bizarre technicolor smoke into the sky. The traffic around us was mostly huge, delapidated cargo trucks, some carrying double-decker loads of cows and sheep all jammed in together till they were literally on top of each other. When, just an hour outside of Beijing, we hit a total bumper-to-bumper jam-up, most of the drivers stepped out of their vehicles to gossip and try and catch a peek ahead of what was causing the delay. Maya caught an unfortunate glimpse of one driver who had stepped out and was squatting at the side of the road, in clear view of everyone, presumably to take a shit. Peasants, meanwhile, appeared out of nowhere, having somehow sensed the traffic jam, weaved between the vehicles, selling bags of berries. The ride back to Beijing ended up taking about 6 hours instead of the promised 4, but we weren't surprised. I think Maya and I have finally come close to Eveline's philosophical outlook on living in China - shit is gonna take longer and be more complicated than it should, so just stay cool, be patient, and enjoy the ride.

horns up in the modern sky

So unfortunately we didn't end up getting drinks with the bloody ghost last night. Also, unfortunately, he seems to be a bit of a weirdo (who woulda guessed that a dude who dresses up as a bloody ghost in a Chinese metal band that can't even decide what their name is would be weird). After many text messages in which he flip-flopped between agreeing to hang out and declining the invitation, he finally shows up at Eveline's apartment building to drop off a couple copies of his band's DVD, and, we think, he made about an hour-long trip from the outlying Beijing district he lives in to do so. Then he calls her from outside the building and says he doesn't want to come up so can she come down and get the DVDs from him. She does so, has an awkard conversation (he seems completely taken aback, she recounts to us later, when she tells him that she's from the U.S. and not China), and when she finally returns to the apartment, she gets yet another text message from him: a cryptic smiley face. As she put it, "this romance might be over." God, for the sake of rock and roll, I hope not.

On another front, tonight Maya and I get on yet another hard-sleeper overnight train, this one to the northwestern town of Datong, which is only the 3rd most polluted city in China. It apparently has some crazy Buddhist caves and a monastery hanging on a cliff-face, which, as much as we love pollution, are the real reason we're going.

Before we took off, I thought I should catch y'all up on what we've been doing over the last week in Beijing. So here's a rundown, fast and furious:

We went to the fourth and final day of the Modern Sky Festival, a huge indie rock fest featuring four stages - the main stage, the electronic stage, the folk stage, and, on that day, a "Heavey Metal" (as they spelled it on the program) stage. It was pretty amazing thing to be at, full of thousands of little alternative Chinese kids, many of whom were artschool students selling their various creations - paintings, dolls, clothing, pins, marijuana T-shirts(!), etc. We bought this weird little mummy doll (Eveline, you're gonna love it) called a Jitmu - it has an odd little red-cloth appendage hanging from its button eye, and when Maya picked the doll up to look at it, the girl manning the stand, explained in halting English: "It is crying, but blood." We were sold. One of the bands on the metal stage, a Chinese hardcore band whose name escapes me, closed their set with a cover of the Hatebreed song, "Live For This." It's a horrible song - if you're gonna cover Hatebreed, you really have to play "I Will Be Heard" or "Last Breath" - but the crowd loved it, and it was still fun for us to witness it being played in China by a Chinese hardcore band.



During another band's set, I had the great fortune to witness a variation on the other insane "Ring Around the Rosie"-style Chinese moshing technique that Eveline had mentioned - a kid was waving this huge red flag on a bamboo pole in front of the stage, and about 10 other fans were skipping around him, hand-in-hand, in a big circle! I almost peed myself it was so funny. Maya and I are determined to bring this move back to moshpits the States with us - not! The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, by the way, were headlining the fest, but we left before they went on because it started pouring rain - and we don't like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

...swung by 666 Rockshop, a metal record store I found through the metaltravelguide.com website I mentioned in a previous post. The shop turned out to be, basically, just around the corner from the 7 Days Inn we've been staying at. The proprietor, a young long-haired Chinese dude in denim, spoke good English, and I asked him if he had anything by some Maya's and my favorite bands that we'd seen so far in China. Unfortunately, he only had, like, 10 CDs by Chinese bands total (again, Chinese bands don't really put out CDs), but I bought 4 or 5 of them.

...checked out Beijing's Russian area, where Chinese hucksters approached us in good Russian instead of bad English (Maya shut them down quick). There were also lots of stores selling fur coats.

...wandered through Ritan Park, a beautiful little park next to the Russian area. We watched a dude practicing the Chinese harp and old folks doing Tai Chi. We also watched as a mom held her little daughter in split-pants (more on these horrible creations in a post to come) over a sheet of newspaper so she could shit on it in plain view of everyone.

