Wherever I May Roam

nostalgic insomnia

2008-01-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

It's been hard, now that we're back home, to find the motivation to actually write the post I'd promised about the last days of our trip. I started writing something shortly after our return, but as we've slowly sunken back into the "real life" we'd left 4-plus months ago, and as I've been struck with the undeniable feeling that "for all my travels, I've gone nowhere," my sense of inspiration seems to have drained away. But in an effort to not completely give in to the inevitable post-trip malaise, I've finished the post that I'd abandoned (also added some funny pics to my entry about the Waitomo caves), and for what it's worth, here it is:

Saturday night, our first night back home, I didn't get to sleep until about 4:30am, woke up the next day around noon, felt surprisingly alert for the most of the day, but then that night, couldn't find my way to La La Land until 5:30 (and Maya, who'd passed right out Saturday night, didn't get to sleep until 6 or so) - strangely, our jetlag seems to be getting worse. It's as if our insides are trying to will their way back to foreign soil.

It didn't help matters that I had just finished watching High Fidelity on TV, which had left me introspective and nostalgic, and then, trying to fall asleep in bed, I was reading this weird-as-fuck book called Samedi the Deafness that our old friend Fish had given to Maya earlier that day when she'd met up with him and a few of her other college friends. If I didn't feel like I was tripping out already, this absurdist little tome was dragging me deeper into a drippy, waking-dream dementia of sorts. (If this sounds like a recommendation, it isn't - I've since given up on reading the book, which, unfortunately, didn't seem to be going anywhere.)

It's really no wonder that Maya and I are all out of whack. The final push home was, as I said in my last post, truly epic - 3 flights over 72-some hours, with a day and a half in Toyko stuck in the middle. The first flight, from Auckland to Bangkok, was 12 hours of hell (though not quite as bad as the 14-hour flight from NYC to Tokyo that kicked off the whole trip) - there were no less than 3 babies in our seating section, and they took turns wailing their pudgy, wobbling, barely human-looking heads off. I watched two movies - the totally unnecessary Invasion of the Body Snatchers re-re-remake, The Invasion, (starring Nicole Kidman, who's becoming increasingly alien-like herself) and the totally unnecessary sequel to an unnecessary sequel to 2 awesome movies, Live Free or Die Hard - both of which sucked. Our next flight, 5-plus hours from Bangkok to Tokyo, was, by comparison, almost relaxing - completely infant-free, it was possibly the quietest flight I've ever been on. I even got in a few winks of rest, but still, when we landed in Tokyo, I was very glad that we'd switched-up our itinerary to include a night's stay on solid Japanese ground - another 12 hours in the air, as had been originally planned, and I'm sure Maya and I would have both lost our shit, hijacked the plane with the plastic cutlery packaged with our air-meals, and brought everyone down with us into a deathly escape at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

But if we thought we had paved ourselves a smooth way home by stopping in Tokyo, this delusion was quickly dashed once we arrived at the hotel (we thought) we had booked a few days before. When tried to check in, the staff couldn't seem to find our reservation. The young Japanese man at the frontdesk (who looked all of 15, an impression encouraged by his ridiculously oversized suit jacket) asked us in very broken English if we had a printout of our booking confirmation. We didn't (we had discussed printing one out after we made the reservation in New Zealand, but since we hadn't needed any such printouts over this entire trip, we decided against it), but Maya noticed that there were two computers with free internet access over in the corner of the lobby, and we told the young dude that we could show him our confirmation email. So we logged into my hotmail account, and the first thing we see is a new message from the site through which we had made the reservation; the email had been delivered during our last two flights, and basically, it said that the hotel we were standing in was all booked up - the "confirmation email" we had received in the first place, it turns out, hadn't actually confirmed a room, just that we had tried to book a room. Like we didn't fucking know that.

Maya and I looked at each other, and with a silent, telepathic nod, decided to bluff. We found the original confirmation email, opened it, and showed this to the hotel staff, pretending that the second email didn't even exist. After much bumbling around (they couldn't seem to figure out how to get the printer to work, and because their English wasn't so great they were trying to translate the confirmation e-mail into Japanese via an online translator), they printed out a copy of this, and brought it back to an office behind the frontdesk. Maya and I waited nervously, trying to think up a plan B, which ultimately went something like this: Put our big backpacks into storage in the lockers at the nearby train station, and go to Shibuya and "Love Hotel Hill," and stay in a Love Hotel. The complication here was that, for some unknown reason, none of the 3 or 4 ATMs we'd tried so far were accepting my bank card, and so we had no cash on us to actually pay for a locker - or for a subway ticket to Shibuya, for that matter. In short, we were looking pretty well fucked.

But miraculously, the staff fell for our bluff and when they finally reappeared, they bowed numerous times, apologized profusely, and said that while they did not have our reservation, they did have a room, and they would give us the rate at which we had made our online booking. All was well and good, except that the hotel only accepted cash, of which we had none. This problem was remedied pretty quickly though - we did have a little over $150 in U.S. dollars, so we found a bank, changed this to yen, then we planned to catch the subway to Shinjuku where we knew there was a CitiBank (my bank) from our previous visit to Tokyo, and hopefully we'd be able to sort out my ATM card issues there. On the way to the subway, however, we found a 7-Eleven - from our previous visit we knew that the chain has ATM machines that accept foreign cards, and that proved to be the case here, and we were able to take out some much-needed cash.

Once this last misadventure was out of our way, our day and half in Tokyo was fucking awesome. Tokyo had been wet, hot, and humid when we were there last. Now it was chilly and windswept; the trees, bare; the air, smelling of winter. It was comfortable and familiar in a way that filled us with pride - we knew Tokyo - and yet different enough to be exciting all over again. We went back to "Electric Town" in Akihabara, where we shopped for twisted toys and ogled maids. We went back to Harajuku, where Maya shopped for boots (unfortunately, without success). And just a few blocks from our hotel in Ueno, we stumbled on a little shrine where we noticed a group of maybe 10 men wearing matching kimono-type outfits and standing in formation in the courtyard, holding a long bamboo ladder on their shoulders. Curious, we joined the small cluster of bystanders that had gathered around - this included a middle-aged man nonchalantly holding the leash of possibly the most disgusting dog I have even seen: it was mostly pink, almost completely hairless, with scratches and scars over its body, and a football-sized tumor/goiter dangling from its stomach. The diseased canine was quickly put out of our minds, however, as the men we were watching slowly lifted the bamboo ladder up on one end, standing it up into the sky; they used staves with metal hooks to hold the ladder in place, and then, to Maya's and my amazement, one of the men fearlessly scrambled up the visibly wobbling ladder. Once at the top, he flipped, twisted, and twirled about, balancing himself precariously on the improvised structure, saluting the heavens with various kungfu-like hand gestures and improbable poses.

Eventually, he climbed back down the ladder, improbably still intact, and another man scrambled up, taking his place, and doing his own set of ritualistic acrobatics. This man was followed by yet another. Maya and I looked on, truly astounded, as the few other bystanders around us (all of whom were Japanese, I think) gasped, applauded each move, snapped photos, and shifted to get a better view. It's completely random shit like this that makes traveling in a truly foreign part of the world like Asia so remarkable - there is always a surprise just around the corner; sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but your mind is guaranteed to be blown.

And sometimes your taste buds, too. The one thing we were absolutely determined to do while in Tokyo again was to revisit the restaurant Sushizanmai - the memory of the fish we'd eaten there during our first time in Japan had had us salivating like Pavlov's dogs many a time over the last 3-plus months. And when we went there the night before our final flight back to NYC, the food did not disappoint. Here's just one of the many sushi orders we consumed (till we were sick) that night - clockwise from the top left: fatty tuna, broiled fatty tuna, medium fatty tuna, pickled ginger, egg, chives, and horse mackerel.

I don't know if I'll be able to eat U.S. sushi ever again...

home is where your ass is

2008-01-06T03:18:00.000-05:00

It's 3am, and for those of you who were worried, we're home, back in Krooklyn. Maya is fast asleep, I'm wide awake and jetlagged as fuck. Not sure if I'm still on New Zealand time or Japan time or, more likely, Martian time. Either way, it definitely feels strange to be back after 4 months of backpacking, stranger than I had expected. Our neighborhood seems somehow like a skewed version of my memory of it, and our apartment looks slightly alien, like some artist's recreation of our apartment with almost imperceptible alterations that you can't quite put your finger on but that fuck with your subconscious mind. it doesn't help that are also some unmistakenable alterations as well, care of Maya's niece Anna and her boyfriend, who were housesitting/subletting the place while we were away. For instance, both the DVD player and VCR were mysteriously unplugged from the TV, and the ethernet cable unplugged from our cable modem with the telephone line plugged in where it should have been... There's a cigarette burn in our couch, and when we first came in, no sheets on the bed... Where are we?

The trip back to this final and right now seemingly most foreign of destinations was epic and exhausting - 3 flights spread over 3 days. I'll post about all that shit, most notably our day and half in Tokyo, soon, hopefully tomorrow if the mind clears. Right now I need to try to find sleep.

out of the darkness and into the light

2008-01-02T04:26:00.000-05:00

This afternoon Maya and I begin the long trip home. We have a 12-hour flight from Auckland to Bangkok, then a 2-hour layover, and a 5-and-a-half hour flight from Bangkok to Tokyo. Our original itinerary next had a 5-hour layover in Tokyo and then a 12-plus hour flight back to NYC in store for us, making for a absurd total of 30-plus hours straight traveling time. Fortunately, we were able to reschedule our flight from Tokyo to NYC and sneak in one last day in Tokyo, where we plan to, well, eat sushi. That's the extent of the plan, really - eat sushi and shake off some of jetlag cobwebs from our heads. Maybe the strangest thing about the trip home is that we'll be traveling backward in time - our flight from Tokyo leaves on the evening on January 5th, and even through the ride is over 12-hours long, we'll be arriving home on the same date and at almost exactly the time that we left Japan. Visiting Tokyo feels something like visiting the future anyway, so maybe it makes sense...

Yesterday we drove back to Auckland from Waitomo, an area best known for its insane cave systems and its flourescent biomasses of glow worms. The Kiwis, as their driving suggests, are total maniacs, adrenaline junkies bar none, which makes New Zealand a great place to engage in all sorts of extreme activity that a layperson off the street just wouldn't be allowed to partake in Stateside. For instance, on the caving trip that Maya and I took while in Waitomo, after an almost ridiculously cursory rappeling tutorial, we found ourselves rappeling (or "abseiling," as the Kiwis call it) down two separate long, narrow cave tubes plunging down into the earth. The first channel must have been, at least, 20- or 30-feet deep; the second, no less than twice as long. I had the dubious honor of rappeling down first - even before our guides - which meant I was lowering myself all alone into utter darkness with only the lamp on my helmet to light my way. It was truly amazing - and I was too busy focusing on my rappeling technique and on the twisted formations and tiny passages I had to navigate through to think about the movie, The Descent, which might have made me slightly more hestitant to proceed if I had.

Once inside the cave, we tightrope-walked over a log bridge across a subterranean chasm, were led by our guides through various squeeze-spaces and claustrophobic chambers, and then rode a zip-line (or a "flying fox," as the Kiwis call it) through an unlit cavern hall full of stalactites and stalagmites!

The only thing that wasn't awesome about our spelunking adventure? The totally dorky blue-and-orange jumpsuit coveralls and white rubber boots that we had to wear.

Other highlights of our four days in Waitomo include:
- Walking by flashlight along a nature trail in the middle of the night and occasionally turning off our lights to see thousands of glow worms in the darkened foliage around us.
- Exploring a small but surprisingly deep and winding cave by ourselves and discovering a wall covered in ginormous Wetas, a gnarly prehistoric insect native to New Zealand.
- Taking a boat-ride cave tour and drifting along a subterranean river beneath dense constellations of glow worms.
- Discovering that the goat living next door to our Bed & Breakfast had broken free from its chain and stationed itself outside the door of our bungalow, where it was bumping its horns against the glass, holding us hostage inside.
- Eating our New Year's Eve dinner at the Huhu Cafe, the one good restaurant in tiny Waitomo Village (population: 45), where we were staying - it was our second time in two days eating there, and the place is really amazing, with a totally delectable tapas menu. We had lamb medallions with toasted cous cous and mango chutney, green-lipped mussels with bacon and baked cheese, goat cheese tart with an amazing salad of pears, walnuts, and something called "rocket," to name a few of the dishes sampled.
- Stopping at the Otorohanga Kiwi House & Native Bird Park on the way back to Auckland and seeing the Kiwi bird in the flesh. We felt like we couldn't leave New Zealand without actually seeing one of the creatures, since they are such a part of the country's culture (such as it is) - not only do the locals call themselves "Kiwis" but every native brand's logo seems to feature the bird in some way. And what a strange, silly (and surprisingly big) bird it is. When we first saw the female Kiwi (the House has two birds - a male and a female) running inside her pen with her awkward loping gait, Maya and I both started laughing outloud.

But for all our adventures, in many ways, driving around New Zealand reminded us of being in small-town America - except with crazier accents, crazier driving, and many, many more sheep. It also reminded us of why we live in New York City - which makes coming home just a little less difficult.

the road to mordor

2007-12-30T17:55:00.000-05:00

First off, Happy New Year everyone (if anyone is still reading - not sure cause you lazy bastards aren't commenting!). I've fallen a bit behind on this thing because decent internet access has been surprising hard to come by in New Zealand - it was faster in Laos! Anyway...

On Friday Maya and I left Rotorua, feeling a little underwhelmed and a lot poorer financially (shit is so expensive in New Zealand that it's almost inevitable that we'll end up feeling ripped off); we drove about 3 hours south to Tongariro National Park where we planned to take on the Tongariro Crossing, a 17-kilometer (about 11-mile) hike that usually takes at least 7 hours to complete, and which, I just found out a second ago, actually had two people die on it last year. Basically, it's no relaxing stroll along the beach, and while Maya and I have some serious hiking under our belts - we made a 7-hour climb halfway down and back up the Grand Canyon last year - we're not exactly what you'd consider to be the outdoorsy, trekking types, so we (particularly Maya) were a little nervous going in. Our trepidation wasn't helped by the fact that we had booked only one full day (the next day, Saturday) in the area so we were praying for the weather to be on our side, and yet, as we drove through the National Park to our guesthouse, we found ourselves in an absolutely torrential downpour. Then as we arrived at our accomodations, an attractively rustic-looking ski lodge, we saw the hikers who had been stuck on the trail during the rain returning from their trek, and they looked miserable, all drenched from head to foot, covered in mud, and limping.

That night we packed our backpacks - with multiple layers of cloths, snacks, lots of water - and went to bed around 10:30 - the shuttle driving us to the head of the trail left at 7:30am the next morning and we had breakfast before that at 7, so we set our alarm for 6. Now, you should know that Maya has had an issue for most of our trip - the night preceding any activity that you would really want solid rest before (like, when we hiked the unrestored Great Wall), she hasn't been able to sleep. And such was the case that night. Even with the help of two pills and earplugs, when the alarm started beeping at 6am, Maya had only gotten a few winks of rest, and she was fucking pissed. "I'm not going to do it!" she said quite for a few times of the Crossing, "I can't do it." But while Maya can whine, pout, and scream with the best of them, when push comes to shove, she's pretty fucking badass, and when she finally calmed down, stepped into the hallway, which was freezing cold, and was shocked into awakedness by a cold blast of outside air, she decide to go for it.

Good thing we did, because the weather ended up being perfect, and Tongiriro Crossing ended up being possibly the most amazing hike we've gone on anywhere. We climbed through Martian-looking plains...

...up crumbly lava flows, past snow-capped peaks...

...above the rather vaginal "Red Crater"...

...right to the banks of surreally colored mountain-top mineral lakes...

...and to the side of the active volcano Mount Ngauruhoe. I think I said of the Great Wall of China that it seemed like something out of The Lord of the Rings; well, Mount Ngauruhoe literally is something of The Lord of the Rings - it was the stand-in for Mount Doom in Peter Jackson's movies.

And the long, steep, exhausting climb up the side of Ngauruhoe was the road to Mordor in the films. Like true nerds, Maya and I joked about Gollum hiding behind the corner of various crags and recited lines of Frodo and Sam's dialogue as we made our somewhat less epic and arduous journey (we finished the Crossing in just about 8 hours, including breaks for lunch and to snap hundreds of photos), feeling not unlike two little hobbits awed in the face of nature's majesty.

kiwi xmas

2007-12-25T22:41:00.000-05:00

It's the day after Christmas here in New Zealand, or as they call it, Boxing Day. Don't ask me what the fuck Boxing Day is, but whereas nothing was open yesterday here in the rotten-eggs-smelling town of Rotorua, almost nothing is almost here today. (It took Maya and I 3 internet cafes before we found one that was open.)

Christmas away from home is always weird, I guess. Holidays (or birthdays, anniversaries, any of the things that normal people celebrate, really) aren't a big deal in my family, but Christmas has been the one day a year when I've always come home from wherever I was, and then, with my parents and at least one of my two brothers, went for dinner at my Aunt's place, where I saw her, her husband, my two cousins, and my grandfather. I don't see my immediate family that often, let alone my extended family, but I can't remember a year when I wasn't there for Christmas (there might have been one - I just can't remember it), so it is weird to be away, and so far away.

New Zealand has been beautiful - and fucking annoying. Part of this has to be our current state of mind as our trip draws to a close - it's like being stuck right in the middle between two worlds (home and halfway around the globe from home) and not being sure where we'd rather be, so we're not quite happy, no matter how we look at things. But it's also been annoying because, well, New Zealand is annoying. The weather has been annoying as fuck so far - it will be the most gorgeous blue-skied and sunny day one second; the next, you're caught under a thunderhead that's pissing down rain even as you can see those sunny blue skies right ahead taunting you. The driving has been annoying as fuck, too - whereas the roads are long, straight, and largely traffic-less in Australia (at least where we were), the roads in New Zealand are winding, narrow, occasionally unpaved, tipping over vertiginous cliffsides, and the native drivers are fucking maniacs - they drive retardedly fast even on the most serpentine strips, and because the roads are generally one-lane and full of blind bends, they end up tailgating you when they think you driving too slowly (i.e. not suicidally). The owner of our guesthouse in Rotorua explained that everyone in New Zealand starts driving at 15, and so there are a lot of inexperienced, hormonal drivers out there, and as a result a lot of bad driving, and a lot of accidents. Then there are the prices - like Australia, shit seems mad expensive. Of course, we're spoiled, having just come from Southeast Asia, but shit really is expensive. It's almost impossible to get dinner at a half-decent restuarant for less than $50 each; a music CD averages about $30; and most of the attractions charge, at least, $25 per person admission fees. We're fucking unemployed, so this shit is gonna break the bank quick.

Still, despite such obstacles, we managed to see some amazing shit. While staying in a beachfront hostel in Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula for a few days, we hiked through the bush, past rolling pastures...

...through tangled jungle, and by majestic coastline...

...to the world-famous Cathedral Cove.

Another day we went on a boat ride through the choppy surf (shit was like a rollercoaster) along the rugged, volcanic coastline, visiting small islands and strange crags rising from the ocean.

And in Rotorua (which is plagued by that aforementioned rotten-egg smell due to the town's biggest tourist draw: it's sulfurous geothermal activity ((geysers, bubbling mud pools, hot springs, volcanos, that sort of shit)), we walked through Wai-O-Tapu geothermal park, where we watched the Lady Knox Geyser erupt some 30 feet into the air...

...and walked among amazing formations like the Champagne Pool...

...and the Devil's Bath, all bubbling up from the earth's hot, acidic, mineral-pigmented core.

We also went to Mitai, a Maori village site where we ate traditional Maori food called hangi (meat and potatoes cooked on hot stones under the earth for 3 hours), watched a cultural show (not as cheesy as it sounds) complete with singing, dancing, a weapons demonstration, and the infamous Maori pre-battle pump-up ritual, Haka, which goes something like this:

After the show, our guide - this huge, intimidating, tattooed Maori woman - led us through the dark jungle to her tribe's sacred spring, which had massive eels swimming in it (she claimed that they had swum there over a period of 3 years from California and would likely swim back at some point to die), and had the clearest water Maya and I had ever seen. The spring also had glow worms gathered around its bank, creating eerie flourescent constellations over the water; our guide explained that the glow worms were actually not "worms" but the larvae of a particular type of fly - maggots, in other words - and that the glow was actually due to an enzyme in the larvae's feces. Basically, we were oohing and ahing over a bunch of maggots' glowing shit. Still, by the time we left Mitai around 10:30pm (we'd been there for nearly 4 hours), we felt like we'd learned a lot about the Maori traditions (including their insane facial tattoos), which was cool since the Maori are a much bigger minority in New Zealand than we had realized (everyone working at the Auckland airport, for instance, seemed to be Maori).

As for our New Zealand Christmas, it was a strange one indeed. We spent most of it hiking through the bush right around our rather remote moutainside/lakeside guesthouse just outside of Rotorua, a location we selected mostly to be away from that rotten-egg smell. True to the New Zealand weather pattern so far, it was raining for much of our hike, but it was still a pretty awesome time, something like walking through a prehistoric landscape of massive ferns and towering redwoods, everything covered with moss and strange fungi. We didn't see any dinosaurs, but the lake we were walking along - Tikitapu (Blue Lake) - is reputed to have its own lake monster, named Taniwha. While we didn't spot the beast, we did see lots of New Zealanders laying out "sunning" themselves and/or picnicing on the lake's sandy beach, and swimming, waterskiiing, and jetskiing on its waters, even though it was freezing cold and raining out. Those Kiwis are fucking crazy.

Drenched after our hike, and after some lunch, we drove into Rotorua, which was basically a ghost town and walked through the hot springs and bubbling mud pools in the free-access Kuirau Park. They were kind of underwhelming - but the playground in the park was awesome, all futuristic-looking and interactive, much cooler than any playground we'd ever seen in the States. We played on that for a while - two Maori kids stared at us the whole time like we were crazy - until the rain got too hard and we had to retreat to our car.

When we returned to the guesthouse, a huge French family has arrived for the night (which they would be spending in the room right next to ours), including mom, dad, two little girls (one 5; the other, 6), and a tiny baby, not even 6-months old yet. As we stepped into the main door, the baby was wailing its head off and burping - we were not happy. This whole trip, we'd been talking about how annoying all the Frnech tourists are, and how they all seem to bring their half-naked children along with them to the most ungodly regions of the world. "French babies" had become a common, half-joking pet peeve of ours - Conan O'Brien does a hilarious impression of a French baby sometimes, and I would do my (not-so-good) impression of his impression in dismay whenever we were confronted with some new Gallic brat. It seemed somehow fitting that the Christian God would have given us, the atheist and the Jew, our own French-baby roommate as gift on his son's birthday.

But as we cooked our rather bizarre Christmas dinner in the guesthouse's shared kitchen - a tomato, scallion, and feta cheese salad (Christmas colors, it turns out!); BBQ lamb chops; garlic and butter potatoes; and a horrible store-made apple pie that made me wish dearly for my Aunt Ellen's delicious homemade pie - the clearly very harried mom of this French family told us sympathetically that her baby was "not a screamer" and that we shouldn't have any problems sleeping. And as it turned out, the French baby made hardly a peep all night, and though I haven't gotten a solid night's rest since we arrived in New Zealand, Maya and I both slept better than we have in days. Our own Christmas miracle.

the end is nigh

2007-12-22T04:33:00.000-05:00

Though we'd only spent a week in Australia, by the time we left a few days ago, we felt pretty fucking satisfied. We'd snorkeled and scuba-dived at the Great Barrier Reef, we'd hung in a town full of kangaroos, we'd driven through "the bush," seen massive crocs chomping chicken wings and massive endangered turtles laying their eggs. We'd even enjoyed a stomach-bursting Aussie BBQ, care of our awesome Bed & Breakfast owners. Stuffed with grilled meats, and a couple liters of Bundaberg's famous ginger beer and rum-and-cola-in-a-can, we flew off for 2 weeks in New Zealand, the final country and the final 14 days of our epic trip.

And the first day we arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, an earthquake hit the country. But it was on the other side of North Island (which is the half of the nation we're spending our time in), and we didn't even feel a quiver. Which isn't to say that we're feeling fine...

There are definitely things we look forward to about coming home. We miss our friends and family a lot. And it will be great not living out of a backpack, and finally sleeping in our own bed. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that the imminent end of our journey has our hearts heavy and has a dark cloud hanging over the New Zealand landscape, as beautiful as it is (more on that to come). But while this is almost certainly the most awesome thing that we've done in our lives so far, we don't plan on it being the most awesome thing we've ever done, so maybe we shouldn't feel so bummed out after all.

down under

2007-12-18T02:02:00.000-05:00

With Malaysia sitting atop our list of countries to revisit (we'd made the most new friends there, spent the second shortest time - just a week - there, and of course, there's the fucking Thaipusam festival still to see), Maya and I headed off for a week in Australia. Arriving in Sydney felt at once comforting after the last 3 months of Asian insanity (we can actually drink the tap water?! No squat toilets?!), but also strangely anticlimactic. A safe western city - yawn. (An opera house shaped like a bunch of big clam shells - double yawn.) And after Southeast Asia, shit seemed really expensive (and even compared to the U.S., it is). The next day we were flying down to Hervey Bay, and from there we were renting a car to drive to Bundaberg and Bargara Beach, where we'd be spending 4 days, visiting the Great Barrier Reef, among other activities; so we spent much of our afternoon in Sydney looking for CDs to listen to during our forthcoming drive - the new Serj Tankian solo album and the new Dillinger Escape Plan album. There were tons of record stores near our guesthouse (which was in a trendy, Village-like area called Newtown), but we couldn't find the Serj album for less than 20 Aussie dollars (which is just about 20 U.S. dollars!) and the Dillinger for less than 30 dollars(!) (so we bought the former, passed on the latter - both are really fucking good, by the way; a warning from Maya about the Serj CD: "The songs might get stuck in your head and drive you insane!").

But if Sydney seemed anticlimactic after everything that has come before it on our trip, once we got down to the coast and started driving around "the bush," as the Aussies call it, the great Down Under did not disappoint. First, there was just the view from the plane of the coast, the ocean, the islands, and the Reef - simply stunning. We couldn't help but be filled with anticipation.

Then there was the driving - my first time driving on the "other" side of the road, which has been a bit of an adventure but not nearly as difficult as I had feared (my biggest problem is that I keep turning on the windshield wipers whenever I try to turn-signal). And the landscape has been amazing - wild, wide-open countryside; vast, dramatic skies; perfect clouds...

...and, we were particularly excited to come across, the occasional kangaroo-crossing street sign.

Most of all, it has been all those crazy Aussie animals that have made our time here so outstanding - in the last 5 days, we've had run-ins with technicolor fish, 4 of the 5 most venomous snakes in the world, hungry crocs, suburban kangaroos, a ginormous nesting turtle - and a little dog named Buddy (who belongs to the owners of the B&B, Golden Cane, we're staying at) that even Maya (who's generally terrified of dogs) can't help but like...

Technicolor Fish: On our first full day along the coast, Maya and I woke at 5am, had our "brekkie" (as the Aussies call breakfast), drove an hour and a half through the bush, and went on a 9-hour trip out on the Great Barrier Reef. First, there was a 90-minute boat ride bouncing over the high waves - we saw at least two other passengers puking from motion sickness - and then, once above the Reef, Maya and I snorkeled and even scuba-dived (our first time doing the latter) in the midst of the most ridiculous menagerie of tropical fish - I don't know any of their names (parrot fish? Long, thin tube-shaped fish?), but it seemed like basically every species in Finding Nemo, other than the sharks.

4 of the 5 Most Venomous Snakes in the World: Another day we went to this place called Snakes Down Under, where this crazy Steve Irwin-esque Aussie dude, Ian Jenkins, runs a little reptile zoo, where he handles 4 of the 5 most venomous snakes in the world (all 5 hail from Australia). Visitors aren't allowed to handle any of those, but they are allowed to handle a big python - and since I had just gotten a snake tattoo before Maya and I left the States, and since this trip is, in some ways, supposed to be about gaining new strength and facing old fears (a fear of snakes being one of mine), I felt like I had to partake. And you know what, I really wasn't freaked out at all - it's been so long since I've actually tested my supposed fear of snakes that, it seems, the fear has faded away without me even realizing it.

Hungry Crocs: At Snakes Down Under, this Jenkins dude also feeds what turns out to be an absolutely humongous crocodile. We had no idea of the beast's proportions as it was laying at the bottom of a small muddy pool in its holding pen; then Jenkins - holding a fresh, fully feathered chicken wing in his hand, and wearing a Santa Claus cap on top of his Paul Hogan hat - slapped the water with a long bamboo pole and the croc, which must have been 10 feet long, exploded out of the surface, sending water everywhere as if a bomb had gone off. The creature then crawled after him and snapped the wing from his fingers with an awful crunch. That's one powerful motherfucking beast - and one crazy motherfucking Aussie.

Suburban Kangaroos: Another day Maya and I drove to this small beach town called Woodgate, where, according to our B&B owners, kangaroos are known to roam the streets and backyards. As soon as we got there (around 12:30pm), we spotted three kangaroos bounding across the road ahead of us, but when we asked a grizzled old local when/where was best for 'roo-watching, he told us that the "nasty pests" are "like Mexicans" during the midday, spenting it just "sleeping in the shade," and really only come out in the afternoon. So, with some time to kill, we decided to go swimming - the beach was virtually deserted; the surf, high; the ocean, bathwater-warm. We didn't have any towels or our swimming suits on us, so we just stripped down to our undies and jumped in.

After a few hours and a quick lunch, we drove slowly through the town, looking for kangaroos - and they were fucking everywhere! Whole crowds of them - huge adult males, cute little ones, and even mothers with babies in their pouches - hanging out in people's yards along Woodgate's perfect suburban lanes, just lounging, sitting, standing, grazing, and staring back at us! It was bizarre and amazing, everything we could have hoped for - and yet as we repeatedly stopped our car, gawked, and snapped endless pictures, the locals just continued with whatever they were doing, almost oblivious to what was to them an everyday presence. Maya and I could only conclude that if monitor lizards are Bangkok's squirrels, then apparently, kangaroos are Woodgate's.

A Ginormous Nesting Turtle: Perhaps our most remarkable animal encounter was later that same day, when we went to the Mon Repos Conservation Park, a turtle rookery where visitors can see endangered loggerheads laying their eggs during their late fall/early winter nesting season. Maya and I got there around 6:30pm, and along with a group of maybe 40 other visitors, we were led by down to the quickly darkening beach, where, we were told, a turtle had been spotted crawling onto the beach. As we approached, however, we saw that the creature - which was huge, 3 or 4 feet long, and maybe half as wide - was making a U-turn back toward the water. The female scientist leading us explained that the turtle must have seen us and been scared off, but she said that another turtle was up on the beach not too far away and had already begun digging out her nest. Unfortunately, when another scientist went to check on this turtle, she discovered that it was a very young female who didn't seem to know how to properly dig her nest, and she had already abandoned her first attempt and was on to a second; the researchers didn't want us to disturb her in the middle of her struggles, so they told us to all sit on the sand and wait. As we were waiting, we spotted a dark shape emerging from the water directly below us; it was, most likely, the original turtle re-emerging from the ocean. The first scientist told us that we would have to all shuffle over while keeping low to the ground to get out of the way of the turtle without her seeing us and getting scared away again, so, in a truly absurd scene, all 40-plus of us crab-walked and crawled through the sand as the loggerhead lumbered out of the water and up onto the sand, seeming to follow us the whole way, forcing everyone to crab-walk and crawl even further. (Our undies were still wet from our earlier swim, so Maya got to do all this in a skirt without any panties on! Don't worry - the skirt was long and rather tight, so there was no free show for anyone.) Then we sat frozen for a long time as the turtle set up almost right next to the group and started making her nest. We ended up watching her for over 2-hours (till 10:30pm or so), as she meticulously dug out her egg chamber with her two back flippers, as she lay 129 eggs, as she filled up and buried over the nest with sand, and then, as she crawled back into the ocean. It was a ridiculously arduous process; big loggerheads are clumsy on land, and this one was clearly exhausted by the end. Plus, the turtles expel the salt that accumulates in them during all their time in the ocean through their eyes in what are known as "turtle tears," which meant that as this loggerhead labored through the night, she appeared to be crying. What made the experience all the more powerful and poignant was that this turtle, like many others, had misjudged her nesting spot, placing it below the high-tide mark, which meant that, if left there, her eggs would all drown. In such cases, however, after the turtles return to sea, the scientists move the eggs to higher nests that they have made themselves; and in this case, Maya and I got to help carry the freshly-laid turtle eggs into the new nest. Unlike snakes, I've always loved turtles - I had many of them as pets as a kid, and there's something about their solitary nature, the way they carry their homes on their back, their slow-and-steady approach to life, their old, craggy, wizen faces that really resonates with me. As Maya and I watched the massive loggerhead crawl back through the darkness into the ocean, knowing that her species is facing possible extinction, and that for all her hard work, the nest she had just made would have been doomed if it had not been for the scientists here, I realized that I had discovered another thing I like about turtles: their persistence in the face of futility, fighting the good fight even when defeat seems assured. Which is really what it feels like sometimes, trying to live a good life in this world of ours.

batu caves

2007-12-13T18:21:00.001-05:00

The day after the "canopy walk," we went to see the Batu Caves, one of the most important sites of Hindu worship in the world. Every year, during the end of January/beginning of February, thousands of devotees make a pilgrimage to the caves for the Thaipusam festival, where they engage in various acts of devotion, notably, carrying/enduring various types of kavadi or burdens. As good ol' wikipedia explains, "at its simplest this may entail carrying a pot of milk, but mortification of the flesh by piercing the skin, tongue or cheeks with vel skewers is also common. The most spectacular practice is the vel kavadi, essentially a portable altar up to two meters tall, decorated with peacock feathers and attached to the devotee through 108 vels pierced into the skin on the chest and back. Fire walking and flagellation may also be practiced. It is claimed that devotees are able to enter a trance, feel no pain, do not bleed from their wounds and have no scars left behind."

Unfortunately, we were a month too early for the fest, but the caves site was pretty fucking spectacular nonetheless. Here's Maya outside the main gate - you can see the stairway of 272 steps leading up into the darkness of the main cave, the Temple Cave... as well, of course, as the 120-foot-plus gold-painted statue of the Hindu diety Lord Murugan.

As you walk up the 272 steps, there are wild monkeys everywhere, playing in the nearby trees; leaping, sitting, and sliding down the stairway railing; and some, even crawling around the steps themselves.

We saw this one enjoying a flower garland left as an offering inside the cave.

And we saw another monkey taking a completely unprovoked and unexpected swipe at an Indian dude walking down the steps not far from us. So yeah, they may be cute but are not to be trusted.

The temple cave, as you can see, is fucking huge, and - as you can't see - is full of colorful tableaus depicting a variety of bizarre dieties in a variety of equally bizarre interactions (blue multi-armed women standing on little baby-sized men with handlebar moustaches; cows with the heads, and boobs, of beautiful women, etc.).

Me, below some of temple cave's many drippy stalactites.

After the temple cave, Maya and I took a personal tour of another Batu cave, the accurately-but-not-so-creatively-named "Dark Cave." Here we are before the tour in our spiffy spelunker's helmets. The highlight of the tour was probably when, about 10 minutes into the cavern, the walkway came to life with all sorts of creepy-crawlies - it was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie - most of which turned out to be cockroaches that live off of all the guano (bat excrement) dropped on the cave floor.

Finally, here I am standing in front of a big statue of an insane-looking green monkey-faced dude at the bottom of the temple cave. Can't pretend to know much more than that (Maya says that she read that he is the most rarely worshipped diety from the Hindu pantheon - can't imagine why).

Our visit has only made us want to come back during Thaipusam and see all the insanity for ourselves - if not actually "mortify our flesh."

welcome to the jungle

2007-12-13T18:13:00.000-05:00

Malaysia boasts some of the most spectacular rainforests in the world, and remarkably, some of it lies not far outside of KL. In fact, even right from inside the city, you can see deep green forest-covered moutains brushing up against the sky. In between visiting metal stores and rocking out at hardcore shows, Maya and I went to FRIM (Forest Research Institute Malaysia), a scientific jungle-study center that was only recently opened to tourists and which is still off the beaten track (though I can't imagine that this will remain the case for long). There we tackled the "canopy walk," a precarious 600-foot-long rope-and-wooden-plank trail hanging from the trees some 90 feet above the ground, right in the midst of the jungle canopy, where it's used by researchers. The walk was ridiculously bouncy and the structure seemed ready to snap apart at any second, and the views were amazing - we saw families of monkeys leaping from tree top to tree top, and, through occasional breaks in the tangled foliage, we saw the KL skyline, with its famous Petronas Towers, in the distance. Indeed, civilization as we know it seemed fantastically far away.

kl rock city (part 2)

2007-12-12T08:57:00.000-05:00

Unlike Beijing, where there are tons of metal bands playing live on a regular basis but almost none of them bother to put out albums, in Malaysia, there are tons of local bands writing, recording, and releasing albums, but there are very few live metal shows. Blame this on the government's last banning of "black metal" a little over a year ago and the subsequent raid of a metal fest in Kuala Lumpur and the detainment of over 300 of the fans and musicians there. Oddly, however, while Malaysian metal bands may be keeping to the studio and to the practice space for the time being, local and international hardcore bands seem to play out in KL almost every month.

In fact, during Maya's and my one week in the city, there was a big annual hardcore fest called Bridging Oceans 3, featuring Southeast Asian hardcore bands from Malaysia, Singapore (or "Spore," as the kids call it), the Philipines, and Indonesia, going down. I found out about it through this cool site, Malaysian Gigs, that I stumbled on while looking to see if there were any shows in KL while we were in town, and Maya and I showed up at the venue, the MCPA Theatre upstairs in the Chinese Assembly Hall - a rather official-looking convention center right by KL's Chinatown - bright and early at 1:30 in the afternoon this past Sunday, when the gig was set to go down. There was some kind of Chinese book fair taking place on the ground floor, which made for many awkward interactions between the black-clad and tattooed hardcore kids coming through to the fest and the very straightlaced book fair attendees. And on the second floor, right outside the MCPA theatre, there was a little exhibition in honor of Sun Yat-Sen, the first president of the Republic of China; all the hardcore kids seemed to find this hilarious, and many took photos of themselves giggling in front of a large photo of the communist leader.

In true DIY fashion, the gig didn't start until after 2:30, over an hour late, but other than that, there wasn't much that Maya and I could complain about - the show was pretty fucking awesome. The crowd was an amazing assortment of Malaysian, Indian, and Arab hardcore kids, including at least two girls in Muslim headscarves(!), many wearing shirts with "MYHC" (an acronym for "Malaysian hardcore" and a play off of "NYHC,"New York hardcore") emblazoned on them. As soon as the first band, a cool Malaysian quartet called Back on Track with an adorably nerdy-looking singer, hit the stage, the crowd went apeshit, moshing, circle-pitting, and skanking, sometimes with a weird synchronicity that suggested the violent choreographed dance routine of some bizarro hardcore boyband. Even more remarkable, however, was just how fucking friendly everyone was - kids smiled at us, said hello or welcome, some shook our hands, one complimented my Pantera T-shirt. And almost as soon as we showed up, a skinheaded Singaporean dude (named Yus) in a Madball basketball jersey came up to us, asked us where we were from (he was very impressed that we were from NYC since most of his favorite bands were NYHC groups like Sick of It All, Cro-Mags, and, well, Madball), and started introducing us to other people (turned out, Yus knew just about everyone there), telling us about the MYHC scene, and just generally shooting the shit. Later, in between sets, a random kid noticed that while everyone else in our general area, including Maya, had a chair to sit on, I was just squatting down on the floor, and in a truly unprecedented act of thoughtfulness, he lifted a chair from the stack behind him and placed it by me, gesturing for me to sit. He then chatted with Maya for about half an hour before excusing himself - "I have to go mosh," he said simply - and disppearing into the crowd.

As for the bands, they were totally solid, ranging from old school to new school, the more punk-inflected and the more metal-influenced. And some even cranked out a number of highly entertaining covers of songs that we actually knew, by bands including Hatebreed, Sick of It All, and Black Flag. The most popular act of the night had to be the Malaysian group xELEVENx, who had almost the entire audience piling on top of each other, trying to get to the mic to sing/shout along to every song which they clearly all knew by heart.

I ended up buying a CD of theirs (and a T-shirt of this "Spore" moshcore band, Overthrown), and Maya and I ended up hanging out at the show for nearly 7 hours, leaving only right before the final band, and only because we were absolutely starving. It turned out that My Chemical Romance were playing that night at the stadium almost exactly across the highway from the Chinese Assembly Hall, and when we walked to the nearby skytrain station after getting dinner in Chinatown, the My Chem show was just getting out. As we pushed disdainfully through the throngs of Malaysian emo kids (who were sopping wet because it had started raining midway through their outdoor concert - and probably because they'd been weeping along to every song), one of the kids, a young dude, looked at Maya and said as we passed, "So beautiful," followed by what sounded to both of us like, "Jew-bol," which Maya and I joked must be Malay for "Jewess" or something. I decided that while, yes, Maya is "so beautiful," she must seem extra-hot - like the forbidden fruit or something - as a Jewess in a Muslim land. Not to mention as a newly minted member of the MYHC scene among a sea of emo kids.

kl rock city (part 1)

2007-12-10T00:12:00.000-05:00

When Maya and I first started telling people at home about the trip we were about to embark on, some of our friends, family, and random acquaintances thought it sounded fucking cool; others thought we were fucking crazy; most probably thought the trip sounded fucking cool and we're fucking crazy. One of those who thought we were just crazy was Maya's cousin Felix. Felix is a few years older than we are, and he's a security guard for one of the building complexes down in our 'hood in Coney Island. He thought we were nuts, and in particular, he thought we were nuts to go to Malaysia, mostly because it's an officially Muslim country. "Be very careful," he warned us, adding to Maya: "And don't let anyone know that you're Jewish," advice seconded by Maya's mother.

So, right now we're in Kuala Lumpur, where we've been for the last 5 days or so, and as shit turns out, KL (as the locals refer to their hometown) definitely is Muslim - there are gorgeous mosques all over the city; women in headscarves and even full-on burkas walking everywhere, sitting in cafes, strolling through the malls; there are restuarants advertising things that no restuarant in the States would wisely advertise, like "Iraqi food" and "Iranian cuisine" - but it's also, well, not. For instance, Christmas is fucking huge here - there are decorations everywhere, carols playing in the shopping centers; it's fucking bizarre. And most of the men that we see walking with the women in burkas are dressed like total wiggers (or "miggers," or whatever the term would be). And the city is actually insanely multicultural, full of Southeast Asians, Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and even the occasional whitey.

If anyone thought we had reason to watch our backs in Malaysia (and they did), it has turned out to be quite the contrary: Kuala Lumpur has proven to be the friendliest city we've visited yet (and the safest and cleanest after Tokyo and Kyoto). Everyone smiles at us, random people say hello (almost everyone speaks really good English, which is the country's second offical language), and we've had almost absurdly congenial conversations with Malay taxi drivers, Bangladeshi waiters, the Iraqi dude at the internet cafe...

And we've eaten the best food - hummus and kabobs, grilled lamb chops, dim sum, "chicken rice" (which, as the name suggests is just chicken and rice but so perfectly prepared that we've eaten it almost everyday for lunch at a restuarant where we've become quick regulars) - and even more impressively, have yet to get sick (a first for any Southeast Asian country).

But maybe best of all, Kuala Lumpur is rock 'n' roll as all fuck. This is actually a very big surprise, not only because Malaysia is Muslim but because the country's Muslim government's National Fatwa Council has gone out of its way in recent years to ban "black metal" - by which they actually meant any heavy music listened to or played by people in black T-shirts, not just the church-burning, corpse-painted brand of metal commonly called by that name - in the country (for more on the bannings, click here). And yet, on our second day in KL, Maya and I went off to find this metal record store, Nebiula HM Shop, which is listed on the metaltravelguide website; we ended up at this shopping center, Campbell Complex, off the beaten tourist track, and on the 1st floor, which had not just the one, but four metal-oriented stores. Nebiula is the best of these, and it's run by this awesome dude Jaei, who's the vocalist of one of Malaysia's leading bands, Sil Khannaz. Maya and I talked to him for an hour or so, as he played us music by his band and a variety of other Malaysian bands (he had a good two shelves full of albums by local bands, way more than we've seen anywhere else on this trip, except Japan) and told us about the scene. He said that the Malaysian government has been "very difficult," and that after the ban on "black metal" (strangely, most of the local bands, even now, seem to play in that actual style), much of the scene had to be rebuilt from the ground up. I ended up buying almost 10 CDs, and he ended up giving me another 4 or so as "free gifts."