...stopped by the Yonghegong Lama Temple, and almost left - I'm suffering from pretty serious temple-fatigue right now, and at first, this looked like just another shrine - before discovering, in the last building, an absolutely breath-taking 50-foot-plus-tall Buddha statue, which has been certified by Guiness World Records as the largest such idol carved from a single tree (unfortunately, you weren't allowed to take the pictures). Maya and I are still skeptical of this whole single-tree thing, considering the gargantuan, bend-backwards-and-you-see-can't-quite-see-to-the-top proportions of the damn thing, but who knows...

...went to the Beijing Zoo, where we saw the great pandas and feeding time for the lemers (freaky-looking buggers) and these ridiculously cute little monkeys. What was less heartwarming were the generally ghetto-as-fuck conditions of the zoo - the big cats, in particular, were stuck in tiny, rusty, barren cages, and this one tiger almost broke my heart, pacing the perimeter of his sorry abode, periodically letting out the most mournful yet still powerful moan you've ever heard.

...took a boat to the Summer Palace. When we first got to the dock, we expected a nice river cruiseship to pick us up. Instead, a rickety motorboat pulled up. We got in, and the driver took us careening through the water. It was fun, and we were getting psyched for the promised 50-minute ride. And then, after about 3 minutes, we slowed down, pulled up to another dock, and were told to get out and board this really dingy-looking and extremely sluggish tourist boat. This took us on one of the least scenic rides you could imagine - at one point, we crossed under a dirty concrete bridge and passed a homeless man's shack underneath; the Chinese tour guide mysteriously kept talking into her megaphone the whole time. After about 20 minutes on this boat, we pulled up to yet another dock and were herded into yet another boat, this one a cool old-fashion wooden vessel, which was nice other than the fact that the seats were old conference-room chairs that had been placed freestanding in haphazard rows across the floor. This ride ended up being very pleasant, though not without its own surprises: about 10 minutes in, Maya noticed a old Chinese man swimming in the river right next to us. It was pretty fucking chilly out that day so I can only imagine how cold (and filthy) the water must have been, but he looked very happy, almost serene, even when our boat's massive wake swept over his head. We would end up seeing at least 4 other old men swimming or about to dive in along the rest of the ride. A few even waved to us.

...and we explored the Summer Palace, one of the most beautiful places we've seen yet in China. Surrounded by a totally massive sprawling park full of pavilions, arched bridges, and a lake full of dragon boats, the palace rises out of a mountainside, which we climbed to an amazing view. Here are some pics, as promised...








Until I get a chance to post again, wish luck to those far crazier than us - my little brother Darren who just left to work in Sierra Leone, Africa; and Eveline's boss Gwynn, who has been in Burma (if you don't know about all the craziness that's been going down there, swing by CNN.com) for about the last week and is scheduled to return today, but Eveline hasn't heard from her yet. Suddenly we seem almost sane...

mao metal than you can handle (part 2)

Tuesday Maya and I returned to the 13 club for the final night of the "Metal Music Festival" with Eveline and our new friend from Seattle, Audrey, in tow. Eveline, it turns out, has been going to an impressive number of metal shows since moving to China, so this was nothing new for her; as for Audrey, though at first she seemed to have no interest in metal or in joining us at the show, she ended up being very easily persuaded to tag along ("So you wanna go?" asked Maya; "Sure," said Audrey).

The club was pretty much the same smokey, scuzzy scene as the day before, except slightly more decked out, care of the enormous Dimebag Darrell (R.I.P.) banner hanging over pretty much of the whole left side of the venue. Pantera may just be the biggest metal band in China, judging from the number of T-shirts, caps, etc. brandishing their name that we saw on both fans and band members at the Fest, and cheesy as it might sound, it was kind of heartwarming to see the late, great Dimebag's face smiling over the night's proceedings.

As we stepped into the club, a band either called Oxygen Can or Maul Heavily (I'm not sure) was bashing out some hilariously derivative but totally (albeit somewhat ironically) enjoyable nu-metal. Think a mashup of Korn, Slipknot, and Linkin Park, plus a couple ska breakdowns. The band even looked the part - from the two dudes with dreadlocks (the lead singer and one of the guitarists) to the drummer and percussionist, the latter banged away at a bunch of oil drums and a keg or two.



Later in their set, they even broke out a radio-ready power ballad, which Maya swayed and emoted along to.