After Nebiula, we stopped by the other stores, and in one, we had the most hilarious interaction with the totally adorable middle-aged proprietress, who walked us through her shop's metal section, describing various products with the sweetest little voice: "Ooh, this band, they play death/grind. Very nice." "Slayer, 'Live Undead' T-shirt. Very old-school vibe." We were giggling almost uncontrollably the whole time, and Maya eventually asked the woman if she actually listens to metal, and she explained that metal is very popular and her customers always ask for that kind of music so she has to stock it, and she started listening so she would know about it and that she did like a lot of it. "Some people think it is just noise, but I think some is actually very nice," she said. Maya told her that she was a great saleswoman, but that the whole experience was very crazy, Maya said, like "having my mother trying to sell me metal," which is pretty much how I felt about it, too. (To be continued)

boy oh ladyboy

2007-12-08T04:52:00.000-05:00

Returning from Ko Chang and swinging through Bangkok for one final night before our flight out to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the next day, we went to the world-famous kathoey cabaret, Calypso, at the luxury Asia Hotel - where we definitely were not staying, by the way; our home for the night was a way more budget joint, coincidentally called the Malaysia Hotel. The Malaysia had been recommended to us by our old friend Max from Vietnam - he told us that it's a place with a dark past, the onetime hangout of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who preyed on Western tourists in the Seventies, luring them to their deaths with promises of cheap drugs. Now, Max told us, the Malaysia was a gay hotel and the best budget place to stay in Bangkok - as long as you didn't mind all the "poofs mincing about," as he put it. We didn't.

In fact, staying at this notorious hotel with its blood-spattered history and going to see the Calypso cabaret seemed like the perfect way to bid farewell to Thailand - and to celebrate the eve of the 3-month mark (Dec. 5) of our trip.

The cabaret, in particular, was fittingly insane. The theater was exactly what you'd expect of a cabaret - all plush red-satin seats, little round tables with small, dim lamps on them, and overpriced drinks. And the show was a kitschy, flamboyant, sometimes hilarious mix of dancing and lipsyncing to classic showtunes, frenetic flamenco, cheesy Asian ballads, really cheesy techno, etc., performed by a cast of, I'm guessing, 50, at least 30 of whom were ladyboys. And not just any ladyboys, but the most convincing, glamorous, and, in some cases, dropdead gorgeous transvestites and/or transsexuals probably anywhere in the world (definitely click the link above for a look). As a straight man, I can say that it was truly a night of mixed emotions - attraction, dismay, disbelief, confusion, more attraction... Maya and I had read in BK magazine (which is kind of like Bangkok's Village Voice), that while, in the States, the average age that people have sex-change operations is in their 50s, the average age in Thailand is the mid-to-late 20s; this made me think that probably most of the ladyboys in the show were post-op and, for all intents and purposes, women, and so I didn't feel quite so conflicted admiring their voluptuous forms and sultry moves. As for Maya, this was one of the few times when she had no absolutely problem with me ogling scantily-clad "ladies." And she found my "issues" to be hilarious.

It was with similarly mixed emotions that we left Thailand the next morning. It definitely hadn't been our favorite country so far, and it wouldn't be our first to visit again, or our first to ever call home, but it had provided us with some of our greatest challenges and strangest - and gayest - memories.

the beach

2007-12-05T09:59:00.000-05:00

Leaving Bangkok once again, we spent 4-and-a-half days on the island of Ko Chang for a little "vacation from our vacation," as I called it. We took a 5-hour-plus bus ride from Bangkok to the town of Trat, then a 15-minute-plus sawgtheow ride out of town through the jungle to the dock, a 20-plus-minute ferry from the mainland shore to the island, and a brief rumble along Ko Chang's one and only road before we finally arrived at the Paradise Palms bungalows, where we somehow lucked out and landed their "penthouse," a cozy little beachfront cabin...

...with a postcard-perfect palmtree-framed view of the ocean. The sun literally set over the lapping waves, right in front of our porch, bathing us and our room in orange warmth every dusk.

We came as close to doing nothing as possible for us. We swam in the warm, crystal water...

... (suffering through the occasional little jellyfish sting along the way), ate (lots of fruit, meat, and French fries), drank (Singha beer, and pineapple juice with a splash of rum), watched the sunset each day, and read. I had just finished reading an amazing book, Welcome to Hell, this Irish dude's absolutely gripping, harrowing memoir about his 8 years of wrongful incarceration in a Bangkok prison (while in Bangkok ourselves, Maya and I literally traded off reading chapters, we were so hooked); now on the island, I read another thought-provokingly relevant book, The Beach, the novel-cum-Leonardo DiCaprio flick (which I haven't seen, by the way - I can't stand DiCaprio) about backpackers seeking untouched utopia on a Thai island and finding much more than they bargained for. It's a derivative work - there's a little Heart of Darkness, a little Lord of the Flies - but a good read, nonetheless, and the author really nails backpackers in Southeast Asia: how they talk, brag, and dream, and how ultimately silly and deluded they often are - myself included, perhaps. That said, Maya and I weren't seeking any sort of utopia on Ko Chang, just a place to relax, to catch our breath, to get away from all the craziness of our trip so far. And in that, (despite Maya having to overcome her fear of canines by facing a few of the island's energetic beach dogs, and me getting some nasty coral cuts on my right foot and maybe even nastier sunburn on my back) I think we succeeded.

and then there was redlight (warning: sexual content - not for the faint of heart)

2007-11-30T09:52:00.000-05:00

After our adventures setting/dodging shit on fire in Chiang Mai, Maya and I headed back to Bangkok for a few days on our way to the island of Ko Chang. Instead of staying in the northwestern tourist center of town, we decided to find a guesthouse in the center of the actual city where we'd have access to more public transportation options, like the skytrain and the subway, instead of having to rely on assholic taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, as we'd had to during our first time in Bangkok. We also decided that maybe one of the reasons we hadn't enjoyed that first visit so much was because we hadn't embraced the city...in all its depravity. Seeking to remedy that this time, we jumped onto the skytrain and headed off to Bangkok's world-famous/infamous Patpong redlight district.

Exiting the Sala Daeng skytrain station, we first had to navigate through a narrow, sweaty, crowded gauntlet of street-vendor stands hawking bootleg clothing, bootleg music, and very real-looking military, police, and martial-arts weaponry. Then we hit the first of the two Patpong streets. Almost immediately, a Thai dude shouted out to us from the front of a dark club, "Sir, come in! bondage show!" Only then did I notice the mannequin in a ball-gag and leather S&M gear hanging above the entrance. Maya and I shook our heads politely, passed another club, where three scantily-clad Thai women were gyrating on the stoop while techno pounded from the venue behind them. And then the first of a seemingly endless line of solicitors approached us with the following totally insane pitch: "Want to see [insert 'Pingpong' or 'Patpong'] show?" He then shoved in our faces what looked like a laminated index card, on it printed a long list of mindblowing acts to be included in this show: "Pussy writing, pussy smoking, pussy horn, pussy bottle-opening, razorblades in pussy, fish in pussy," and so on and on... "You can see first - no pay," he continued. "If you like, then pay. Come, follow me."

These solicitors would then lead us, sometimes physically, with a loose grip on the arm, to the sketchiest-looking of the numerous clubs stacked on top of each other along the streets - dark, dirty doorways up narrow metal staircases on the second floor of whatever building (the one venue name that sticks in my head is "Super Pussy" in big neon lights). First-floor spaces mostly seemed to be your basic go-go and strip clubs, their open doors revealing stages jampacked with fairly attractive young Thai girls in bikinis or topless, rocking back and forth listlessly (it couldn't really be called "dancing" due both to the girls' lack of enthusiasm and the lack of space) to the thumping 4/4 beat. The more outre performances are religated to the upper floors, apparently.

The streets outside, meanwhile, bustled with a strange motley crew, due, in no small part to the fact that Patpong Street Number 1 not only hosts redlight fare but also a market full of stands selling T-shirts, watches, CDs, and souvenirs; so, while there are plenty of the expected types - aged sexpats, drunken fratboys, sleazy Europeans, glamorous kathoeys (on Soi Jaruwan, the gay strip), Japanese salarymen (on Soi Thaniya, the Japanese strip), and fast-talking solicitors - milling about, there are also plenty of everyday tourists and even families brushing uncomfortable shoulders with the rest. As we pushed through the throngs, Maya and I saw a cute little white kid, maybe 3 years old, cradled in her mother's arm; a Thai woman was pinching the child's cheeks: "Pingpong show, pingpong show," the woman was babytalking to the kid till the mom, understandably disturbed, pulled away into the crowd. We also noted a teenage boy, maybe 15, staring at the index card of a solicitor eager to whip him into a nearby den of iniquity; the boy's gray-haired mother tapped him on his shoulder: "I'll be across the street in the internet place," she said, as if sending him off to see the pussies at work and setting up their post-show rendevous.

As for us, after a few false starts (we followed a solicitor into one place, only to run into a white couple on their way out who told us not to go in (("It sucks - the girls just stand around and try to get your money," they said)), then we walked into another club to find that exact scenario being played out), we ended up seeing something of a Pingpong or Patpong show (still not sure which is the correct terminology). Attracted by the fact that no one was trying drag us into the place, by the fact that there were only matronly-looking women working the door, and by the cardboard sign promising that we wouldn't have to pay more than the price of a beer, we ended up sitting on a padded bench in the corner of a dark, dingy stripclub. The white dude next to us had two strippers - one topless; the other, completely naked - draped over him, giggling. In the section to our right, a whole crew of wrinkled, older white men was laughing and drinking with - and fondling - a number of strippers in various levels of undress. And on the stage in the middle of the room, 5 or 6 strippers were gyrating lethargically, with bored and/or pissed-off expressions on their faces. Except for the two girls with both their bras and panties on, the women were not hot at all.

Maya and I sat, sipping our beers, trying to touch as little of the walls, seat, and table around us as possible, and watched, barely keeping our jaws from hitting the floor. During our maybe half-hour there, we saw a woman blow a horn with her pussy, another woman pull a good 8 feet of rainbow streamers out of her pussy, yet another woman pour some clear liquid from a bottle into her pussy and pour it back out whereupon it had mysteriously turned purple, and then a final woman pull maybe 6 feet of thread out of her pussy - the thread had sewing needles hung from it every couple inches, and as she tugged the string out, she pinned paper flowers through alternating needles till she had a garland hanging from between her legs!

Now, I'm not really a stripclub kind of guy - as far as I'm concerned, a stripclub, at its best, is just an exercise in sexual frustration, and one that I'm paying for. That said, there was nothing sexually frustrating about this place because the whole thing was so profoundly un-erotic. And, perhaps, a little bit unsanitary. At some point, a middle-aged Thai woman (strangely, in her clothes) stopped in front of our table, and put out a hand for shaking. Not knowing what else to do, Maya and I reluctantly shook her hand. We all stared at each other for a few moments, then the woman pointed to her own teeth and smiled, then walked away. "Do I have something stuck between my teeth?" Maya asked me, completely confused by the interaction, as was I. (We later observed this woman giving apparently platonic massages to some of the other clientele.) Soon after, two chubby strippers, who had been "dancing" on the stage, came up to us, and put our their hands for shaking; again, not sure what else to do and not wanting to insult them, we shook their hands. They then awkwardly - though sweetly - tried to chat us up with what limited English they had, clearly campaigning for us to buy them drinks. It was definitely time for us to go.

As we dashed back out into the relatively fresh air, the matronly women outside thanked us for attending. And as we walked away up the street, the solicitors swarmed on us again, as they did every foreigner, tried to angle us into their clubs. "Want to see show?" Maya shook her head, proudly telling them, no thanks, that she already had.

When we finally turned the corner off of Patpong and onto the main strip, Maya suggested that we try to find a pharmacy where we could buy some hand sanitizer. Not a bad idea, considering the disturbing number of hands we had ended up shaking. We stopped in a few places, but no luck. Riding the skytrain back to our hotel, resisting the urge to scratch our noses or bite our nails until we'd had a chance to wash, we felt oddly content knowing that while Bangkok may have kicked our collective ass during our first stay, now we'd seen her naked.

a blaze in the northern sky

2007-11-26T06:12:00.000-05:00

As I alluded to in my last post, when we were in Vang Vieng in Laos, we lost an email regarding a hotel reservation in Thailand. The reservation was in a Northern city called Sukhothai, and it was from November 23 to 25, which is when the city was holding its annual celebration of the Loi Krathong festival, also known as the Yi Peng festival or "the festival of lights." Since we couldn't find our reservation info and since hotels are booked up well in advance over the festival dates, we had given up on seeing the fest and instead extended our stay in Laos, scheduling our flight back to Chiang Mai for the 23rd. Then we relocated the email, but now it was too late - we tried desperately to figure out a way to get from Vang Vieng to Sukhothai in time for Loi Krathong but without any success. Resigning ourselves to returning and staying in Chiang Mai then, we contacted the guesthouse, the Trigong Residence, where we'd stayed our first time there; the proprietor emailed Maya back explaining that he was all booked up and that finding a place to stay over the dates of fest, which, it turns out, is also celebrated in a big way in Chiang Mai, would be very hard. He added, however, that if we really needed it, he would try to help - but we didn't expect much. We began to formulate contingency plans for returning to fucking Bangkok, the city that had so royally kicked our collective ass the first time we stayed there. As it turns out, the owner of the Trigong, going way beyond the call of duty, actually did email us back in a few days, saying that we were all good, he'd booked a place for us to stay!

So, on Friday, we flew back from Luang Prabang to Chiang Mai just in time for the start of the festival, which, let me tell you, was pretty fucking insane. Basically, the whole 3 days - actually, mostly the nights - are a pyromaniac's wet dream. First, there are the krathongs, little floats about a handspan in diameter made from a section of banana tree trunk and decorated with elaborately-folded banana leaves, flowers, candles, incense sticks, etc. During the festival, everyone buys one from vendors lining the streets, lights the candles and incense on them, and lets them go in the Ping river, which runs through Chiang Mai, until the water is full of flickering trails of light. Couples often float two krathongs together, which is apparently considered quite romantic by locals, so that's just what Maya and I did.

Second, there are the Saa lanterns, rice-paper lanterns-cum-hot air balloons that Maya and I first saw in the skies of Beijing. Vendors are selling these everywhere, too, and everyone is buying them (some of them are massive, even bigger than the folks purchasing them), lighting them up in the streets, and sending them airborn, creating a truly surreal sight: a night sky filled with constellations of slowly drifting orange flame (some of the lanterns also have fireworks attached to their bottoms, so they drop a trail of sparks beneath them as they fly). But not all of the lanterns make it that high - some are blown into nearby trees, where they burn themselves out; others aren't filled with enough hot air by the time they are let go and fall lazily back to the earth like lethargic comets. Maya and I, fortunately, had both the skill and the patience to successfully launch the two balloons we bought into the sky. Some say that the Yi Peng festival evolved from the Brahmin belief of floating away evil - if so, we floated whatever bad vibes surrounded us so far, far away that they turned into stars in the heavens.

Finally, there are all the fireworks and firecrackers. These, in every imaginable form, are also being sold by a gazillion roadside vendors, and everyone - but most kids and teenagers - are setting them off in the streets and over the river deep into the night. Sometimes it literally feels like you're in the middle of a warzone as you walk through the city, as explosions flash and loud cracks resound all around you, dangerously close, sometimes right under your feet or over your head. Nowhere did we feel like this more than when on the last, climactic night of the festival, we went on a dinner cruise on the Ping river, a boat ride that, though the food was ridiculously good - I had honey-roasted spareribs with som tam (Thai green papaya salad); Maya had crispy fried mushrooms with kaffir lime leaves and tom kah gai (Thai coconut-milk soup) - was the least romantic cruise we've ever been on. It felt more like riding on the boat in Apocalypse Now, down a river into the heart of darkness. Everyone on the banks seemed to be setting off fireworks or tossing firecrackers, all into the center of the river, as if the opposite shores were at battle and we, on the boat, were stuck in the middle. More than a few fireworks actually hit our vessel, a few exploding right against the side where Maya and I sat! By the time, we and the maybe 14 other passengers disembarked, we were all literally feeling a little shellshocked and more than a little relieved.

Add to the krathongs, the flying lanterns, and the fireworks, endless food stands, bands playing, Thai dancing and drumming competitions, parades on land and on the river, probably the biggest bazaar we've been to so far on this trip, and a square filled with lanterns (of the non-flying variety) and even trees made of lanterns (one of which, Maya and I are standing in front of below). Like I said, fucking insane.

As if the fest weren't action-packed enough, on Sunday Maya and I spent our afternoon, riding ATVs - through the jungle, past water buffalos and ginormous white, humped cows, by mysterious, massive clay jars sitting in banana-tree groves - and shooting guns at the Chiang Mai shooting range. Here I am blasting my Glock.

Maya, with her little .22.

And Maya again, with her very big sniper rifle!

Somehow it just seemed like a fitting way for us to celebrate Loi Krathong.

down the tube

2007-11-23T05:55:00.001-05:00

It's funny how quickly shit changes on you when you're travelling like this. One second you're on top of the world; next, nothing seems to be going right. So it was in Laos.

We were enjoying Luang Prabang so much that we decided to extend our stay in the country and bumped our return flight to Thailand back by a few days. And since our experience in the cave temple on the opposite shore of the Mekong had been so fucking cool, we decided to go to the Lao town of Vang Vieng, which was supposed to have a number of Buddhist caves that you can explore, as well as a river - the Nam Song - that you can kayak and tube down, and amazing karst peaks akin to those in Halong Bay. We booked what claimed to be a 5-hour "V.I.P. bus" ride from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng.

What we couldn't have guessed about the bus was that 1) it would have big speakers and a TV inside and there would be absolutely atrocious Lao karaoke playing for the first 3 hours of the ride. Think 3 hours of the shit below but worse...

2) that the toilet in the bus would be a particularly awkward hybrid of an Asian-style squatter and a western-style sitter, situated in the back of the vehicle, which bounced so extremely over the rugged, pothole-ridden roads that trying to keep your stream on target - there was also nothing to hold onto in the bathroom cabin - was just about impossible; 3) the vast majority of the trip would be on roads that were not only rugged and pothole-ridden but also winding through jungle-covered mountains along a nauseatingly serpentine course that had me fighting to hold in the vomit for much of the ride; 4) our lunch break would be in a shanty-town-like village in the middle of one of these jungle mountains and would include almost nothing that didn't look like it would make the latter fight against spewing, a losing battle (we ended up having some rice and bought some packaged chips and cookies); and finally, 5) 5 hours actually meant 7 hours.

Excruciating as this ride was, our first impressions of Vang Vieng suggested that perhaps it had all been worthwhile. As we neared the city, the landscape became even more dramatic than it had been, as otherwordly limestone peaks crawling with tangled foliage and vines reared up from the jungle floor around us. The bus finally dropped us off at the "bus station" - really just a big, dusty abandoned airfield along the road - and we caught a sawngthaew to our guesthouse, passing as we went the river and the jagged peaks rising above its shore.

That evening we stumbled on a fantastically chill bar along those same shores that had four or five little shacks on stilts with two hammocks inside each; we claimed a shack, sprawled out in our hamocks and watched the sunset, feeling perfectly relaxed and content as we sipped our bottles of Beer Lao to the tunes of Pink Floyd.

Unfortunately, this was just a brief respite. The next day we went on this caving trek that we had booked the night before. We were under the impression that it would be just us, another couple, and a guide, and that we would be taking one of the "customized tours" that the trekking place we'd booked the thing at advertised in big bold letters over beside its front door. Yeah, bullshit. We ended up being jammed into the back of sawngthaew with, it seemed, 20 other travelers so tightly packed that one dude had to sit on the floor and 3 of the guides had to hang on outside on the back of the truck. We had been told to show up at 9:30am, but the sawngthaew wasn't even ready for us until 10, and then it did a couple circles through town to pick up other passengers and a variety of kayaks and tubes before finally heading off out of town.

When we arrived at the starting point of everyone's various treks, we were all separated into groups; Maya and I into one with maybe 8 other people. Our guide - a fat, amiable Lao - told us that we'd be visiting four caves, tubing and swimming inside one, and visiting four villages. We couldn't hold our tongues, and Maya told him that we weren't going to any villages - we've been to enough already along our trip so far, and we've found that most are just poor and depressing and/or just an opportunity for the villagers to try to get you to buy their trinkets and shit. Our guide seemed a little taken aback and confused, but he agreed to arrange for a vehicle to take us back to town before the rest of his group went on to the villages.

Then it was off to caving. The first cave set a poor precedent - it was just a little nook in a cliff face with a big golden-colored Buddha in the back and an even bigger man-made "Buddha's footprint" in front. There was also a small altar in the opening of the cave where, our guide explained, you could shake this little shaker-thing, then take a slip of paper with Lao script on it off these little pads - the writing supposedly would tell your fortune. Maya, if you don't know already, is very superstitious and pretty into this kind of shit, so she shook the shaker and tore off a slip; she handed it to our guide for translation. He looked at it and hesitated before finally explaining what it said. "It says to keep an eye on your husband," he explained with a somewhat uncomfortable grin on his face. "He might have a girlfriend. Not now, necessarily, but sometime, in a few years." As if the cave itself hadn't been disheartening enough, now Maya was really distressed. And of course, I didn't help things by teasing her that this sounded like a really good fortune for me.

Then we went to the next cave, which ended up being adventurous as fuck but also absurdly dangerous. Let's just say that Lao safety precautions are basically nil. First, our guide asked the group if any of us had brought our own flashlights ("torches" he called them, as the Brits do); fortunately, Maya and I had, because, it turned out, he inexplicably only had 4 "torches" with him. These were divied up between our tourmates; Maya and I had been talking to this Irish guy and girl who had been traveling together through Asia about along as we have, and the dude ended up getting this headlamp that basically looked like a lightbulb attached to an elastic band and wired to a slightly sized-down car battery that you hung around your neck on a string. With him wearing this absurd contraption, we all climbed up and down these slippery, muddy rocks and into the dark mouth of the cavern.

Our guide, having given out his 4 flashlights, was holding just a tiny little candle and walking around in his flip-flops. We were all wearing hiking shoes or hiking sandles, and having a hard time with our footing, since the interior of the cave was essentially all mud and puddles. As walked deeper into the blackness, which was pierced only by our torches and half-assed headlamps, we passed a precariously narrow and deep crevass on our left, which the guide only pointed out after most of the group had already - fortunately, I guess - walked by it. The one safety precaution around this crevass? There was some barbed wire strung over it!

Around this point, the luckless Irish dude totally wiped out in the mud and fell into a filthy puddle; he righted himself, completely coated in dirt. His fortune wouldn't improve when we descended even deeper into the cave and he whispered to his friend that battery acid had leaked on his hand from his headlamp contraption and he said, "It really burns." Maya poured some of her water on his hand, and when our guide was alerted to the situation, he didn't seem too nonplussed and simply encouraged us to pour more water on the burn.

When we got into the third and final room of the cavern, our guide explained why caves were so important to the Lao and why so many were full of Buddha idols. Laos, it turns out, is the unlikely holder of the unenviable title of most bombed country in history - according to our guidebook, the U.S. dropped a ton of ordinance, an actual ton, on the tiny country every eight minutes for nine years during the Vietnam War! - and the caves acted as natural bomb shelters for the people.