As the next band started to set up, Eveline got a very excited look on her face. "I think this is my band," she said, her eyes wide with hope. See, about 6 months ago she had sent me via YouTube some video footage she'd shot of a performance of this band she thought was called 01. They incorporated Mongolian influences (throat-singing, and an instrument called the horse-head fiddle) into their music, and they dressed like Chinese demons of a sort (the bassist, like a mummy, wrapped in guaze; the guitarist, like a blood-spattered ghost). The clips she'd sent me were grainy and lo-fi, but the band looked and sounded awesome.

Thing was, the band in this spot on the schedule was called Voodoo Kungfu, not 01, and in fact, Eveline was under the impression that 01 had broken up. But as soon as the bassist took the stage - in blood-sprayed mummy garb - Eveline knew that rumors of the band's demise had been greatly exaggerated. "I love the mummy!" she said (the first of many times that she would repeat this mantra through the night). The band started in atmospherically, with the drummer throat-singing while the horse-head fiddle-player pulled a haunting melody from his instrument's two strings. After building the tension to a fever pitch, the rest of the band crashed in with some ferocious doom riffage and feral roars, courtesy of their burly singer, who wore a long, ornate Mongolian robe. Eveline, Maya, and I, and even Audrey - as well as the rest of the crowd - were completely enthralled.



By the end of their set (which ruled), their frontman had stripped topless, had been splattered with (presumably stage) blood, spit on him by the mummy/bassist, and was ranting like a rabid howler monkey. Dude, it was awesome.

Now, the one thing that Maya and I had been bummed about the night before was that none of the bands seemed to be selling merch, and I really wanted some Chinese-metal-band shwag to bring home with me. So when Maya spotted 01/Voodoo Kungfu's guitarist, "the bloody ghost" (though very much out of costume by now), sitting outside the club all by himself, she dragged Eveline along and made her ask him if his band had any CDs for sale. I was standing a bit aways with Audrey so I didn't see this myself, but according to Maya, the guitarist gave them a look like they were crazy (Eveline would later explain that there's so much piracy in China, that a lot of Chinese bands don't really bother putting out official CDs). But he and Eveline struck up a conversation (he didn't speak any English), and the next thing we knew the two of them were exchanging cellphone numbers!

Later in the cab back to our respective homes, Eveline explained that the guitarist/bloody ghost had said that the band didn't have CDs but did have a DVD and that he would be willing to sell one to us, so they had exchanged numbers. Eveline said she thought he'd said something about maybe he could even come by himself and drop the DVD off, but again, she only really understands 30 to 40% of shit, so who really knows. We immediately decided that he must be hitting on her, or that maybe he'd misinterpreted "Do you have any CDs for sale?" as a weird sideways come-on - since everyone knows Chinese bands don't have CDs (see previous explanation). I said, "Too bad you're only going to use him to get to the mummy," and we all joked that she was going to end up being 01/Voodoo Kungfu's Yoko Ono and break up the band.

Then a few days later, I get a text from Eveline: "The bloody ghost just texted me! I cant understand it but hes basically like whats up. It ended w a smiley face. Bwahahahahaha!!!"

Basically they've been texting ever since, and tonight he might even join us for drinks. We'll see. Maya and I have plotted out the 01/Voodoo Kungfu VH1: Behind the Music storyline - Eveline starts dating the bloody ghost, I come back to the States and rave about how awesome his band is to my metal label contacts, the band gets signed and puts out a critically acclaimed debut album. Then on the eve of the band's highly anticipated first U.S. tour, Eveline breaks the news that she actually has had feeling for the mummy all along, the band breaks up. Years later Eveline writes a tell-all memoir called I Loved the Mummy.

mao metal than you can handle (part 1)

Since returning to Beijing and to the 7 Days Inn, Maya and I have laid pretty low this week. That's the beauty of being in China for a month - we don't have drive ourselves nuts, running around all the time, trying to jam every sight into a few days. Plus, this is the week of China's national holiday and just about the whole population of the country is on vacation and traveling, which means that pretty much every sightseeing location is absolutely deluged. We'd rather wait it out than deal with the crazed masses of Chinese tourists.

What we have done this week is discover Beijing's metal underground - and it's pretty fucking cool. On Monday and Tuesday we went to the final 2 nights of the 3-day "Metal Music Festival" held at 13 Club in the Haidian district. I had found out about the venue and the fest via the website metaltravelguide.com, which lists metal clubs, bars, and record stores around the world and is an invaluable resource for any globetrotting headbanger.