Somehow extracting ourselves from this second cave, which, hardships aside, was really fucking cool, we went to a third cave, where, our guide explained, a Spanish dude had gone exploring by himself a few years ago and had ended up getting lost and dying a 3-days-distance inside its long winding channels. He said there was a lagoon inside, and we heard that there was a waterfall as well. Then we walked about 50 feet inside and he said we were going to turn around because it was time for lunch. Maya and I were like, That's it? What the fuck kind of "trek" is this?! All that build up for shit?!

So, lunch. Lao BBQ - meat and veggie skewers cooked over a little campfire - with fried rice and baguette, which we ate sitting on some tatami-like mats on the ground in a clearing among some banana trees. The food didn't taste bad, but I ended up getting the runs almost as soon - and very luckily, no sooner - as we got back to our hotel after the trek. After eating, we went to the fourth and final cave, a water cave in which we would tube and swim. Good thing, then, that the water was so absolutely frigid that Maya's toes went blue from just stepping in up to her ankles for a few minutes.

As he set us up with our tubes, our guide offered all of us those ridiculous headlamp contraptions with the hanging battery and the open wiring, which seemed like an insane thing for anyone to wear while in the water. I turned mine down, but the guide was insistent and Maya ended up wearing one, which kept on going out, then flickering back on, the entire trip through the cavern. As for the trip itself, Maya found it to be a journey through hell itself; I'm much less sensitive to the cold, and I found it to be pretty fucking cool, to be honest. We tubed deep into the cave, pulling ourselves on a rope strung along the rocky walls, and then we (well, mostly just me) swam in the small lagoon shrouded in darkness, where it looked to me almost as if we'd been swallowed by a whale and were swimming around in its shadowy ribcage.

When we finally got back to our hotel from the day's caving (mis)adventure, I got the aforementioned shits, then the next morning I locked up my backpack with what few valuables we have with us - which I've been doing this whole trip whenever we leave our hotel room - and then almost immediately afterwards, realized that I had no idea where the key was. While our new Irish friends, with whom we hung out for the next few days, were telling us about all the shit that they'd had stolen from them while in Southeast Asia, we were in the improbable position of having to break into our own luggage. I ended up trying to buy a bolt cutter from a local hardware store to cut through the lock, but had to settle for a wire cutter; using that, I wrestled with the little padlock for 45 minutes until it finally just popped open and I got into the bag, in which - surprise, surprise - it turned out, I had locked the key.

A variety of other things proceeded to go wrong - I won't go into the devilish details now (suffice it to say, we lost an email regarding a hotel reservation in Thailand, then found it only once it was too late to get back to Thailand to use the reservation; we were getting more mosquito bites here, in the most remote place we'd traveled to, than anywhere else in Southeast Asia so far; and some other shit) - but mostly the town of Vang Vieng began to get on our nerves. As beautiful as the surrounding landscape is, the place is a proper shithole. There are only three real streets to the place, and they're basically just all guesthouses, bars, restaurants, internet cafes, and trekking places, and 4, not 1 or 2 but 4, of the restaurants/bars play nonstop Friends episodes all day and night to steady crowds of young backpackers, most of whom seem to be basically just frat-boys and sorority-girl types but the Eurotrash version, which, take it from me, is even more despicable than the American version. And to what end are these young backpacking Eoropeans using the beautiful landscape? Put it this way, Vang Vieng's biggest tourist activity is tubing down the Nam Song and stopping at the numerous bars that dot the banks, some of which sell ready-to-puff joints. It doesn't sound like a bad way to spend an afternoon, but when you find yourself in a town that's been built up in the middle of nowhere in one of the poorest countries of the world, just around that singular pasttime, shit starts to seem awful lame awful quick.

So, after just 2 days and 3 nights there, we bought tickets for a minivan - we had heard that the minivan was much more comfortable and quicker than the "V.I.P. bus" - back to Luang Prabang, from where we were scheduled to fly back to Chiang Mai, Thailand. The morning of our ride, we showed up at the place where we'd bought the tix and where we were to be picked up at 9am sharp (originally advertised as 8:30), only to be told that the van wouldn't be there till 9:20. Then when the van showed up, it was far from "luxury", jampacked with locals, most of them with their luggage in their lap and their heads sticking out of the open windows, clearly panting for air; there was only the backseat left open for us, with shin-crushingly little legspace, and when we asked the driver if there was A/C, which we had been told there would be, he shook his head incredulously. Maya just about lost it - and justifiably so. She stomped back to the woman who had sold us the tickets and told her straightup that we were not getting what she'd promised and we wanted our money back. The woman hemmed and hawed, but eventually relented; and then we dashed to the nearest other office for bus/van tix and begged for spots on the 10am V.I.P bus, which was our last hope out of this hellhole and to our flight out of Laos the next day. Miraculously, there were 2 seats available (here's Maya in the sawngthaew to the bus station - her expression says it all),...

and after 7 nauseating - but, thank god, karaoke-free - hours back through the jungle mountains, we found ourselves back in what-felt-like the sanctuary of Luang Prabang, where, hopefully, our luck would change again but for the better.

ain't no phousi

2007-11-18T09:13:00.000-05:00

As soon as Maya and I got back from our trekking tragicomedy we decided that we were done with the hyper-touristed bullshit of Thailand, and that very night we bought plane tickets to Laos. Yes, I said Laos. And yes, we didn't really know anything more about Laos than you probably do right now (the country hadn't been on our original intinerary). All we really knew was that just about everyone we'd encountered along our travels thus far who had been to Laos said that we had to go. They said that it was like Thailand when it was still cool, still relatively untouched. We went to see some Muay Thai fights in Chiang Mai that night (saw a dude get his arm broken, another guy get knocked out via an uppercut elbow to the chin), then went back to our room, packed up, and the next morning we called a few hotels, booked a room, and flew to Luang Prabang, Laos. (We had thought about getting there via a 2-day slow boat on the Mekong River, but then we heard that one of the boats had sank recently; everyone onboard had been able to swim to shore but had lost all their luggage. We opted to fly.)

As soon as we landed, it became apparent that we were in a different kind of Southeast Asian country. At immigration in the airport, the officers checked everyone's papers then handed each of us an illustrated pamphlet with "10 suggestions will help you enjoy your visit while helping us preserve our culture and traditions." These suggestions included: "5) We believe that kissing, holding hands, and other displays of affection with the opposite sex are private acts that should be done in private," and "7) Lao people are modest, and it's uncomfortable to see people who are not. Nude bathing at the waterfall, in the river, or while rafting, is never appropriate. Lao women wear a t-shirt and shorts covering from mid-thigh to shoulders; for men, shorts are fine. When in Laos, we hope you'll do the same." Woah.

When we exited the airport, more differences became apparent. Whereas in just about every other city we've visited, there's been an onslaught of cab-, tuk-tuk-, and whatever-other-kind-of-vehicle-drivers eagerly trying to get us into their whatever-kind-of-vehicle and take us to our hotel, here there was all of 2 sawngthaews (those crazy pickup truck taxis) for at least 20 some newly arrived tourists. We ended up bargaining for a spot and a poor whitey got kicked out of the sawngthaew he'd been sitting in to make room for us. Sorry, whitey.

Rumbling through town, we found Luang Prabang to be something like Siem Reap in Cambodia - but minus all the fancy hotels. Dusty roads, kids and livestock running alongside the street, a muddy river - the Nam Khan - with naked children playing in it, shacks woven from dried palm leaves... When we finally checked into our hotel, we found ourselves in a room with walls woven from dried palm leaves...

...and a dirty, dimly-lit, and altogether sketchy shared bathroom. There's a sheet of paper posted to the inside of the door listing "accomodation regulations," including "6) Do not allow domestic and international tourist bring prostitute and others into your accomodation to make sex movies in our room, it is restriction." What the fuck had happened in this place? (That night we could barely sleep due to the rooster crowing at all hours - that shit about roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing to mark the sunrise is a total myth, by the way - and then at 4am, the mysterious sound of drumming and gongs chiming, which we learned was the monks making morning music in the nearby temple. Needless to say, we checked out the next morning - though the place was worth all $6 that we paid! - and moved to a much nicer, quieter place - for the exorbitant sum of $15 a night - along the one trendy, touristy strip in town. This new place had a sign posted behind its bar: "Say no to child-sex tourists. Don't turn away, turn them in.")

Other things that tipped us off that Luang Prabang was a little different? When walking from our first hotel to explore town, we passed a flock of flamboyantly feathered chickens, including two roosters who were clearly facing off and engaged in some crazy fighting dance. When the electricity went out - twice - at the restaurant we were having dinner at. When a little boy monk in orange Buddhist robes walked into the internet cafe where Maya was checking her email and sat down to go online. When we learned that at 10:30pm quiet time starts in the city, and by 11pm all the bars and restaurants close because the locals need their sleep so they can wake up early to give alms to the monks (who are all over town, as are their wats, or temples).

Basically, we've been in Laos for 5 days now, and it's pretty much fucking ruled. Here are just some of the other highlights:

Climbing the mountain in the center of town, Mount Phousi, in the dark on our first night to reach the golden wat at top, which is lit up at night and can been seen for miles. We found a number of young monks and Lao locals amassed up there, a few of whom seemed to be practicing their English by either conversing with the few other foreigners there or by reading lessons out of their notebooks. This dude Ian we'd befriended at the Chiang Mai airport - a 24-year-old New Yorker who'd just been laid off from his soul-sucking investment banking job and decided to use his severance by travelling - told us that he'd heard about a wat in Luang Prabang where monks go to practice their English by talking to tourists. This, it turned out, was it. While Ian started conversing with an 18-year-old kid who told him that he'd had to drop out of school in order to work a construction job that pays $2 a day to support his family, Maya and I, feeling much less social, sat on a bench, watching the Mekong River in the moonlight, and made fun of a young white woman who we could overhear talking to one of the monks: She was ostensibly helping him practice his English, but it sounded to us like she was pretty obviously hitting on him.

Laughing at the names of various estalishments around town. You see, in the Thai and Lao languages, P-H is pronounced with a P sound, not an F sound, as it is in English. So, for instance, the Thai city Phuket is actually pronounced Poo-ket, though it's temting to pronounce it Fuck it. This being the case, think about how the word Phousi, as in Mount Phousi, would be pronounced. And think about how Phousi Massage, Phousi Gallery, Phousi Hotel, et al, would be pronounced. Needlessly to say, Maya and I were in hysterics.

Taking a sunset boat ride on the mighty Mekong river and riding on the tin roof of the long, narrow, otherwise-wooden boat for most of the ride. The view of amazing, the wind fresh and cool in our faces - all the stress instantly drained from my body...

About an hour into what had been an awesome ride, the boat pulled up to a floating fuel station, which turned out to be closed. Apparently the boat was almost completely out of gas because our driver then began shouting in Lao at any passing vessel, eventually hailing down two, which pulled up next to us to listen to our driver's plea. The second vessel agreed to drive us back to the dock and so we switched boats in the middle of Mekong and sped back to shore, laughing at the unrelenting adventure/incompetence that we've encountered in Thailand and now Laos.

Watching Sin City upstairs in the teahouse/bookshop L'Entranger Books and Tea, a cozy oasis of semi-familiarity.

Taking the local boat to the other side of the Mekong where we found ourselves on a trail where we came across no more than 4 other whities in the course of a whole day; we explored abandoned temples, crumbling in the jungle, overgrown with palm trees and vines, and we came across, at the top of a long stone stairwell, a cave temple locked with a huge padlock. Retreating to the nearest abandoned temple, we found a man, who looked rather like a bald young monk but in street clothes, and asked him if there was any way we could get into the cave. He said that we should buy a ticket - he directed us to a little ticket table sitting under a tree (tickets were 5,000 kip each (about 50 cents) - and that he had the key. Next thing we knew we were being led back down the jungle path to the cave temple by a maybe 10-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, both carrying flashlights (fortunately, we had brought our own along). They unlocked the door to the cave and led us inside. The cave was huge, winding and opening up deep inside the mountain, and pitch-black. "Buddha, no head," the little boy would say periodically, before flashing his light on the statue of a Buddha sitting among the stalactites in some subterranean corner - it's head, the kid correctly pointed out, broken off. The girl was mostly silent the whole tour; the boy, hilarious - making monster noises in an attempt to frighten Maya (she, of course, responded by making her own animal growls and sinister faces in the glow of her flashlight), singing bits of English-language (I think) songs, and telling us at one point to all turn off our lights - so that he could make even more monster noises in the absolute dark. Maya and I wanted to explore the cave even more, but the kids told us, "Sleeping," whenever we asked if we could go into a particularly shadowy offshoot of the cave; we think that they were trying to say "Slippery," but "Sleeping" made me imagine that we were the naively intrepid tourists in some horror movie and the kids were trying to warn us of the evil "sleeping" in the dark. When we finally emerged back into the light, the little boy pretended to shut the door on Maya, the little bastard, then when we tipped the kids a dollar each, the little capitalistic bastard asked for a second greenback since, as he explained, he had talked to us more than the girl. We just laughed - "You're like 5-years old," said Maya. "You get a dollar."

Exploring Khuang Si waterfall, about an hour's drive outside Luang Prabang - though our completely mad sawngthaew driver only took half an hour getting us there, whipping around the winding mountain roads as he did at terrifying speeds. The waterfall was gorgeous, multi-tiered and an otherworldly blue color due, we think, to its heavy calcium content, which had also built up strange stalactite-like structures along its banks (the photo below just shows the main section of the falls)...

We hiked to the top of the mountain alongside the falls (passing along the way a small animal sanctuary complete with bears who had been rescued from "bear bile farms" - bear bile is apparently a staple of Chinese medicine - and a tiger, who had been rescued as a cub from poachers), where we wandered through the jungle and, to alert any large cats that might be prowling in the area to our presence, we sang Pantera's "Mouth for War," Life of Agony's "Through and Through, and Metallica's "Fade to Black" complete with guitar solo to which we air-guitared along - if only some upsuspecting hippies had stumbled upon us up there. The truckride ride back was even more insane then the ride there had been - our lunatic driver was stopped on a number of occasions by herds of water buffalo loping about in the middle of the road, then he stopped to pick up three locals who piled in with a basket of vegetables; one unrecognizable veggie fell to the floor of the truck, and I picked it up to return it, but the Laos villagers shook it off, pointed that it belonged on the floor. Maya and I were confused. Then they placed a little baggie of cherry tomatos and a komquat-looking thing on the floor as well. Soon our sawngthaew stopped again, it seemed in the middle of nowhere, and the three passengers disembarked with a smile and a wave to us and our driver - it was then that we realize that they had left the veggies as payment for the ride! Our driver continued careening along the jungle road, then he suddenly screeched to a halt, calling back to a group of people hanging out in front of their palm-leaves-woven-shack-on-stilts; an older man runs over to the truck with a water bottle filled with a mystery clear liquid (it turns out to be Lao Lao, a 50-proof liquor distilled from sticky rice) and a shot glass, pours our driver a shot - "Oh, my God," says Maya outloud - which he downs in a smooth, unhesitating gulp. Then the older man pours a smaller shot and offers it to Maya who declines, then to me, who laughing at the absurd wrongness of this situation, accepts - if we're going to die, I might as well have a little buzz going. The man pours another a shot for Maya who relents this time. The shit is strong and warms us immediately. As Maya comments hopefully of our driver, "He'll probably actually drive a little more carefully now," and I think maybe he does. Either way, we ended up getting back to our hotel intact, and as we walked away from the pickup truck, having paid our fare (150,000 kip or about $15 for driving us there and back and waiting around 3 hours while we explored), our driver pantomimed puffing on a joint, asking us whether we'd like to buy some marijuana. We shook our heads and continued walking - as much as we've enjoyed exploring Luang Prabang so far, the inside of a Lao jail is one place we have no desire to see.

where no man has gone before...yeah, right

2007-11-16T03:49:00.000-05:00

Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, is about as far from Bangkok as you can get. If Bangkok is the metal metropolis (as my friend Rebecca suggested in her comment on my post about the city), all manic, hard, over-the-top, and relentless, then Chiang Mai is fucking hippie heaven, all organic food, flowy hemp clothing, rasta bars, and "trekking." Trekking, though it sounds like something that only Captain James T. Kirk and crew should undertake, is actually the catch-all term used by Europeans - and so by the Southeast Asian tourist industry catering to them - to describe going out into the jungle and being all outdoorsy. It covers everything from white-water rafting to elephant riding to hiking to remote hilltribe villages - all things that Maya and I did on the "trek" that we took on our second full-day in Chiang Mai. We're definitely not fucking hippies, but we don't mind a bit of adventure.

But if that's what we thought we were getting into, what we got was mostly misadventure; our "trek" was wild, but more because it was a totally half-assed, chaotic tourist safari than because we were actually going out and exploring actual nature. Our tour guide picked us up at our guesthouse at 8:30am - s/he turned out, much to our surprise, to be a particularly thickly-built lady-boy with burly man-hands and huge ankles (that said, her face looked pretty womanly) absurdly juxtaposed with a full range of the most flamboyantly gay gestures you've ever seen. S/he loaded us into a pickup truck with a metal railing, a roof, and two benches installed in the back (this sort of pickup truck-cum-taxi/bus, known as a sawngthaew, are all over Chiang Mai, in addition to the usual car taxis, tuk-tuks, and motobai) and then we drove to another hotel to gather the rest of our trekking group: two guys and one girl from Seattle who had just arrived in Thailand a few days before, an Australian chick who was on the last day of her 3-month journey-home-via-the-world after living in England for 3 years, a German woman (who I know nothing about), and a totally crazy Russian dude who'd just gotten off the overnight-train from Bangkok that morning and jumped right onto this tour with no idea where it was going or what it involved, and without putting on any sort of bug repellant.

The pickup truck roared out through Chiang Mai, and after maybe half an hour, deposited us at an orchid farm, of all things, a stop that had not been on our itinerary, as far as any of us knew. We all wandered around, glancing with vague interest at the alien-looking flowers, wondering what the fuck we were doing here, while our tour guide and the guides from at least three other tours that had just pulled up (none of whom were lady-boys) ate their breakfast under this rather luxurious-looking canopy set up in the middle of the garden. What the fuck, indeed.

We all waited by the truck for our guide to finish eating. S/he finally reappeared, sashaying out from amid the orchids; Maya, who had already had enough, asked him/her what our next stop was. The lady-boy told us, "7-Eleven."

Sure enough, after 10 minutes or so, our truck pulled up to a 7-Eleven (the convenience store franchises, much like KFC in China, are everywhere in Thailand), where our guide bought two bags of chips, and then it was finally off to the jungle, where s/he promised us that we would, first, white-water raft and bamboo raft, then visit the Karen longneck hilltribe, then ride elephants, then hike to a waterfall, and then call it a day.

The road through the jungle was part paved with massive potholes and part not-paved with even more massive potholes, and all of us sitting in the back felt every bump right in our tail bones and whiplashing necks. Our guide meanwhile sat contentedly up in the cabin next to the driver, reading a book - which I joked was probably White Water Rafting for Dummies, much to the horror of the Australian and German chicks, who were both particularly nervous about that portion of our trek. The booking agent in Chiang Mai with whom Maya and I had booked the tour had told us that because the roads into the jungle were so rough, our trek would have to take a truck instead of the air-conditioned van that less adventurous treks take; turned out that our truck was 2-wheel drive anyway, and as we thudded slowly up the road, we watched numerous air-conditioned vans rumble painlessly by us.

Finally our truck pulled over to the side of the road next to some wooden shacks where we saw big white-water rafts set up; our guide got out and shouted at some young Thai boys who seemed to be telling her that they weren't ready for us right now. Clearly pissed off, s/he got back into the truck and we rumbled onto our way to god knows where.

When we pulled over next, our guide explained to us that we would actually be hiking to the waterfall first. So we all tumbled out the back of the truck, stretched our aching bodies, and followed him/her as s/he sashayed up a narrow, crumbly path into the jungle, wearing just his/her flip-flops. After maybe a 15-minute walk, we arrived at probably the most anticlimatic waterfall I've even seen - there are bigger "falls" in the park 10 minutes from my parents' house in Pennsylvania. But the lady-boy seemed very pleased with where s/he'd guided us, and s/he proceeded to urge us to go swimming in the pool at the base of the "fall," which was about the size of a large bathtub. His/her English wasn't great, so s/he mostly urged us on by pointing, moving his/her arms in a swimming motion, and then clapping his/her man-hands excitedly together. None of us made a move towards swimming - Maya and I were definitely not going in because fresh water in Southeast Asia is somtimes known to harbor all sorts of unpleasant bacteria and parasites - except for the Russian dude, who didn't even have a change of clothing with him, as most of us did, but he whipped off his shirt, jumped right in (the pool turned out to be surprisingly deep), and did a couple laps (which basically meant that he lay flat on top of the water one way, then turned around and lay flat in the other direction).

On the way back from the "waterfall," Maya - who was already plenty pissed at how the trek was going so far - slipped on a stepping stone over a tiny creek and totally fell over into the water; fortunately, she caught herself with her hands on a rock, but not before she had completely drenched her sneakers (her one pair of actual shoes) and her pantlegs halfway up the shins and scratched up her knee. Now she was really pissed.

As we continued our walk back to the truck - and as I tried to calm Maya down - the crazy Russian dude ran off the path and up to a banana tree from which he plucked three mini bananas, tossing two to Maya and I. We glanced at them unsure of what to do with these "gifts," while he peeled his and chomped right into it. Our guide looked at him and us with a disturbed expression of his/her face. "Not good to eat," s/he said, shaking her head. The Russian dude spit his mouthful out; we tossed our bananas quickly back into the jungle.

Next stop: white-water rafting, which turned out - somewhat unbelievably, considering all that had come before - to be awesome. We were on a boat with the Australian and German girls, and our "captain," a hilarious hyperactive Thai kid who couldn't have been older than 16 and who tutored us in how to row our craft through the crashing waves and then shouted at us throughout the ride, "Forward! Forward!" "Back! Back!" "Down!!!" We all laughed and screamed as we rode the rollercoaster of the lurching river, and in the middle of the craziest rapids that our boat hit, Maya was fully launched airborn out of her seat and speared my lower back with her helmet-clad head. Like I said, awesome.

Drenched from head to toe after this ride, we moved onto the bamboo-boat riding portion of the trek. If Maya was pissed off before - at the orchid farm, 7-Eleven, her fall, her launch in the white-water - now she was taken to a whole new level of righteous indignation. Steered by standing Thai dudes with long bamboo poles, the bamboo boats didn't even float on top of the surface of the water but rather a good 6-inches below it, meaning that we all had no choice but to sit in the cold and assuredly dirty water (more on that in a bit) for the duration of the ride!Believe it or not, this is us on the so-called "raft"!

Now even more drenched than before - which shouldn't have been possible - we stumbled onto the bank and put on the dry change of clothes we had brought with us (and just about the only other change of clothes we have with us on this whole 4-month trip at all), then we piled back into the truck and went off for lunch - suspiciously tasty pad thai served up under a wooden canopy where skinny cats begged under our tables, head-bobbing chickens stalked around us, and the elephants we were about to ride stomped the earth. We've learned over our travels that there's no rhyme or reason to what food will or will not end up making you ill, and so no surprise here, though this lunch almost certainly should have had us retching, we never did get sick from it.

Elephant riding, which followed our meal, could have been awesome, if the poor beasts hadn't been so brutalized. The elephant Maya and I rode on seemed to be on his last legs, and we quickly fell far behind the rest of our group and their elephants (which we could see dropping ginormous poops right into the river which we had only too recently been riding down and sitting in); the kid sitting on our pachyderm's head in front of us (we sat on a precarious metal carriage somehow attached to the creature's back) egged it on and steered it along the muddy path by kicking his heels into its forehead and slamming a wooden rod with a nasty-looking metal hook on the end into its ears. By the time we had all-too-eagerly disembarked, the elephant had multiple bloody wounds on the sides of its head. Such treatment was particularly shocking since elephants are supposedly considered to be sacred creatures in Thailand. As we drove away I saw the boy with our elephant, bowing to it and saying "Thank you" to it - and then chaining it by its leg to a post.

The last stop on our trek was perhaps the strangest of all and in some ways, the most uncomfortable, but was still definitely a highlight for me: visiting the Karen longneck hilltribe. We hiked for a good 20 minutes into the jungle, crossing numerous streams and passing through banana-tree and bamboo forests. Finally, the shapes of wooden huts appeared from our of the thick foliage ahead.

The village that we entered was tiny (there may have been more of it somewhere deeper in the jungle where tourists are unwelcome) - no more than 10 huts - and there were also no more 10 longneck women and little girls (see below) sitting and standing around.

It was amazing and magical to see these people in person...

but it was also disturbing. I've read online some people describing the experience of visiting the longneck villages as going to "a human zoo"; it didn't feel that wrong and weird to me. But it was hard to know how to act around the tribespeople because the truth is that you were there to stare at them and take pictures of them (which we did only after asking permission from each person), not necessarily as oddities, but kind of... And it was weird how even the most outgoing and talkative members of our group suddenly starting speaking in hushed tones and how tense everyone got. It was hard to know how the longneck people themselves feel about the whole thing. As Maya and I read in our guidebook, the practice of the tribal females wearing those iconic brass rings that seem to stretch their necks (but actually compress their chests) had been dying out until it become apparent that the tribe could make money from it as a tourist draw, which makes any sightseer somewhat complicit in perpetuating what could be considered a deforming tradition. That said, the Karen tribe are refugees from Burma, and the money they earn by opening their villages to tourists may well by the best living they can make, and what they do to their bodies is beautiful in its own way - at least, I think so - and no more deforming than the extreme cosmetic surgery millions of white so-called-civilized westerners inflict upon themselves - so really, who are we to judge?

The one thing I know that I can judge at the end of that day? The trek. Lame.

do do that voodoo

2007-11-14T22:37:00.000-05:00

For all of you in suspense about Eveline and the bloody ghost (in other words, all of you), here's an update - and one of the most fucking hilarious stories I've heard in a long time - she emailed me a few days ago:

so yeah, the ghost called (like 2 weeks ago) to tell me that the band [Voodoo Kungfu] was playing nov 6 (last friday) so i FINALLY got to go hang out with him, & it was quite a night.

i got my friend jamila to come with, & jamila brought her friend sarabeth. so we get there, pay the cover, & go in to the bar. i see the drummer but not the ghost. so after buying a drink & standing around for a few moments, i'm like, hmm, what am i supposed to do? so then i text the ghost that i'm there & he calls back being like, where are you, i'm here too. some confusion ensues (what with that whole little i-don't-speak-chinese thing) but we wind up meeting at the entrance to the bar. then he starts to go talk to the little window lady to let me in for free & i'm like, oh i already paid the cover. & he looks really disappointed & is like, oh no, you did? & i was like, yeah it's okay no worries. but inside i'm thinking something more like - you idiot, you could have told me AHEAD of time to call you before going in.

so then he's like, want to go backstage? so i go fetch my friends & we're like, okay we're going back stage. much to my surprise going back stage means going up onto the stage & into this little door in the back of the stage. & this btw is a really nice club, 2 floors, really great sound system, not a little dive like club 13. so yeah, we climb the stairs onto the stage, go through a door in the back, and walk into....the most brightly lit room in the world. it is like stark white, like it looks like it was painted yesterday, & everyone is sitting against the wall & there are 2 fluorescent lights overhead. i.e. a room full of dreadlocked chinese guys & their bored looking girlfriends all look up at us the moment we walk in & we're like, ack. & it's a small room & we can't totally speak chinese and - yeah. super embarrassing. of course the chinese guys, being chinese guys, jump up & insist that we sit on the couch even though it basically means they have nowhere to sit in this tiny little room, & we keep insisting no, & there's this long period where everybody's standing and insisting & blah blah & finally the ghost says in extremely loud, accented english, "puh-lease-uh sit down-uh!" so finally we all sit (with the guys who gave up their seats now perched awkwardly on various chair arms or for the ghost, on the coffee table) & . . . silence.

crickets chirp.

me, jamila & sarabeth kind of feel like we're on stage with a ring of chinese strangers watching us, all of them looking not quite unfriendly but also seeming to be thinking, "who the fuck are these people?"

there's a tubby, dorky looking guy next to me playing guitar & finally the ghost is like, give that to me. so then the ghost starts playing guitar. as jamila whispered to me, he was obviously feeling really shy/awkward & didn't know what to do with himself or how to talk to me so he just sat against the wall across the room like a teenage boy playing guitar.

okay this is getting way too long. basically we finally managed to chat a little bit, although a lot of it was pretty awkward because we sort of had to talk loudly across the room with the other people in the room on either side looking on, as if watching a tennis match. there was a lot of like, one person says something, the other person says huh?, we both scoot forward & lean way forward to be nearer each other to hear better, statement is repeated, statement is answered, we both sit back against the wall again, he starts playing guitar again, we ponder what to say next.

oh and, after that initial long awkward period of not talking & him playing guitar & looking down & me looking at the ceiling & around, etc., when he FINALLY spoke to me, do you know what the first thing he said was?

he asked me if i know bon jovi.

ok it might translate better as something like, "in america, have you met bon jovi?" but still.

i said i don't know bon jovi. then it occured to me that actually i have seen bon jovi, once, when he sang a song at this john kerry fundraiser concert at radio city music hall that i went to for free through work. so i tell him, oh i have seen him sing like one song from really far away. and then the ghost is like, "was he..." and i expect that sentence to end in "good" but instead he says, "good-looking?" i'm like, huh? oh. "uhhh, yeah i guess he's good-looking. i mean, he's getting a little old but, uhh, yeah, sure."

he said 2 more english phrases over the course of the night - "do you speak chinese?" (to jamila), and "tonight i break your fucking face," which is apparently a limp bizkit lyric.

at some point the opening band started playing & we're like, oh shit. we can't get out of this room now without walking onto the stage. at some point my friend jason & some others arrive & text me & jamila, "where are you?" & i have to write back, "we're trapped backstage. seriously."

at some point the singer & his girlfriend (i think) walk in & look at us kind of like, "who the hell are these strange people sitting in our backstage area?" & then disappear into the bathroom & then come back out & perch somewhere awkward (what with there being no place to sit thanks to me, jamila & sarabeth.)

the ghost managed to get less adolescent-boy-shy & even managed to come sit by me to chat for a bit. however, this involved him sharing the armchair with the tubby, dorky, but very nice guy next to me, who turned out to be a friend of his from back home, & the tubby friend would like stroke the ghost's arm or rest his hand on the ghost's back & stuff. & from my low angle it kind of looked like the ghost was sitting on tubby guy's lap while tubby guy affectionately stroked his arm & back.

tubby & i talked a lot, but because of his heavy accent when saying band names in english, it was mostly,
"do you like [insert name of band.]"
"huh?"
"[name of band.]"
"say that one more time?"
"[name of band.]"
"wait - spell that?"
"[name of band, spelled out in english.]"
"ohhhh! yeah i like them."
*repeat entire conversation several more times, inserting a different band each time.*

oh & it's also funny because whenever the ghost addressed me (by calling out across the room) he would say my chinese name, & since i never actually use my chinese name (i only gave it to him that night because he was gonna store my name in his phone & i assumed it would be harder to communicate my english name than just tell him the chinese characters to put in) there'd be like a split second where i didn't quite register that he was saying my name. so he'd begin a sentence "zhao yi" and it'd be like - beat of silence - oh wait that's me! ha.

oh and the BEST part of the night. talking to the drummer. I LOVE HIM. he has like the BEST personality in the world. he also, as i discovered when i went & sat by him & saw him up close, has one little patch of hair below his lip that is basically a soul patch dreadlock. yes, there is a tuft of hair below his lip that is dreaded into like a PERFECT cylinder that isn't any narrower at the bottom than at the top.

but so, i went over & was like, "i have to ask you - how do you know how to do mongolian throat singing?! where did you study it?" & in a nutshell, he was basically like, "it's the funniest thing - i never studied mongolian throat singing anywhere, i just kind of discovered out of the blue one day that i could do it!" but the explanation was a lot longer than that. THEN he's like, "when i was little there was this movie (or maybe cartoon?) that i used to watch, and it had this big scary monster on it who would yell in a really low growly voice, and i liked to imitate him. so i think doing that all the time built up my vocal chords so i can do mongolian throat singing now!" & then i *think* he said that his girlfriend is mongolian & gave him a cd of throat singing once, about 3 years ago, & he listened to it & was just kind of like, hey i bet i can do that. and he could. how fucking AMAZING and hilarious is that? also the singer & one of the other members of the band are taking throat singing lessons now from some old mongolian sage who lives by the lake that you guys were staying near. they're all also now trying to learn the kind of throat singing where you split your voice & can sing 2 notes at once!

also the drummer is from yunnan (very south of china), which explains why he's so short, hee.

oh and the mummy? totally hot. okay well maybe not to most people, but i found him completely hot w/o his makeup on. sadly he seemed to have a girlfriend. oh but at one point he like stood up right in front of me in the middle of the room & was doing all these big elaborate stretches and deep bends and swinging his arms around and stuff. like at one point i look up & his ass is right in my face because he's touching his toes.

& then of course when they finally performed they rocked and were amazing and it was even better than at club 13 because the sound system at this other new bar was AMAZING. and then of course, after the show the ghost & i are talking (well, barely, still not so good at the whole, how to talk to a girl thing) & this hungarian guy comes up to us and says he's a filmmaker & the band was awesome & do they have a cd & how can he get in touch with them, what's their website, etc. (i was translating for him.) and of course the ghost is just like, huh? cd? website? why on earth would a POPULAR METAL BAND have any of those things? so i'm like, they basically have nothing. then the hungarian filmmaker is like, don't you have ANYTHING? can i email you? how can i get in touch with you guys? finally the ghost comes up with the helpful tidbit that they can go onto baidu (the chinese equivalent of google) and search their name in chinese. uhhh, thanks. the guy presses some more and then finally the ghost is like, well i guess i can give him my phone number. so we wrote down his number for the guy & the guy said he had a translator he could get to call & talk for him. god it just KILLS me that these guys could actually be pretty big if they like, you know, had a manager who was with-it or someone who could speak english working wiht them or something but, nope, none of that. although on the other hand it's really cool that, given their apparent lack of any hitting-it-big dreams, they i guess do this for fun? and for like ,years, right? at least however many years it took the singer's hair to grow from that awful 'do in the DVD to the length it is now.

OH and i forgot to mention - the drummer is in 2 other bands. one is a pop rock band and one is . . . brace yourselves . . .

a flamenco band.

yup.

bangcock

2007-11-11T10:08:00.001-05:00

So Maya and I are in Chiang Mai, Thailand, right now. We just got here after spending 6 frustrating, annoying, and very occasionally awesome days in the mad metropolis that is Bangkok. Maya's and my current mindset surely contributed to our issues there - the books that we've read on the subject of taking long trips like ours warned us that around the 2-month mark, most travelers start to tire and feel homesick, and as we've headed into the second leg of our journey, that has definitely proved to be the case: We're fucking beat, and a day rarely goes by during which one or both of us doesn't say, "I just want to go home." That said, Bangkok really was a pain in the ass. Since I'm feeling wiped out - and suffering from a bit of writer's block - here's just a quick rundown of the good, bad, and the ugly of the Bangkok we experienced:

Crazy and cool that its not just a myth: Kathoey, a.k.a. lady boys, a.k.a. Thai transvestites, really are everywhere. There are beautiful, completely convincing ladyboys hanging out and/or working at snazzy bars, clubs, and restaurants; there are chubby, stubbly, completely unconvincing ladyboys walking around the streets, arm-in-arm with their (real) girlfriends; and there are even teenage schoolgirl ladyboys brushing by you along the sidewalk in their school uniforms, which look very much like Catholic school uniforms, making for a truly amazing image to western eyes.

Seriously disgusting and disturbing that its not just a myth: "Sexpats" (humorously - and not totally inaccurately - described by wikitravel as a "Fifty-plus, bald, beer belly, stained shirt, lovestruck expression and a hairy arm wrapped around a girl too young to be their daughter") really are everywhere, too. Along our way through town, Maya and I saw all too many older white guys - most dressed not so much like the comic-book-store owner on the Simpsons, as the above description suggests, and more like Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice - walking around with a noticeably younger and slutily-dressed Asian chick. Ewwwww.

Fucking annoying that it is a myth: Thailand being the "Land of Smiles"? That's the country's nickname and its rep - smiling is the rule; people are friendly; frowning, arguing, and making a scene in public are taboo. So, as our time in Thailand approached, Maya had been telling me that I should get ready to smile a lot if I want to fit in there (if you don't know already, I'm not generally a big smiler). Well, no worries there, as it's turned out. The staff at our guesthouse is made up of 4 of the grumpiest, grouchiest women we've ever met anywhere (the only nice woman there doesn't speak a peep of English). The tuk-tuk and taxi drivers have almost all turned out to be assholes - metered taxi drivers routinely refuse to use their meter, while tuk-tuk drivers will literally drive away from you without so much as a word if your fare offer doesn't meet their expectations. Vendors at Chatuchak Market, which, like any Asian market, is supposed to be all about the bargaining, have refused to bargain with us (for bootleg metal T-shirts, which we had to have). It's as if they have come to see white foreigners as little more than walking wallets for the picking. And there is a strain of discrimination in the workings of the city - at some of the sightseeing locations, there are different entrances for foreigners and for Thai people; at some of the religious sites, where you are supposed to remove your shoes before entering, there are different places for foreigners to leave their shoes and for Thai to leave their shoes; and at the Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, where we watched a string of Mauy Thai fights (more on that in a second), there's a separate section marked off for foreigners (though we ignored the sign and sat with the natives)! Well, I call bullshit. "Land of smiles," my ass. I'm not smiling. I'm fucking pissed. And Maya's probably even more pissed.

Possibly the cheesiest road in the world: Khao San Road. Think Bourbon Street, then add a stand at every half-block where young Asian women sit braiding dreadlock hair extensions to the scalps of tie-dye-clad pseudo-hippie tourists. Add carts selling grilled meal worms and beetles. Add fratboy-stuffed bars where bands play acoustic covers of that Umbrella song by Rihanna. Add hundreds of stands selling the most retarded "joke" T-shirts you've ever seen...

(Speaking of which,) Embarassing to be associated with, and perhaps the explanation as to why Bangkok seems to be so mean to its tourists: Bangkok tourists are the cheesiest we've met so far. In our guesthouse alone, there was some cheesy goateed-and-ponytailed European dude who wore, 2 days in a row, a T-shirt with "The Goodfucker" emblazoned on it in the font and logo of The Godfather trilogy. There was another dude wearing a T-shirt with "iPood" on it with a traffic-sign-style illustration of a person on the toilet, vomiting and, yeah, presumably, pooing. The tourists who weren't wearing retarded "joke" T-shirts like these, were wearing horrible linen ethnic clothing. And then there were all the French families travelling with their kids, who they left to play in the common space in their dirt-and-I-can-only-imagine-what-stained underwear. Oh, the manatee...

Strange and kind of creepy: How much the Thai love their king. There are huge posters of the dude everywhere, and in the markets, there are stands that exclusively sell photos of him - baby photos, kid photos, teenage photos, family photos, and on and on. Before a movie starts at the movie megaplex in the mall, they play a short trailer featuring the national anthem and rainy scenes of the Thai landscape with images of the king tumbling across the screen in raindrop shapes; sitting in the theater as this played, Maya and I looked at each other, then she (very intelligently, it turned out) looked back to see the rest of the audience (all Thai) standing reverently. Afraid we would be lynched if we didn't, we stood as well.

Awesome but brutal as all hell: Muay Thai at Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, which we watched on our second night in the city. The stadium was as ghetto as it gets - dirty concrete bleachers/steps crawling with small cockroaches, the air buzzing with mosquitoes, the second and third seating levels separated by a chainlink fence. We sat in the second level where we were surrounded by the wildly shouting and gesticulating locals, just about all of whom were obviously gambling on the fights (just about all the other whities had paid the big bucks for the "ringside seats," which meant they got none of the true vibe of the matches and got to crane their necks up at the ring to see any of the action). We befriended a tattoo-covered little punk-rock Thai girl who was sitting next to us, and she talked us through some of the action, explaining that when the crowd shouted along with the fighters pounding on each other, they were basically shouting for the dude they had bet on to, "Hit!" Hit!" As for the fights themselves, 4 of the 7 we watched ended in knockouts, and in 3 of those, the knockouted dude managed to stand and walk out of the ring under his own power; one of them, however - a particularly lanky fighter, who couldn't have been older than 16 and whom I couldn't help but pull for, since he was the obvious underdog - went down cold and was carried out on a stretcher.

Awesome but shocking and kind of frightening: The monitor lizards in Lumphini Park. One day we went for a walk in what is basically Bangkok's Central Park. We were walking along this relaxing lake, over a bridge, when I noticed something big and reptilian crawling around near the walkway in front of us. "What's that?" I said to Maya. She squinted ahead. "Is that an alligator?" she responded, aghast. I looked closer. "No," I said, "I think that's a monitor lizard," showing off how many nature shows I've watched on TV. We crept closer, and it was indeed a big monitor lizard, no shorter than 4 feet long, creeping around, completely uncaged and uncontrolled. We got to within 10 feet of it, watched as it flicked its long tongue out, tasting the air...

...and then slid into the lake, and swam away. It didn't swim far though, exiting the water 20 yards away or so, right next to a Thai man who was napping on the grass by the shore - I was sure he was going to be lunch, but the lizard just positioned itself in the sunlight and sat there contentedly. We took our own seats on a bench in the shade and watched the strange scene. Next thing I knew I heard a loud rustling from my left, Maya let out a shriek and lept up onto her bench. Two other monitor lizards - a massive one, maybe as long as I am tall, and a smaller one, about the size of the original specimen - had scurried out from a nearby brush to within a few feet of us; the larger one, presumably male, seemed to be pursuing the smaller, presumably female (but in Thailand, as I said earlier, you can never be sure). I joined Maya, standing on the top of my bench. We watched these lizards, which eventually crept into the water like the first. To end this absurd tale, as we walked around the rest of the park, we discovered that there were ridiculously large monitor lizards hanging out everywhere, and none of the Thai people lounging in the park seemed to give a second thought about them. Monitor lizards must be like Thai squirrels, I guess - except big, scaly, and with possibly venomous saliva.

Totally awesome but totally sick: The Siriraj Museum of Medicine, which includes a museum of forensic medicine and a museum of parasitology. This place seriously put what had been the sickest museum Maya and I had ever visited - the Mutter Museum in Philly - to fucking shame. Just a few of the ridiculously gruesome artifacts we encountered (as we walked around the place, our jaws on the floor, along with numerous Thai families complete with little kids)? The actual head of a man who had been shot through the brain, preserved in a jar and bisected so you could see the path that the bullet tore through his skull and gray matter. Walls and walls of glass cases containing just about every body part you could imagine, all taken from people who had died various violent deaths - from tongues with bullet holes in them to a digestive system blackened and burst after its owner drank acid. Jars and jars containing all stages of fetuses, including one with an enlarged, alien-like head - small piles of candy and toys sat in front of these jars, left for the dead babies by museum visitors. The preserved watermelon-size scrotum of a man who contracted the Elephantiasis parasite, which swells its victims' anatomy - particularly the genatalia - to grotesque proportions. A long hall of blownup photos of death scenes, including those of children who had been blown up by Molotov Cocktails, crushed by machinery, or mangled in traffic accidents (many looked just like chunks of ground beef with hands and legs sticking off of them). A large clay urn in which, as the photos hung above it revealed, a boy had been cooked to his death. The complete preserved naked body of the Chinese serial child-killer and cannibal Si-Oui. For more in-depth description of the place with some pics, click here. Seriously, if you're ever in the 'hood, you gotta check this place out - it'll blow your mind.

Gaudy as all shit and tourist-swarmed as all fuck: Wat Phreaw Kaew and the Grand Palace. I thought it was like being at Disney Land - but without the rides.

Pretty fucking cool: Wat Po, which houses a massive 46-meter-long, 15-meters-high (you do the math) reclining Buddha.

Best random discovery: Battle of the Bands outside of the Bangkok CentralWorld mega-mall. We were just walking through some markets in downtown when we heard the crunch of a loud powerchord, and following the sounds, we found a huge stage setup right in front of the mall with hundreds of Thai seated and standing in front. A Thai metalcore band was rocking onstage. When they finished two songs, they walked to the front of the stage, and a panel of judges in a tent gave their critique (in Thai, unfortunately). We stayed for four more bands - a power-pop band, a Cranberries-like girl-fronted alt-rock band, an cringe-worthy emo band, and a totally hilarious funk band with a saxaphone player, a DJ, and a frontman-guitarist in a cowboy hat and a leopard-print jacket who pulled out the most painfully earnest facial expressions as he did his best Anthony Keedis impression. (The guy actually reminded Maya, and me, after she pointed it out, of this guy we call "Bidet." Jade and Lamb, and Anna, you know who we're talking about.)

Worst random discovery: The Thai horror movie we saw at the CentralWorld movie theater. The Spirit World. Do not, I repeat, do not see it.