The club ended up being a suitably scuzzy place tucked into an alley between a couple of noodle shops. Our cab driver had gone far beyond the call of duty trying to deliver us right to the door of the place, and we greatly appreciated his efforts considering the general rudeness that we've encountered so far in China. As we walked up to the venue entrace, we passed the bathrooms, which were located outside and reeked - but this hadn't prevented a crowd of black-clad, spikey-haired Chinese teenagers from congregating right by them. Maya and I recognized a few Pantera T-shirts, a Metallica tee, an Emperor shirt, among others, in the mix, and we immediately felt at home. The woman at the door turned out to speak English and as we paid our 40 yuan each (a little more than $5) to get in, she asked if we knew any of the bands playing, and if so, who we were there to see. I had read about one of the groups on the bill, Ritual Day, supposedly a Chinese black-metal band, but never actually heard them, so I dropped their name; the woman seemed to know that I didn't really have any idea who they were.

Inside we found a small-ish but comfortable space - maybe around the size of Southpaw in Brooklyn - filled with cigarette smoke, covered in graffiti, and jampacked with young Chinese metalheads, little Asian gothgirls, some college kids not wearing anything resembling the metal uniform, and even a few whities besides ourselves. The first band of the night - Hg, I think they were called - was just hitting the stage, and they kind of sucked, but not for lack of effort. Their sound was mixed very poorly (you could barely heard the guitar), but they played some not-terrible nu-metal-tinged metalcore and were most notable for their very skinny, very young-looking bassplayer who provided endearingly impassioned clean backing vocals. The next band, Sleep Deeply, were kind of a My Dying Bride-ish gothic-metal band with both a dude singer and a chick singer (stuffed into a nice corset). The guy singer had plenty of stage presence and a resonant death-metal roar, but the rest of the band sounded thin and rather amateurish. As for the crowd, they kind of bobbed along to the music but didn't do much in terms of moshing or rocking out. Maya and I, while entertained by the ernestness of both bands and, of course, the novelty of witnessing metal played in China(!), were beginning to wonder if, when it came down to it, Beijing's heavy music scene just kind of sucked.

Then, after we stepped outside for a breath of bathroom-smelling air (which seemed fresh compared to the haze of cigarette smoke inside the 13), we heard the third band, Avulsion, start up their set. It sounded like totally decent metalcore so we ducked back into the club to check the group out and were shocked to find a little Chinese girl (she looked all of 15) providing the totally brutal growling vocals! In between songs, she would grin embarassedly and brush her hair from her eyes, then, without hesitation, suddenly channel some demonic force, let out serious banshee screams, and headbang like a maniac. The crowd went nuts, and one kid even launched himself up into a bit of crowdsurfing. Maybe Beijing did have some idea of what was up after all...



Next up came this group called Suffocated, and they kind of ruled, cranking out super-groovy thrashy death metal. They had plenty of personality, too, care of their short, chubby, affable vocalist-bassist, whirlwind drummer, and a sweet contrast in dual guitar players - the stoic prettyboy on stage left, and on the right, a dude with a face like a Chinese ghost mask and a full range of pained expressions to match his intricate shredding (Maya commented more than a few times about how awesome he was). The crowd clearly knew and loved them, and by the end of their set, so did we.

Maybe even more entertaining than the band, however, was the crowd's display of a moshing technique that Maya and I have never seen before (which is saying a lot considering the insane number of metal shows we've been to in our time). Midway through the band's set, Suffocated's frontman said something in Chinese, clearly exhorting the fans to action the way a vocalist in the U.S. might call for a "circle pit" or for the "wall of death." In response, about half of the audience members suddenly put their arms around the shoulders of the person next to them, then everyone bent slightly at the waist, and proceeded to synchronized headbang together in a completely bizarre rocking-out group-hug of sorts. Maya's and my jaws instantly hit the floor.



We would see this "move" repeated a few more times over the course of the night, and the next day, when we told Eveline about it, she said that she's seen a variation on it, which is for audience members to put their arms around each other's shoulders, form a circle, and then skip counterclockwise, "Ring Around the Rosie"-style!

After Suffocated, Ritual Day took the stage and ripped out some completely respectable buzzing black metal with horror-movie keyboards. They lacked a little in the charisma department, though, and after a while the songs started sounding very same-y, so Maya and I decided to leave while we - and Beijing metal - were ahead. The experience had been an exhilarating one, really the most fun I've had at a show in a long time. We both agreed that it reminded us of the thrill of some of our first concerts, before everything became too familiar and before we - and it seemed everyone else in the audience - became too jaded. In contrast, this show had been almost innocent in its total passion and utter lack of self-consciouseness. Little did we know that the next day, the "Metal Music Festival" would prove to be even cooler... (to be continued)