Hair-pullingly frustrating: Trying to find true metal shit in Bangkok. Before we arrived, I had looked up what metal bars and stores there were in the city on metaltravelguide.com. It looked like there were a lot - bars called Immortal, Metal Zone, the Rock Pub, and Chaos City, and a record shop called Metal Quest - so Maya and I were pretty psyched. As it turned out, most of the places didn't end up being at the addressed listed on the website, and the ones that did - Immortal and the Rock Pub - fucking sucked (Immortal, though it was covered in metal band posters and stickers, played hip-hop and lame radio rock; and Rock Pub, when we went there, was completely empty, except for us and the 7-person staff, and was playing AC/DC and Poison concert videos on a big monitor). What made this all the more irritating was that all the local kids in Bangkok seemed to be wearing metal T-shirts - one night on Khao San Road (where we went haplessly hoping that Immortal would be playing metal) we saw Thai kids hanging out in Pantera, Metallica, Cannibal Corpse, Iron Maiden, White Zombie, Napalm Death, Skinny Puppy, As I Lay Dying, Killswitch Engage, and Avenged Sevenfold shirts! Out of desperation, I finally emailed the webmaster of this Bangkok-based metal webzine, siammetal.com, asking him where, oh, where were all the metal clubs, bars, and/or stores. He wrote right back, explaining that there weren't really any clubs or bars (and agreeing with me that Immortal and Rock Pub sucked), but that there were some metal record stores, including Metal Quest, which was, according to him, at a completely different address than on metaltravelguide.com. A few days later, Maya and I went to Metal Quest, which ended up being a tiny shop with no sign on the top floor of a mega-mall! I bought two CDs by Thai metal black-metal bands (the store only had three CDs by Thai bands), and we talked to the owner - a super-nice, awkward metal dude with limited English skills. He confirmed that the Bangkok metal scene kind of sucked - the only upcoming show was a big death/grindcore fest called "Bangcock," which is going down 3 days after we leave Thailand - and when we asked about all the kids in metal shirts, he explained that it's just a fashion thing, that a few popular emo bands have members who've worn metal T-shirts in videos and in concert, and so their fans have followed suit. But they don't listen to the music, he said with a resigned sigh. We had noticed that most of the kids we'd seen in metal tees had completely over-the-top emo haircuts, and we pointed out that to the Metal Quest dude. "Yeah," he agreed, making a diagonal slash across his forehead to indicate the kind of angular cut we meant. We all laughed. Not only had the Bangkok metal scene been excruciatingly hard to find, but all the kids who had seemed to be part of the scene had all turned out to be posers; at least, when we finally found a true metalhead, we could hate on the same shit together: metalheads hating lame emo pussies really is universal.

skyhigh, rock bottom

2007-11-07T22:15:00.000-05:00

We didn't plan it this way intentionally, but it was in Cambodia that we reached the midway point of our trip. And in some ways our experiences over our 4 days in that country seemed to make a perfect - and perfectly imperfect - centerpoint for our travels. In Cambodia (the town of Siem Reap, to be specific), we felt as if we were as far from our everyday lives as we are likely to be anywhere on our journey, and we reached some of the highest and lowest points of the last two months; now we can start the slow descent/ascent home.

The highs were at Ankor, among the majestic, awe-inspiring jungle-entangled ruins of the ancient Khmer empire. At epic sites like Ta Phroem, where massive roots and trees literally grew up from and down into the stones...

At Ankor Wat, which we explored at sunset...

And most of all, at Bayon, where we went on our first full day in Cambodia. It's the site that has been pictured in the title header of this blog all along, and finally climbing up among its towers in person and walking, standing, meditating among their huge, blissful stone faces felt like reaching a true milestone.

On our second day in Cambodia, we woke at 4:30am and drove to back to Bayon. There was a roadblock around it, but our driver found the policeman manning the entrance and got out and talked to him. Next thing we knew our driver was moving the roadblock. He drove up next to the temple, which was bathed in almost complete darkness, and parked, and with our flashlight leading the way, Maya and I climbed back up among the towers, the only people there, feeling as if we were discovering the ruins for ourselves in the twilight. Up there, hearing only the animal sounds of the jungle, we watched as the stone faces came to life in the light of the rising sun, and we found perhaps some little piece of our own nirvana.

And then there were the lows... Cambodia is a poor as fuck country with a dark, violent past and present - the Khmer Rouge, landmines scattered across the landscape... If we sometimes came across extreme poverty and the scars of history in China and Vietnam, in Cambodia, they were much more in our faces and seemed so much more desperate. What made it seem all the worse is that Siem Reap is a such a fast-growing tourist town and full of shocking juxtapositions between the oscenely rich - luxury hotels commanding literally thousands of dollars for a room per night - and the obscenely poor - reed-and-plastic-tarp huts housing multi-generational familes, sometimes just across the street.

- We visited a memorial to victims of the Khmer Rouge, a small wat pagoda with glass sides revealing a waist-deep pile of skulls, bones, and torn clothing: the remains dug up from nearby killing fields. When we returned to our car, our driver revealed to us that both his father and his brother had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.

- We took a boat tour of a floating village outside of Siem Reap, which has become something of the tourist draw despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that it is so astoundingly poor, full of tiny wooden boathouses crammed with multiple generations, and houses with walls of dried palm leaves and roofs of rusting tin, standing on precarious tree-stem stilts, sometimes up to 10 meters (about 30 feet) tall, above the waters, which rise and fall dramatically with the wet and dry seasons.

The families who live there do so because they don't have the money for earthen real estate and they subsist by fishing and by begging/selling cold drinks and bananas to tourists. Our guide was a very morose 24-year-old who claimed to live himself in the floating village and told us that he was supporting his two sick parents, both in their 60s, whom he lived with. He said that his two older brothers had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. Both Maya and I were skeptical at first - we've been trained after two months of travelling to suspect a scam in every sob story, and we wondered what the odds were that both our driver and and our guide here would have had family members killed by the Khmer Rouge. And we felt bad about our skepticism - as we discussed later, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered a fifth of the Cambodian population, so it was actually quite likely that every Cambodian had a fmaily member or a friend or an acquaintance who had been murdered.

- As our boat cut slowly through the water, villagers would paddle their boats up to us, begging for us to by drinks and bananas from them. On one boat, a tiny naked kid, maybe 2, stood wrapped in his/her two pet snakes, while his/her mom plaintively begged for tourists to buy bananas from her for a dollar each.

- Our boat stopped at a floating fish farm, where we found a large, waterfilled hole in the floor filled with huge, flopping catfish. We noticed more holding tanks up a short platform and walked up to see what they contained, and were shocked to find them full of at least 20 large crocodiles, lounging about in garbage-strewn waters. As we watched them, a teenager working onboard, pulled a particularly ginormous catfish from its hole and took it, wriggling, to a back area, where he hacked it into large chunks with a butcher knife. Then he carried a few of them, including the head, over to the crocodile pen we were standing over and hurled them in. The crocs lunged jerkily as the pieces landed, snapping at them, but then ignored the food and just laid there, frozen in their various positions of attack. The one thing moving in the pen, however, was the catfish's head, which was still very much alive, its gills pulsing with breath and its front fin periodically flicking in a gesture of understandable distress.

- Perhaps the most startling image of our visit to Cambodia: A boy, maybe 10 years old, wearing no shirt and with only one arm - the other, amputated at the shoulder - which he was using to row himself around the lake in a metal basin that he barely fit into, dodging fishing vessels and rocking in the choppy wake of the many passing vehicles; rowing himself between tourist boats in order to beg. Back when we were dodging scam artists in China, I had morbidly joked to Maya that once we got to Cambodia, she would look back fondly on a time when the people trying to get our money had all their limbs; watching this boy paddling away, Maya turned to me, reminded me of my joke, and said that, yes, right now she did long for those days.

While we are definitely glad to have made it to - and now out of - Cambodia, it's the one country we've been to so far that we're not sure we want to revisit any time soon.

punkass crusade

2007-11-05T06:08:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, we're in Cambodia right now. We left Vietnam on Thursday, feeling much as we did when we left China: that we were saying goodbye to a newfound home away from home, one that we would like to visit again in the not-too-distant future. This was due in large part to the fact that we felt like we had made a real friend there: Max, with whom we had drinks the night before our morning flight to Cambodia. Maya and I had found a copy of the last issue of Revolver magazine I worked on before our trip (with Down on the cover) in a Hanoi bookshop that afternoon, and we showed it to Max, and we talked about how fucked up the music industry is, and he told us about the time he'd had a meal with Metallica's James Hetfield (who is apparently friends with Max's "mate" from Midnight Oil) and James wouldn't go anywhere without his bodyguard. After drinks, he dropped us off at our hotel on his motorbike (yeah, I know Maya and I vowed not get on one of the "damn things" again - but when Max is driving, it doesn't count) and bid him a fond farewell, promising to stay in touch. In homage to Max, here's a link to the Sir No Sir! anti-war flash trailer he showed us one day in his cafe - Punkass Crusade. It's pretty powerful stuff - check it out.

What else will we miss besides Max? The food. Delicious. All about fresh fruit, vegetables, and spices combined delicately with meat and fish. Over our two weeks in Vietnam, we had sizzling Cha Ca, a fish marinated in yogurt and spices grilled up at your table with veggies and served up with fish- and/or shrimp-sauce (and we ate it with an older Australian gentlemen we happened to befriend whose been eating Cha Ca at this one restaurant over the past 15 years and is writing a book on Vietnam); we had the most scrumptious Bun (pronounced "Boon") - a rice-noodle dish with sweet slices of beef, crispy deep-fried garlic pieces, sprouts, sprigs of cilantro, basil, and mint, and all sorts of other unnamed goodness - at a streetside family-style restaurant of questionable hygiene but unquestionable culinary talent; we had mouth-wateringly scrumptious fresh spring rolls, and fried spring rolls, and apple juices, lemon juices, strawberry shakes, slices of papaya, dragon fruit, and the list goes on... Did we pay for our culinary adventures? Occasionally. But we rarely regretted the days-after that we lost in our hotel bathroom.

On Halloween night, which was rainy and cold in Hanoi, we walked down to a movie theater that the propietress of our hotel recommended to us. (By the way, our hotel, Tung Trang, despite our somewhat frightening first night, ended up being awesome.) The theater was in a huge, western-style mall and had stadium seating and great sound and picture. We saw The Bourne Ultimatum, which we had missed when it was in theaters Stateside - and it rocked hard. The film, if you haven't seen it, ends in New York City, and seeing the familiar streets, buildings, bridges, and scenery of our hometown on the big screen, Maya and I felt a tinge of homesickness, which was made even stronger by the fact that sitting in the dark neverland of that mall movie theater felt just like sitting in a movie theater back in the U.S. When the film ended and we stepped back out into the dirty, barely lit, frenetic streets of Hanoi, we felt like we'd stepped right from America into Vietnam. The truth is that as much as Hanoi may have come to feel something like a home, we're still only visitors and our real home is half a world - and two more months - away.

call me lady boy

2007-11-01T06:12:00.000-04:00

"There's a big difference between travelling and a vacation." That's what the Belgian woman we shared our soft-sleeper cabin with during our 9-hour train ride from Hanoi to the northern Vietnamese city of Lao Cai last weekend. Having done a little of both, I have to agree - travelling is work, it's a challenge, it's not just an escape; it's about escaping your life as it was but it's also about facing life as it is elsewhere and as it can be, in its most positive and negative extremes. The Belgian woman and her husband (both in their early 60s) told us about their extensive travels through South America, Africa, and now Southeast Asia, and we were pretty amazed - and then they revealed that all the trips had taken place over the last 3 years! When his wife left for a bathroom break, the husband explained that she had been sick - "She had a thing in her head" is how he put it in halting English - and bedridden for over 10 years, and so they had been unable to travel - or have children - in their youth. Now that she had finally recovered, they were going to see the world.

From Lao Cai, where we arrived at 6 in the morning, we took a public minivan on an hour-long, completely nauseating ride up narrow, serpentine mountain roads to Sa Pa, a remote frontier town that has become something of a tourist hotspot due to both its amazing landscape and its large population of Vietnamese ethnic minority tribes such as the Black H'mong and the Red Dao, many of whom still live subsistence-lifestyles in traditional villages.

Here's a view of mountainsides terraced with rice paddies and a river running through the valley that we caught on one of our hikes - the sort of sight commonplace in Sa Pa.

It was a strange visit that left us with mixed emotions, too complicated to lay out right now (you should know that I'm typing this blog in my hotel, outside in the jungle of Cambodia, where I just got bitten by a mosquito, and Maya's deathly afraid now that I just contracted the dengue fever... Basically, I'm literally risking my life for your entertainment). But here are some standout moments from Sa Pa:

- On our first day we hiked through the village of Cat Cat, where dirty children stared at us from the doorways of their familes' huts, and men and women glanced up at us - somewhat hostilely, it seemed - as they worked in their rice paddies. We passed a waterfall (which is where most tourists turn around) and then walked onward into the jungle. We had been trekking for maybe an hour and a half, when we ran into some people who told us that there was a village "maybe 5 kilometers away." That didn't sound too far, so we decided to go for it. Another hour and half - and two river-crossings - later, we found ourselves on an ever-narrowing dirt path, in the thick of the jungle, trudging up and down the muddy mountainside, with a dwindling water supply, and no village in sight. We had already turned back once when the path seemed to vanish - temporarily, it turned out - then decided to forge ahead. And we had run into a number of villagers, some carring insanely huge loads on their backs as they sped along the precarious path in their flip-flops(!), and some even seemed to encourage us, pointing us deeper into the forest, smiling, and saying "Village." But I'm sorry to say, we gave up - we were almost out of water and definitely out of time - since the sun would be down in the 3 hours it would take us to walk back to whence we came from. Of course, as soon as we actually turned around, the friendliest villager of all came up the path toward us, pointed in our original direction, smiled, and said, "Village," as if inviting us to follow him, but by that point, our minds were made up - mostly just to make ourselves feel better about abandoning our mission, we joked that the village was probably full of cannibals who were just pretending to be nice to lure us into their soup pots - so we politely declined and hurried back to semi-civilization.

- As we walked down to Cat Cat, we were assailed by the motorbike drivers all offering us rides back to the hotel once we got to the waterfall. Each of them asked us to look for them once we got there - and they all turned out to have weird, instantly memorable pseudonyms ready so they'd be easy to identify. One guy, in particular, stood out: he took off his baseball cap and showed us the moniker he'd scrawled on it in marker. "Look for me," he said. "'Penicillin.' That's me." It was such an awesome name, I actually ended riding back with him (for the fee of $1).

- Our first night in Sa Pa, we walked out into town and were assailed by young and old women and little girls selling all sorts of tribal goods - mostly, jewelry and enbroidery. One of them came up to us: "Earrings?" she asked, holding out a pair. "No thanks," we answered. "Do you smoke?" she quickly moved on. "Opium? Marijuana? Hashish?" It became a theme of our visit. We were offered drugs by, at least, four or five people, most of them middle-aged-looking ethnic-minority women in full tribal dress!

- On our second day, we went trekking through the mountains and through some villages with an 18-year-old H'mong guide named Zi (pronounced "Zah"). As soon as we set off, we found that a pair of "shadows," as we came to call them, had joined our little group: a little girl, maybe 9 years old, and a young woman with what looked like a gold tooth but turned out to be copper, who looked to be maybe 34 but turned out to be only 24. (As we would discover, village life does not age people well.) Here's our little crew (minus me, who shot the pic):

Our "shadows" followed us for a good 3 hours as we hiked by rice paddies, through creeks, and over hills, talking to us in what little English they knew. (Our guide told us that this was how she had learned English - by following tourists around and talking to them - which was impressive, considering she spoke the language better than almost any Vietnamese person we'd met in Hanoi). But Maya and I both had a feeling that as nice and friendly as our "shadows" seemed, they were really just trying to sell us shit. And that proved to be the case as soon as we arrived in their village and were bumrushed by at least 10 people selling the exact same stuff. The "shadows" then made it personal: "You're going to buy from me, right?" said the little girl, trying to use the fact that she'd walked with us to get the upperhand on the competition. Thing is, it kind of worked. We didn't buy much from them - just a small handwoven bracelet from the girl, who looked like she was going to cry if we didn't - but we felt guilty and weird and kind of used but still sad and really just all confused and conflicted as fuck. The trek had been cool; the landscape, beautiful; but we felt like shit.

- It didn't help that the villages and the villagers seemed so damn poor. At one point, we stopped for a break at this little canopied area, where many other tourists were already assembled, having cold drinks and eating snacks. Of course, all the guides and locals weren't eating or drinking, just chewing on pieces of sugar cane and standing on the outskirts (a few locals would occasionally step in to try and sell something). Maya and I sat there uncomfortably, and I noticed a little boy, maybe 4 years old, dressed not in the colorful tribal clothes of most the villagers but in filthy and torn western clothes; he was carrying what I presume was his baby brother on his back, who was wearing just a dirty T-shirt, no pants or underwear, and was crying his head off. Their parents were nowhere to be seen. I definitely didn't feel having a snack.

- Early in our trek, Maya mentioned to Zi, our guide, that a lot of the locals, particularly the young girls, seemed to be staring at me because of my big buffalo-bone earrings, which I had thought the tribal people might relate to since they also wear oversized jewelry through stretched ear piercings. She explained that in the culture of the various ethnic minority tribes of Sa Pa, men do not wear earrings, only women. The next morning, as I waited outside our hotel for the van that was going to take us the Bac Ha market 3-hours-plus away, a large group of adolescent H'mong girls started pointing and laughing at me: "You are man but you wearing earrings!" they tittered. Later that day, at the market, as I sat inside a restaurant, a teenage H'mong girl passed by, glanced at me, and snickered, "Nice earrings. Hehehe. Lady boy."

- During the neauseating rollercoaster ride to the Bac Ha market, winding up and down the mountain roads, veering past motorbikes and water buffalo, and through jungle-entangled villages, our guide - a 20-year-old H'Mong girl named Cha (with a copper tooth and big smile) - mentioned that I would probably look very hansome if I cut off my beard. She explained that right now I "look at bit like Ho Chi Minh." Personally, I don't see it, but you tell me...

- During the same ride, I pulled out my iPod at some point and started listening to the Pantera song, "5 Minutes Alone." Cha tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could listen. "English song?" she asked. I handed her the headphones. She listened for a while with a rather inscrutable expression on her face, then handed the headphones back. "It was good," she said, "but do you have the song, 'Hello, Is It Me You're Looking For?'?"

- Coming back from the market, our van approached a large group of people standing around something alongside the road. As we got closer, we could see that it was a motorbike laying on its side, still smoking. And as we passed, we saw the bike's driver, laying on his back, not moving, his head covered in blood. The guy looked dead. Everyone in our van was silent for a while, then Cha explained that just two days before - our first day in Sa Pa - a man had died in a motorbike accident in the vicinity of our hotel. (In Hanoi, we'd seen a kid totally wipe out on his motobike in the middle of the street - amazingly, he'd jumped up and rode away, apparently not seriously injured. And Eveline's friend Ann had gotten into a accident while riding on a motorbike-taxi when she was in Hanoi a few years ago.) We already had been wary of riding on motorbikes - and had only ridden on two (Max's, then Penicillin's); now Maya and I vowed to stay off the damn things.

- One night as Maya and I strolled through Sa Pa at around 10:30pm, we passed three white tourists, 1 guy and 2 women, around our age or a little younger, skipping arm-in-arm and giggling with large group of prepubescent H'mong girls in the streets. "Who does that?" we wondered aloud, feeling a little dirty as we walked away. Sa Pa is a strange place... and tourists are strange people...

- Our last day in Sa Pa Maya and I were approached by this cute little old H'mong woman who didn't really speak any Engish but this didn't stop her from eagerly trying to sell us shit. (A little H'mong girl, who turned out to be a shark of a trinket-seller, also approached us at the same time - but that's a story for another day). She grabbed Maya by the arm, and as we walked, she walked with us and talked to us in her H'mong language while producing various wares from her satchel. Maya was saying "No thank you" and shaking her head to make sure the point was getting across - but it wasn't. The old woman kept walking with us, and when she noticed that her charms, as they were, weren't getting the job done, out of nowhere, she pinched Maya's ass! Maya started laughing hysterically, completely shocked, and the old woman started laughing hysterically, too. I thought she sounded stoned, so I started laughing, so we all stood there in the middle of the intersection and laughed. Maya said to me, "Ï have to buy something from her - she pinched my ass. That's, like, going beyond the call of duty."

rock shopping

2007-10-30T18:06:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-27T06:17:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-24T11:01:00.049-04:00

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)

2007-10-21T11:04:00.000-04:00

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)

2007-10-21T03:19:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-20T06:22:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-18T00:24:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-18T00:04:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-16T23:21:00.000-04:00

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)

2007-10-16T10:57:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-12T11:25:00.001-04:00

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

2007-10-09T05:38:00.000-04:00

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)

2007-10-07T09:13:00.000-04:00

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)

2007-10-05T06:36:00.001-04:00

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)

no sleep 'til beijing (part 2)

2007-10-01T04:58:00.001-04:00

(Just to point out how extraordinarily marked-up the internet access is at our Marriott Courtyard hotel's "Business Center," right now I'm typing in an internet cafe that Maya and I just stumbled on. It's full of young, chain-smoking Chinese gamers busy shooting each other up online, and the internet access is 3 yuan per hour - only 20 times less than what it costs at the hotel! That said, blogger is being slow as fuck, which may or may not be the fault of the cafe. Anyway, I digress...)

Bad, very bad...actually, fucking disgusting: the 9-hour hard-sleeper train ride from Xi'an to Pingyao. If Maya had been pleasantly surprised at our first Chinese overnight train experience, now that her expectations had been raised, she was in for a horrible shock, as were Eveline and I. As we stumbled with the frantic mass of humanity making its way from the Xi'an train station to our 11:15pm train, breaking out the "moshpit elbows" technique we've perfected over the years (though the Chinese seem to have elevate it to a martial art and were honestly kicking our asses), we knew pretty much right away that we were in for a long, bumpy night. Through the train windows we could see that the bunks were made of exposed metal and the so-called beds were basically glorified benches. This was clearly, as Maya called it, a "ghetto train." Once we stepped inside, the story only got worse. We walked through the bathroom area, which was wet with puddles of fluids we could only guess at. There was a tiny metal sink in the corner and, across from it, the door to the toilet (more on that hellhole soon). Similarly, the rest of our car - the bunks, walls, floors, everything - was filthy, rusty, and made either of metal or something equally hard and forbidding. Basically, it looked like someone had uprooted a decrepit old prison or insane asylum and slapped it on wheels. Maya, who sat in her bunk trying to touch as little as possible, noticed with the rest of us that the blankets, far from the plushy comforters of our last ride, were just raggedy old towels (which especially sucked since the train was freezing cold). She sat there, and basically flipped the fuck out. Eveline and I both deal with stress internally, with a quiet, grit-your-teeth-and-take-it attitude; not Maya. "I can't ride this train," she said over and over. "Maybe we can go back to Fish's hotel and book a plane back to Beijing. I don't give a fuck about Pingyao. This is nauseating." The poor Chinese man who was sharing our bunk area slunk back into the corner, clearly uncomfortable watching his strange white female bunkmate lose her shit. Eventually Eveline and I managed to calm Maya down a little, and since the train had started moving, she (and we) really had no choice but to man the fuck up and make it through the night somehow.

Even more fucking disgusting: the toilet on this train. At some point, Eveline decided that the best way for her to deal with our situation was to try and sleep it out; before attempting slumber, she paid a visit to the bathroom. When she came back, she looked traumatized. "Bad, huh?" Maya asked (by now she'd moved on from flipping the fuck out to shaking her head and chuckling at the horror of it all). "Yeah," was all Eveline could manage before climbing up to her bed, sticking in her earplugs, putting on her sleeping mask, and pulling her raggedy old towel up over her. A few minutes later Maya's bladder compelled her to pay her own visit. She came back, with a mirthless grin on her face. "That might be the most disgusting bathroom I have ever seen," she said to me. "Though it doesn't smell at all for some weird reason," she added. "You really have to go see it for yourself." My morbid curiosity fully aroused, I got up, strode back to the bathroom area, opened the door, and took a peek. What I saw was basically the nightmarish, shit-splattered bathroom from the film Trainspotting - if the movie had been remade in Chinese and featured an Asian squat toilet.

A brief digression on squat toilets: If you've never seen one of these fuckers, consider yourself lucky, and then imagine a shallow rectangular pit in the floor with a drain at one end, where waste get's flushed away. Sometimes there's some tread on either side of this pit where you're supposed to place your feet. Basically you squat over the whole thing and do your business. Now as a dude, pissing into a squat toilet is no big deal - it's like a big urinal. Shitting is another matter. The first and last time I took a shit in a squatting position, I was out camping for a week Freshmen year of college. I walked into the woods, dug a hole in the ground, pulled my pants down around my ankles, squatted - and proceeded to piss all over the back of my pants. Needlessly to say, I have yet to use a squat toilet here in Asia, and I certainly wasn't going to start with this particularly grostesque model in a moving train. So I squeezed my sphincter tight and prayed for a constipated night. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming already in progress...

Strangely good: staying up that night with Maya. Unlike Eveline, Maya and I knew that sleep wasn't in our immediate future, so we pulled down two seats next to a window, watched the strange rain-swept darkness outside whiz by, and talked 'til the early morning. Between hanging out with Fish and Eveline, crashing with Fish in his various luxury hotel rooms, and riding overnight trains, we hadn't been alone together for a long time it seemed, so it was cool to finally get some time to talk for real, just the two of us...even though we were hardly by ourselves, but rather surrounded by snoring Chinese. We talked about how, in some ways, as disgusting as the train was, this was just what we had signed up for when we embarked on this whole 4-month trip - experiences that were truly foreign, that truly took us out of our comfort zone, that we would not and could not find at home. We talked about how much stronger we would be after this trip, and after this train ride, in fact. And as we peered out our window, we saw rising out of the blackness, a bizarre factory/town filled, for whatever reason, with green lights that cast the whole smoke-filled sky around it in an eerie green. Maya commented that it looked almost like the aurora borealis... or, I thought, like the aftermath of a nuclear winter. Either way, it was a surreal - and truly foreign - image. Eventually, we crept into our bunks and into a fitful sleep, and when morning finally came, and we pulled into Pingyao station, we felt deep inside us that it really was a brand new day.

Totally crazy and awesome: the auto-rickshaw ride from the Pingyao train station to our hotel. Take the front half of a motorcycle, solder a bunch of seats and two wheels behind it, and then bend some pipes into a frame around the whole thing and throw a dirty plastic tarp over it all - that should give you an idea of the vehicle that took us, bumping and splashing, through the slick, rainy, and narrow-as-fuck streets of Pingyao.

Also totally crazy and awesome: our hotel, called Yi De. Basically, the whole place was as gorgeous as many of the shrines and courtyard houses that we had visited as sightseeing locations, but we got to stay there. And though the architecture was ancient and traditional, the actual accomodations were modern, comfortable, and, most importantly, for me, did not include any squat toilets. Here are Eveline and Maya in front of the portal (the thing locked with a huge padlock) to the cozy room that the three of us shared.

Beautiful but sopping wet and shiver-inducingly cold: Pingyao. The inclement weather didn't stop us from exploring. We climbed up and around the city wall...

explored the old-district streets, walked through a martial-arts museum full of the most insane antique weaponry you could imagine, and visited the mansion where the movie Raise the Red Lantern was shot.

What was striking (other than the singular ancient beauty of the city) was the obvious poverty. Pingyao originally remained so preserved simply because it was too poor to advance; only later did it become apparent that being trapped in time could be a tourist draw. From atop of the city wall, we saw buildings where people were still living that had shattered roofs and walls, roofs with trees growing right through them, roofs made of twisting, uncarved tree limbs. What was stunning was not just the ancientness of the town but the fact that people, modern people not unlike ourselves, were living their "normal" lives (watching TV, driving cars, wearing western-style clothes) in conditions that seemed medieval to us.

Bizarre but warming: coke and ginger tea. We stopped into a cafe to take a break from the bone-chilling rain, and Maya and I got ginger tea and lemon tea, respectively. Eveline got coke and ginger tea - coke apparently has become a staple of nu Chinese cousine (Eveline says that she's even heard of coke chicken, where the cola is used as a sweet glaze). What she got was a cup of hot, no-longer-bubbly coke (and, yes, ginger) that wasn't disgusting but pretty fucking weird.

Delicious and ridiculously cheap, yet with a price: the restaurant in Pingyao where we had both lunch and dinner. The place was packed with locals, which is always a good sign, so we went inside around lunch time after settling in at Yi De. Everyone stared at us as we walked in, and the staff, which was all junior-high or high-school aged girls, led us to a private room in the back. We ordered the most incredibly scrumptious comfort food, most of which was hardly what you think of as chinese food - stewed beef (which tasted very much like pork) and potatoes, sauteed green veggies, and some delicate noodle soup with this pasta called Cat Ears (for its visual resemblance to, uh, cat ears) in it, as well as some fresh parsley and little pieces of tomato. As we finished our meal (which costs about 40 yuan or a little over $5 total!), we heard loud bangs coming from outside and we discovered that a shitload of firecrackers were going off right on the street by the restaurant - turns out that the reason the place was so packed was because there was wedding party going down. When we returned there for dinner (the food was that delicious), the party was still raging, only the people were clearly way drunker (as custom goes, the bride and groom have to do shots of this insane 60-proof Chinese alcohol with every member of the party, and there were a lot). Almost as soon as I finished dinner, I felt my stomach churning, and by the time we got back to our hotel room, I had the full-on runs, which was particularly embarassing since the bathroom walls were thin (but thank god we had a western-style toilet). The next day I was feeling only marginally better (after popping 6 or so Pepto Bismol tablets) and Maya had followed in my unfortunate example (Eveline, however, apparently gastronomically hardened by her year in China, was no worse for wear). Our digestive systems bubbling and broiling, Maya and I were especially nervous about the forthcoming 11-hour overnight hard-sleeper ride back to Beijing. The staff at Yi De had assured us that while the train from Xi'an-to-Pingyao was, it turned out, notoriously gritty (a train for coal miners, basically), the train to Beijing was much, much better. Still, we couldn't help but be trebidatious...

Not bad at all: the train back to Beijing on Saturday night. As soon as we were close enough outside the train to see the bunk set-up, we knew we would be alright - Maya and Eveline immediately recognized the nice plush comforters from our first train, not the raggedy old towels from our second. Though not as cushy and lux as that first ride, and though it was jammed with passengers (the national Chinese holiday week was about to kick off and all sorts of folks from outlying areas were coming to Beijing for vacation), this train proved to be plenty clean and comfortable. We ended talking to this totally awesome Chinese family (a father, mother, and 14-year-old daughter who spoke surprising good English and was just about the sweetest little Asian teenager ever) sharing Eveline's bunk area. The dad offered me a shot of that crazy 60-proof Chinese alcohol (he had already polished off about a 3rd of the bottle), which I accepted, hoping that it would kill whatever bacteria was plaguing my gut. The shit wasn't bad and it warmed me right up (the dad told Eveline that, this being my first time trying the liquor, I should take 3 shots, but I declined that). Maya also took a swig, as did Audrey, the nearly 6-foot-tall redheaded girl from Seattle we befriended while waiting for the train in the station. Needlessly to say, she deflected a lot of the stares from us, though eventually Maya and Eveline goaded me into showing off my stretched ears and my tattoos to the Chinese family, which made me once again the center of attention. ("Don't you love that Brandon is like a walking freakshow here?" Maya grinned.) Maya talked to the 14-year-old daughter for a while, about her school, her family, etc. and they seemed to hit it off (in fact, Maya had such a great time talking to everyone that she not only had a good night's sleep when she finally took to her bunk, but her stomach was mysteriously - though temporarily - cured). The next morning as we disembarked and went off in search of a taxi, Eveline said that since meeting us, that girl would probably practice her English 20-times harder now.

So, ultimately, what did we take away from our little trip to Xi'an and Pingyao? Well, we came away with a new friend, for one: Audrey, who just left to return to the States today (Wednesday). (We might have left with another, as I had encouraged Maya to give the daughter of that Chinese family her email address, but Maya can get weirdly shy sometimes. I always feel like her sociability and skill at just shooting the shit and connecting with random people is her greatest talent - one that I'm pretty jealous of - but she sometimes doesn't take full advantage of it.) Eveline, personally, also came away with a new appreciation of Beijing; Maya, with a truer understanding that, as she put it, "things can always be worse"; and me, well, I'm even more dedicated than ever to staying as far away as possible from those squat toilets.

no sleep 'til beijing (part 1)

2007-09-30T08:57:00.000-04:00

As I noted at the end of my previous entry, since last Tuesday night Maya and I (joined by Eveline and Fish) have been on a rather sleepless mini-voyage to Xi'an (home of the Terracotta Warriors) and Pingyao (the best preserved ancient Chinese city in the whole country), and extended internet access has been hard to come by which is why I haven't posted anything new for the past week. Now Maya and I are back in Beijing, staying at a fancy-ass Marriott Courtyard hotel (we return to the budget lodgings of the 7 Days Inn tomorrow), trying to recuperate from said mini-voyage, and there's a nice little "Business Center," where, for the excessive fee of 30 yuan per half hour (approx. $5) I can type away happily.

Before I get into our Xi'an/Pingyao adventures and misadventures, first a quick plug: I've got my first cover story (on Phil Anselmo and his band Down) in the new issue of Revolver. If you have a chance, check it out - and make sure and check out the Editor's Letter, as well.

Now the good, the bad, and the ugly of our trip to Xi'an and Pingyao:

Good: Unloading about 1/3 of our shit out of our backbreakingly heavy backpacks and dropping it off at Eveline's place Tuesday afternoon so we wouldn't have to lug it all around with us through Xi'an and Pingyao. Eveline's freelance writer roommate, Jen, let us in while Eveline was at work.

Bad: The drug raid incident that went down on our second day in China, which Jen wrote this article about while we were away.

Good (or at least better than we expected): The 11-hour "hard sleeper" overnight train ride from Beijing to Xi'an. First, a few words of explanation for all of you 1st-worlders who don't have to experience such things: The way you get from Beijing to Xi'an (assuming you don't want to shell out for the plane flight, which is what Fish, being a wealthy fucker, likely would have done, if it had not been for us) is to take an "express" (see 11-hour) overnight train. Said trains are divided into a number of different sections, each being more or less expensive and correspondingly more or less uncomfortable. There're the soft seats (padded benches where you sit for 11 hours) and hard seats (wooden or metal benches where you try to do the same - and, if you're a dude, likely blow your prostate up to basketball proportions in the process); then there are the soft sleepers (a cabin fitting four people via two bunk beds) and the hard sleepers (a whole bunch of stacked bunk beds where the proletariat masses get to snore and fart together through the night). When, a few weeks ago, Maya and I were talking to Eveline about going to Xi'an, she had volunteered to take care of the travel arrangements, and since Fish also really wanted to see the Terracotta Warriors, we asked her to include him in our plans. Since we now had 4 people total, we assumed, not unreasonably, I think, that she would opt for a soft sleeper cabin. But as they say, when you assume, you make and ass out of U and me, and yeah, Eveline emailed us back a few days before we were set to arrive in China to say that she had bought 4 hard sleeper tickets from Beijing to Xi'an. Maya was nervous, to say the least - when she was growing up in the Ukraine, she had ridden on similar overnight trains with her family, but as far as she could remember, never in the hard sleeper section. When she called her mom to confirm this, her mom responded, "Of course not. I would never do that to you." Now Maya was super-psyched. As for why our so-called friend Eveline had booked these hard sleepers, she explained that they were the hardest tickets to get (pun intended) since most Chinese don't want to shell out for a soft sleeper and can't afford a plane ticket, and that she had ridden that way before and loved the experience "because," as she told us via email, "you get to hang with the common folk this way... often times have random conversations (which will no doubt involve everyone asking me, 'Where are your friends from? How come your English is so good? Which do you like better, China or America?') Plus train culture is such an interesting experience. Like before they turn off the lights for bed, everyone sits in the aisles chowing down on the TONS of food they brought with them, as if they've been hording food all month specifically for the purpose of getting to pig out on the train ride." This was sounding better and better. But actually the ride wasn't bad at all - the train was clean, relatively smooth, and no Chinese common folk really bothered us (perhaps to Eveline's disappointment), though they did stare at us a lot as we were just about the only whities on the train; the bunks were not jumbled in a big open space, dorm-room-style, but rather in soft-sleeper-style cabins - the only difference was that they were stacked 6 to a cabin rather than 4. While this did make the bunks rather claustropobically coffin-like, the matresses were actually softer, I think, than those in most of the Asian hotels we've stayed at so far. Plus the plushy comforters were to die for. I didn't get a much sleep, since I couldn't shift around or spread out at all, plus I had a bag full of our few valuables (passports, iPods, camera, that's about it) under my pillow. But Maya remembered that as a kid, she had always wanted to ride in the top bunk, and that's just where we got to ride to Xi'an - so in some ways, you could even say that the ride was a dream come true. Here's Maya enjoying her top bunk (while an old Chinese dude stares vacantly at what kind of looks like a laptop in the photo but was actually a metal plate for garbage).

Depressing (and a little odd): the view from the Beijing-to-Xi'an train. Crumbling ancient-looking shanty towns, filthy coal mines, filthy factories pumping black smoke into the already smog-filled skies, new-ish-looking building prematurely reduced to rubble though people apparently still live and work in them, lonely gravestones along the train tracks, and, uh, miles of corn fields! (Corn, according to Eveline, is "huge" in China, and yeah, over the course of our trip, we'll see lots of locals chomping down on corn-on-the-cob. Who knew? And in a grocery store, we'll see corn-flavored yogurt! Yum.)

Good: Crashing at Fish's fancy-as-fuck luxury hotel in Xi'an and blowing off our own hotel reservation. Though his place was just outside the city walls, and our place was in the city center, central Xi'an turned out to basically be a big fucking mall...in what we decided was essentially the Iowa of China.

Not so good but funny: Discovering that Eveline, who we were all kind of relying on to order food and get us to the right places, etc., only speaks and understands just enough Chinese to get by and is basically illiterate. Half the time she would have a long exchange with a local, a hotel staff member, a waiter and waitress, and then we would all be like, "So what did they say?" and she'd smile, shrug, and answer, "Oh, I don't know. All I got was something about spinach." As she herself admits, she really only understands about 40 to 50% of what's going on, but since that's 30 to 40% more than we understand, we're still very, very thankful to have her.

Underwhelming: the Terracotta Warriors. First of all, you really can only observe them from fairly far away (Maya, for some reason, actually thought that we might be able to walk among them; I didn't expect that, but was still hoping we'd be a little closer). Secondly, the Warrriors are divided among 3 pits, and only Pit 1 really has a good number of the clay dudes standing together in formation (in a bizarrely stripped-down hangar-like building). A shocking amount of the site has yet to be excavated or restored, which meant that Pits 2 and 3 were mostly just piles of dirt which some holes dug into them. Here I am, underwhelmed.

Overwhelming: The apocalyptic weather in Xi'an. Due to otherwordly smog levels, the sky over the city looked a crazy yellow and visibility was something looking through wonton soup; Fish's already hacking cough (which had been steadily worsening since he arrived in Shanghai a week-and-a-half ago) got to the point where you almost expected him to cough up blood (which wouldn't have been far from local custom: Chinese regularly hack up and spit out phlegm on the streets - it's not considered impolite or anything - due to the pollution levels in the country). By the afternoon of our first day there, it started to rain, though our cab driver (more on him in a bit) explained that it usually never rains. The bartendress at Fish's hotel said that the increasing pollution has been making the weather all crazy, and she predicted even worse rain our second day there; we were all skeptical of her meteorological prowess, but good for her, and bad for us, her prediction proved all too accurate, and it pissed (probably, acid) rain all over us all day.

Good: hiring a cab driver for the day for around 400 yuan (approx. $55); the dude even waited around for us for hours while we explored various sites at no extra charge.

Disconcerting and strange: As Eveline pointed out to us, the Chinese word for
Um" sounds exactly like "niggah," which, as we quickly found out as she and our cab driver talked, means that listening in on the average Chinese conversation can be a peculiar and uncomfortable experience - if you're sensitive to racial slurs (which Maya, the kike, and me, the half chink, are not, so we found it pretty fucking funny). I joked with Maya that this would probably be the only Chinese world she would come away from our trip remembering.

Creepy as hell: the tomb of some emperor and empress (for some reason we absolutely cannot find their names anywhere right now) that were filled with thousands of doll-sized recreations of soldiers, musicians, enuchs, concubines (mostly armless, since their arms were made of wood and had rotted away), and all kinds of farm animals. Eveline had joked at the Terracotta Warriors site that it was strange that no one had made a horror movie there yet, but as soon as we walked into this site (whatever the hell it was called), we realized that this was the place for a horror flick. Dolls are just scary.

Very cool: Xi'an's Muslim quarter. Bustling alleys full of vendors hawking everything from Mao lighters and knockoff Obituary T-shirts(?!) to elaborate paper cut-outs and exotic streetfood - and doing so, amazingly, without harassing us, grabbing us, shouting at us, etc. like we've experienced basically everywhere else in China. Many of the locals - mostly Chinese Muslims - barely looked Asian, in their white hats and with their curly hair and light-colored eyes. We walked through the gorgeous Great Mosque, which, in contrast with the people, looked very Asian and barely looked like any Mosque we'd ever seen, displaying as it did almost no Middle-Eastern influence, other than some weird, ornate Arabic-in-Chinese-font script. The night of our second (and final) day in Xi'an we ate at this crazy and rather sketchy-looking restaurant in the quarter, where all the food was grilled up outside on the wet, rain-splattered streets and brought into us at our table. The wait staff was all rough-and-tumble prepubescent boys and girls in blue shirts and white pants, except our waiter who had no uniform, a gimp leg, and spoke a Northern dialect that Eveline couldn't understand, which made ordering particularly fun. We drank beer and ate delicous spicy fish, some noodles, crispy flatbread, and over 50 skewers of lamb and some mystery cow meat that we theorized later was probably the most savory of the cow's 4 stomachs. Fish was particularly happy to be gorging so much animal flesh, while Maya was nervous that her own (presumably not-so-savory) stomach would not be able to handle all the street meat through that night's imminent 9-hour hard-sleeper ride to Pingyao. Fish would not be accompanying us there, as he had one more day scheduled in "beautiful" Xi'an before flying home to NYC. Having sampled most of the city's so-called wonders, enjoyed its gorgeous weather, and inhaled its aromatic smog, we were particularly sorry to leave him behind - but at least, we knew that he would be able to find plenty of meat-on-a-stick. (To be continued)

a better tomorrow

2007-09-24T02:10:00.000-04:00

Not there was really any other direction in which things could go, but since our first day in China, shit has gotten way better, in fact, you might say that in general, shit has gotten kind of awesome.

In hindsight, Japan might have been the worst place to come here from - as Maya and I have said a few times over the last few days, our culture shock probably would have been a lot less if we'd come straight to Beijing from NYC. Where Japan is ultra polite, clean, orderly, modern, China is brusque, crusty, and chaotic, existing in some bizarre neverland between the 1st and 3rd worlds, between western freedom and old-regime oppression. While we've gotten more comfortable in this liminal state, there's always an underlying sense of danger, which, as the American doctor who gave me my 3rd Japanese Enchephalitis vaccination shot this morning (in a ridiculously sleek and sanitary western-style clinic) pointed out, is kind of what you want if you're going to travel as Maya and I are. Kind of.

Fortunately, that sense of danger is now just a little bit more in check. Regarding our living situation, we spent our first two nights crashing with Fish in his luxurious executive suite (on the second day we swung by the good ol' Fangyuan to check out a day early, and miraculously, they not only gave us cash back for the night we weren't staying but didn't mention or charge us for the shattered bathroom shelf). Then on Friday, we moved to the 7 Days Inn that Eveline had booked for us. That has turned out to be pretty much all you could hope for out of a budget hotel - think Motel 6 but in technicolor, with really hard beds, barely anyone who speaks English, and water that stops running periodically for a few hours so they can refill the tanks.

As for the city at large, here are just a few of the awesome, crazy, and/or disturbing experiences we've had in the last few days:

Revisiting Tiennamen Square in the daylight.

Exploring the gorgeous, disarmingly sprawling Forbidden City...

the highlight for me being the Imperial Garden in the City's north end, which is full of amazing craggy stone scuptures and structures, intentionally carved over long periods of time with dripping water. Here Maya stands in front of the stunning Duixiushan, (Gathering Beauty Hill) a small artificial mountain of twisting rock, complete with caves, fountains, and on its peak, Yujingyuan, the Pavilion of Imperial View, to which the Emperor and Empress would ascend every year (but unfortunately no tourists were allowed).

Discovering even more insane animals-on-a-stick at roadside stands. Here are some scorpion and seahorse kabobs (the latter of which Fish sampled - "Tastes salty and crunchy," he reported after the little thing was deep-fried to a blackened crisp), and behind them, a vendor who took obvious pleasure in grossing out tourists - in the back of the stand were rows and rows of live scorpions impaled on skewers; whenever he had an audience of already aghast whities assembled, this sadistic little fucker would blow on the poor critters and have them (and quite a few tourists) all squirming madly.

Passing Hooters Beijing in our cab one night, which was a strange enough sight in itself, but then we noticed the large billboard advertising the place, which featured three Chinese Hooters girl in the restaurant chains' signature tube-tops and orange shorts, each one of the fine young ladies more flat-chested than the last.

Walking around the Temple of Heaven, where, for some reason, they had enormous speakers blasting out classical music everywhere (though not as loudly as this photo would suggest).

Discovering the George Orwell novel Animal Farm for sale right out in the open in a big bookstore in the Waifujing mall.

Climbing the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu. (That's Fish there on the far right, stepping into the fucking photo - way to go, man.) Words and pictures really cannot capture the absolute majesty and scope of the structure and its misty mountain setting.

Hurtling down the, believe it or not, toboggan/flume-ride that takes you over 3,000-feet from the Great Wall to the foot of the moutain! You really have to experience it to even begin to understand - but here's how the Chinese pamphlet that Fish picked up described it (in fall-on-the-floor hilarious broken English: "Toboggan mixed sports and entertainment and became a new amusement project. Tt is also called 'Nanirrigated farmland sled'. Toboggan uses the theory of acceleration of gravity and makes coasters dive along the mountain path in low-latitude flying or high-speed driwing, Thrilling,amazing,safe and comfortable,it also has an auto device make speed easily controoled by both old and young.Weigang Company in German made this toboggan of stainless steel.It is 1580 meters in total length and ,in a form fo snake , it takes adwantage of different situations to accordance with the mountain path,so safely send tourists Muzhihaolou to the foot of Great Wall." ...This video that Eveline shot in February might give you a (slightly) better idea of what the ride actually is like...

Exploring the totally nuts neighborhood around our 7 Days Inn, where snazzy bars, sleek boutique-like shops, and tourist-friendly trinket stands sit side-by-side with tiny housing complexes that are basically just piles of rubble and inside you can see mothers sleeping with their babies, both clad in rags, on rickety beds.

Renting a slow motor boat (for 60 yuan - less than $10 - per hour) at around 10pm and driving it around the gorgeous lake in said hood while drinking Heinekens purchased from the same folks who rented us the boat. Red-lantern- and neon-lit nightclubs crowd the banks; a mix of traditional wooden boats, swan-shaped pedal-boats, and other motor boats share the water; and strange mini hot-air balloons with open flames rise in the sky around us, set off by locals on the shore; all make for a truly surreal scene. Maybe best of all, the disclaimers/warning sign by the boat-rental booth commands (again, in sublimely broken English): "Do not bubilosity, and do not engage in nonstandard behavior. Please do not stand and fight while in the boat..."

Eating in a hot-pot restaurant in said hood. The menu included "Braised dog," "Braised pig large intestine," "Braised bullfrog (live and fresh)," and "Braised bull penis, marrow, and testicles." We passed on all those culinary gems, but opted for the "Braised shrimp (live and fresh)," obviously expecting a nice steaming plate of cooked crustaceans to be delivered to our table. Instead, we got, along with our hot pot of boiling broth, a glass bowl full of very live shrimp, all kicking, spitting, and, I swear, sneezing. Our waiters gestured for us to stand and back away from the table, whereupon they dumped the wriggling shrimp into the boiling pot. The poor little animals danced and lept as soon as they hit the bubbling liquid, and two actually popped back out - one onto the floor, the other onto the tabletop - before the waiters could slap down the hot pot's lid. Maya, Fish, and I all stood around, watching this, completely amazed. The waiters frantically recaptured the escaped crustaceans and hurried back into the kitchen with them, only to return seconds later with the same shrimp, presumably washed, and began to put them back into the pot. Fish protested: "No, no, they've been on the floor," he said (and I have to agree - the 5 second rule should not apply in China), but the waiters were so obviously offended and incredulous, that we eventually relented, against our better judgement. The shrimp ended up being delicious - though we did half expect them to still struggle a little as we picked them, all pink and smoking, from the pot with our chopsticks. Hopefully, Maya and I prove to have as much fight in us as these poor critters - in fact, just a little more, since they're dead right now - over the rest of our mad trip.

P.S. Tomorrow night (Tuesday) we're off on a 12-hour train ride to Xi'ian (to see the motherfucking Terracotta Warriors) and to visit the trapped-in-time city of Pinyang. Most likely we won't be able to access the internet much in said locales, but stay cool: We'll be back and posting soon enough.

one world, one dream (part 2)

2007-09-21T21:57:00.001-04:00

So we head out into the Beijing streets, which are deluged with torrents of not just pedestrians but every sort of wheeled vehicle imaginable - cars, buses, rickshaws, bicycles, tricycles, cycles with strange little cabins attached to their backs for holding passengers and/or massive piles of recyclables, motorcycles, motorcycles with strange little cabins for the same purposes, etc., etc. Think Road Warrior set in a crumbling urban wasteland. We dodge the traffic somehow, with our guidebook in hand, looking for a highly recommended vegetarian restaurant that should be just a block away. We can't find it. We walk back and forth along the block, and though we find the exact street number, the restaurant is nowhere to be seen. Finally we ask an official-looking dude standing by the door, and show him the Chinese characters for the eatery's name in the book. He shakes his head, refers us to the English-speaking receptionist inside the building; she explains that the restaurant closed down. We go off to find another recommended restaurant, which apparently suffered the same fate, judging from the lot of dirt and rubble at the corner where it should have been.

Around that corner, we see a long line of lantern-lit food stalls (we later learn it is the Night Market), and are drawn to take a look, hoping to find some sustenance. What we find instead are shouting salesmen hawking pretty much every sort anything on a stick you could possibly imagine: from marinated beef to shrimp to whole squids to, uh, scorpions, seahorses, cicadas, silkworms, centipedes, and snake! Maya and I walk the seemingly endless line of insane kabobs, jaws on the ground, as the vendors scream "Snake! You like!" "Worm, very good!" and grin at us invitingly/ominously. We (wisely I think) duck into an actual restaurant (where we see the turtle soup mentioned in my last post) and order some not-completely-ridiculous (though not particularly good) food.

Bellies full, we head off to look for an internet cafe, where we can hopefully get in touch with our friend Fish. Our guidebook, which so far has not served us well, claims that there's one at the southeast corner of Tiennamen Square. So we make a long but rather amazing walk along the moat around the Forbidden City...at night...in near total darkness...with the pagoda towers silhouetted against the moonlight.

When we finally make it to the north end of the Square, we find massive crowds of tourists and very aggressive locals who seem to pop randomly out of the throng, trying to get us to buy everything from postcards to enormous kites. We are also accosted by a very cute couple of Chinese girls who ask us if we are tourists and where we are from. They claim to also be tourists, and we are unwittingly sucked into a seemingly very innocent conversation about our and their travels. However, Maya notices some shady dudes lurking behind the girls, eyeing us, and we talk politely while she clutches her bag. After a few minutes, one of the girls asks what we are doing right now and if we'd have any interest in going to teahouse and continuing our conversation there; a subtle look of amazement registers on Maya's face and we quickly extract ourselves: "Sorry, but we really have to find this internet cafe and find our friend," we say - which is totally true. As we walk away, Maya explains to me that she had read about a scam exactly like this, where random Chinese young people come up to you and ask you if you are a tourist and if they can practice their English with you; they invite you to a teahouse, where after a few drinks, an exorbitant bill arrives; when you protest, some strongmen appear and basically force you into paying. We are stupified - and oddly thrilled - that we have actually come across the set-up (and fortunately eluded the payoff) of this very scam.

So we walk across the Square, a strange, otherwordly experience considering recent history, and arrive at the corner where the internet cafe should be. It's closed. What the fuck? Our guidebook is from 2005, and we knew Beijing was a fast-developing city, but this was getting ridiculous. On our book's map, I located another internet place that should be along the way back to the dreaded Fangyuan hotel, but again, it was nowhere to be found.

Finally, around 10pm, we retreat to the hotel and discover that there have been, all along, a few computers right in the lobby with internet access that we can use; Maya logs into her email while I go to our room to call Eveline again - she had told me to call her around 9:45 when she would finally be done with work. Turns out she has a cellphone that we can use while we're in the country; I just need to get it from her and she lives a cab-ride away. Maya meanwhile comes back to the room with good news: She's received an email from Fish, he's fine and in Beijing in a swanky-ass luxury hotel, the Waifujing Grand, where we are totally welcome to crash. And once we look on the map, we discover that the place is literally right around the corner.

So we throw all our shit back into our backpacks and trudge to his hotel (which is massive and gorgeous, with doormen and bellhops, a bar in the lobby complete with classical pianist), where Maya meets up with him in his executive suite (the dude is a fucking VP, and, more importantly tonight, a fucking lifesaver), which, rather absurdly, has the room-number 1234, while I catch a cab to Eveline's place. I hand the driver a printout of the address and directions in Chinese that Eveline had emailed to me, and after a few U-turns and confused stops along the side of the street to re-read the directions, he deposits me in front of a practically unlit skyrise apartment complex (the Chinese don't seem to believe in streetlamps). I stumble around between buildings for a while, trying to locate Eveline's, finally take the evevator of what I think is the right structure. When I step out, the hall is basically pitch-black and I have to almost literally put my nose on each door to read the numbers (I find later that there's a Clapper of sorts connected to the lights, and I just wasn't stomping around enough). Finally I get to what I think is hers, and I knock, praying that she - and not some grumpy old martial arts master pissed to find a white stranger outside - will open the door. Praise Buddha, it is her and I stumble in, give her a hug, and flop onto the nearest chair. We quickly catch up, I take the cellphone from her (which should make life a hell of a lot easier over the next month), exchanging it for the cute "Little Boney" plushy skeleton doll we picked up for her in Japan.

We're both completely beat and it's getting late, so after a little while, I bid her goodnight and somehow manage to hail a cab outside of the strange, dark apartment complex; as soon as I step out of the car in front of Fish's luxury hotel, I get propositioned by some snappily dressed Chinese pimp for massages and "sexing women." I thank him for his generous offer but that's about the last thing I need right now - sleep on a clean bed in a room without worms being at the very top of the agenda - and make my exhausted way to Fish's suite. There Maya and I catch up with the rich bastard (who we love - even more so now) - turns out he was basically unharmed by the typhoon, though it did ruin some of his sightseeing plans. We have a few beers, a few laughs, get a cot for Fish to sleep on (we don't love him enough to snuggle up with him through the night), and Maya and I finally pass the fuck out at in what felt like the softest bed in the world (but actually wasn't, because Chinese seem to hate soft beds even more than streetlamps) around 1:30 in the morning.

It was a long, grueling day - maybe the most insane 13 hours Maya and I have ever gotten through together - but all's well that ends well, and thank god (or Buddha) for good friends far from home.

one world, one dream (part 1)

2007-09-20T13:36:00.000-04:00

As Maya and I agreed over dinner on Thursday, as we looked at the menu of the restaurant we had stumbled into and eyed the photo of the turtle soup - which looked exactly like a turtle just cracked out of its shell and tossed whole into a bowl of broth - China was kicking our asses. It was just our first day in in the country, but we already felt like we had been there for a harrowing month (which is how long we are scheduled to be here on this insane trip of ours). And to think, it all started out so benignly. Maya and I had been nervous as our plane from Tokyo came into Beijing airport that early afternoon about going through the Chinese passport control, customs, and "quarantine" - China makes you fill out a form declaring that you don't have a whole range of ailments from HIV to psychosis to sneezing - but when we finally actually disembarked, the procedures proved to be as blase and perfunctory as in any other airport we'd ever been through. Call it the calm before the storm...

Two days before we were set to arrive in Beijing we had gotten an email from the hotel, Li Shi, which we had booked for our first week telling us that "the government is having a meeting" and had booked all the rooms, which meant that our reservations had to be bumped to the hotel's sister hotel, a place called Fangyuan. We frantically looked up online reviews of this sister hotel and shit didn't look so good, so we asked my friend Eveline (who has been living in Beijing for over a year now) to see if she could book us a room at the 7 Days Inn in her neighborhood, which she has heard from a friend is not a bad at all for a budget place in China. Unfortunately, said 7 Days Inn didn't have any rooms available for our first two days in town, so we decided we'd just have to brave Fangyuan. And it would end up taking every ounce of our courage.

First, our taxi driver could barely find the place, and when he finally did, the neighborhood looked sketchy at best - down nearby alleys we saw residential areas that were basically little shanty towns constructed from scraps. Then, the young, very bored, and very disinterested girl at the check-in counter turned out to have no record of our booking or any idea what we were talking about when we recounted the story of our original reservation, the email we received, etc. But she did give us an economy room for two nights (for around 238 yuan, approx $30, each night). Then she gave us our key and directed us to the basement; words can hardly capture the horror of the subterranean hallways that awaited us when we walked down the stairs - the ceiling sagged heavily in places, had gaping holes in others; the carpeting on the floor had huge black stains all over it; the wallpaper was peeling, the walls had holes in them; the door of one room appeared to have had its entire doorknob and lock torn right out, leaving a splintery maw in their place; and the whole place stunk. As I said to Maya, "It looks like the hotel in The Shining - except that hotel was nice." When we got to what was to be our room, the bedroom smelled thickly of cigarettes, while the bathroom smelled like shit, and the walls, floor, and ceiling were hardly in any better shape than those of the hallway outside, plus they were covered in mold. We decided quickly that we needed to see a different room.

So we returned to the visibly annoyed girl at check-in, who suggested the number of another available room. She called down to the housekeeper - a different but equally young girl, whom we had seen sitting with a slight, inscrutable smile on her face, at a desk in the middle of the basement hallway; she, the check-in girl said, would show the room to us. Meeting up with the housekeeper, who spoke no English as far we could tell, we followed her deep down the left end of the labyrinthine hallway to the very last room there - which, at first glance, actually looked endurable compared to the first. Then, as we began to unpack our shit, Maya discovered that the mattress of the bed was made of some mysteriously crunchy, painfully-hard styrofoam-liked material and had a large gully on the right side of it, while one of the pillowcases bore a suspiciously bloodstain-like blotch and some strands of hair. I was on the phone with Eveline, seeing when we could meet up and describing our hotel travails so far, when Maya said, "Is that a worm crawling on the bathroom floor?" I snatched up my eyeglasses and peered ahead - sure enough, a skinny, very energetic earthworm was wriggling along the dirty tiles, arching its head up like a Mini-Me cobra, apparently checking out its new home with much more enthusiasm than we were. A chill ran down my spine - as I've mentioned before, I really don't like legless slithering things like snakes and worms, and I definitely don't like them hanging out in my bathroom.

I slapped a teacup over the worm so that I could show it, alive and wriggling, to the hotel staff, and we returned to the frontdesk, finding there a new, even less friendly, and less English-language-savvy young woman. We complained about the mattress and I tried to explain about the worm; "A what?" she said. "A worm," I answered, inching my finger along the desk in an absurd pantomime. "A worm." Nope, no comprende. "Need see 'nother room?" she asked; exasperated, we nodded our heads. She called down to the housekeeper, who, with the same inscrutable look on her face, showed us to yet a new chamber. This one looked far superior to both the previous ones, though it was still far less hospitable/sanitary than anywhere Maya and I had ever stayed before: As in everywhere else in the hotel, the wallpaper was peeling off, there were holes and mold everywhere, and we were still totally sketched out. We gave her a beleaguered "Xie xie," ("Thank you"), the housekeeper returned to her desk, and we flopped down on one of the beds together - only after putting down our own sheets, which we'd wisely brought with us - utterly exhausted (we'd been up since 5am to catch our morning flight from Japan and were feeling worn out before any of this even went down).

After a little while, having failed to get any rest, we decided to try and find some food and an internet cafe - Maya's friend Fish was supposed to meet us in Beijing (he had timed his own, much shorter vacation to China with our first week and a half here) but he'd gone to Shanghai first and that city had been hit by a major typhoon leading to an evacuation of half the city and we hadn't been able to get in touch since; Maya was hoping for an email from him, or at least, to get the number of his hotel in Beijing so we could call and see if he'd made here.

As we redistributed some of our shit to our daypacks, Maya pulled a pair of underwear from her bag that were still wet from doing laundry in Japan, and since we didn't want to hang it on any of the existing surfaces in the room, which all appeared to be filthy, I decided to improvise a hanging line. We had some cord, which I strung from the lip of this glass shelf above our sink to the towel rack a few feet away. Mind you, the line was slack and the panties weighed next to nothing, but as soon as I stepped back from my setup, the shelf instantly pulled away from the wall, hit the floor, and shattered! The ceramic mugs on the shelf also shattered. I stared at the scene in total disbelief, as did Maya (who had run over, having heard the sound).

We called over the ever inscrutable housekeeper, who impassively swept up the wreckage, while we looked on and exchanged glances of "What the fuck?" Once she cleaned the scene of the crime, we quickly stuffed our daypacks with everything we had with us of any real value (very little, actually), and headed out into Beijing, eager to, at least temporarily, escape this Fangyuan hellhole, get some food, find Fish, and hopefully clear our heads... (to be continued)

a long sigh

2007-09-19T08:04:00.000-04:00

Our last real day in Japan (Wednesday; we fly out tomorrow for China at 9am or so), and needless to say, there were many loose ends to wrap up, souvenirs to buy and mail (dealing with the Japanese post office literally gave Maya and I both headaches), huge and yet somehow not-quite-big-enough backpacks to pack, and, oh, tons of shit I'm probably forgetting and maybe we forgot to do.

But this afternoon, instead of dealing with all the above, we 1) learned that the story oft-repeated in the States - or at least in the Revolver office - that in Japan you can buy girls' used panties from vending machines is partly an urban legend (you can't buy them from vending machines) and partly true (you definitely can buy them from the many sex shops scattered around Tokyo). In the back of the sex shop Maya and I decided to peruse while sourvenir shopping, we found a back corner covered in little baggies, each stuffed with a pair of folded panties alongside small polaroids of a Japanese girl wearing said undergarment. Shit was expensive - like, 3,500 yen (approx. $35) each - or else I would have bought a pair for every member of the Revolver staff. Then again, as Maya pointed out, if you're the kind of person who has to go to a store to pay money for a female's used undies, 35 bucks probably sounds like a bargain.

After making this discovery, we 2) hung out with vocalist-keyboardist-songwriter Mirai and vocalist-saxophonist Mika (a.k.a. Mikannibal) of the awesome Japanese metal band Sigh. I had met Mirai briefly in the States a little while ago - he came into the Revolver office to write and record an original short song on the spot for the magazine's now-defunct "Unit" page (click here to hear the creepy little ditty), and when I knew I was going to Tokyo, I got in touch. As for Mika, see below what she looks like onstage - needless to say, I would never have worked up the balls to get in touch with her. And that's before Maya talked to her and discovered that she's a 3rd-year PHD student in physics!

Mirai and I had arranged to meet outside the Hard Rock Cafe in Oeno station - because that seemed like really the cheesiest place we could possibly meet - and from there, Maya and I followed Mirai and Mika on the subway and along a maze of streets on a personal tour of Tokyo's metal record stores. Most were Disk Union shops, while one (located in the Shinjuku district) was excllently named No Remorse Tokyo and it had an amazing variety of metal T-shirts, including a Gallhammer tee that I almost bought, except that it was gray-on-gray and I had seen a kid wearing a black-on-black one of the same design at the Mono/Envy show and that looked so much cooler that I just couldn't shell out the 2,100 yen (approx. $21) for the lesser gray version. (I did, however, buy a CD by Gallhammer frontwoman Vivian Slaughter's other band, Congenital Hell.)

I had actually been working on a Gallhammer story for Revolver before I left for this trip, and had even sent email questions to Vivian Slaughter almost a month before Maya and my date of departure, but she had never responded with answers and I had had to kill the piece. Mika, who is friends with Vivian, explained that Vivian really barely knows any English at all, and that she has had to resort to using Yahoo translator when trying to answer English-language interview questions. Plus, according to both Mika and Mirai, Vivian is really crazy, like she-should-be-taking-her-meds- but-isn't-and-she-gets-benefits-from-the-government crazy. Which only makes her cooler in my book.

In between record stores, Mirai and Mika took Maya and I to this insane noodle shop down some alleys by this almost dried-up canal. It was basically just a bar with space for many 20 people around it, and two greasy-looking cooks/servers scrambling over huge steaming vats of broth and ramen in the center. Mika ordered for all of us with a very mischievious look on her face, and when Maya's and my late lunches/early dinners arrived, we knew why. The meal consisted of a normal sized bowl of broth with strips of pork and bamboo shoots and pieces of scallion - and then an absolutely ginormous, I mean Godzilla-sized bowl of noodles that would easily feed a family of 5 in any of the other countries we are about to visit. While Maya and I looked at each other nervously, Mirai proceeded to noisily slurp up his entire portion (in Japan you're supposed to consume your noodles while producing maximum slurping noise - it's only polite) in about, oh, 5 or 6 gulps. Mika wasn't far beyond (though she had ordered a smaller bowl of noodle for herself - because, even though she's already enviably slendor, she says she's dieting. Ultimately, Mirai and Mika left the premises and waited outside for us - in order to make room at the bar for the steady stream of customers coming in - while Maya and I tried not to humiliate ourselves completely with our meager noodle-eating skills. Eventually we gave up and staggered out, bellies engorged. "You have to eat fast before your stomach knows that you're already full," Mirai explained his power-noodle-pounding technique later.

But while Maya and I feel like we've had to consume Japan very quickly over the last 2 weeks, I can definitely say that we have not had our fill. And when we bid Mirai and Mika farewell later that evening - knowing that we would have to bid Japan itself sayonara soon the next morning - we did so with full intention of returning sometime not too faraway.

fat wrestlers, even fattier tuna

2007-09-18T07:48:00.001-04:00

Coming back to Tokyo from Kyoto on Monday has been cool because it's been like coming back to a city that we know, and that kind of seems to know us , too. As Maya says, it feels like we're just getting started in a way - so, too bad, that just as we're becoming comfortable in and with Japan, we have to leave (the day after tomorrow).

After our 2-and-a-half-hour ride on the Shinkansen bullet train - which was smooth and restful considering the damn thing to hurtling along at 160 MPH - we chilled most of the afternoon at the good ol' Oak Hotel - small as ever, but compared to the Ryokan we had spent the last 5 sleepless nights in, it seemed especially comfortable.

That night we took a walking tour of Kabuki-cho, the Shinkjuku redlight district, which is notorious the world over and supposedly inspired some of the street scenes in the movie Bladerunner. While I'm sure there was all sorts of depravity taking place behind closed doors, from the pedestrian eye-view, the thing was pretty anticlimatic. Sprawling and hyperkenetic, yes, but what was striking was not its brazen perverted-ness but rather it's outward coyness: stripclubs, for instance, advertised without a shred of nudity, but with billboards of girls' headshots, each more innocent and angelic looking than the last. What was also striking were the number of male host bars, which also advertised via boards of headshot, this time of pretty Japanese boys with big spiky hair and all-American smiles. Having been to Amsterdam's much more in-your-face redlight district - narrow alley upon alley full of prostitutes in lingerie behind glass walls - Kabuki-cho seemed unexpectedly tame.

The next day (Tusday), however, did not disappoint - though it didn't necessarily start out looking so good. After a long, lazy morning hanging out in the Oak Hotel, we returned by subway to Asakusa - site of Senso-Ji shrine - to try and buy souvenirs for a shitload of folks back home in the States. And we failed miserably at finding anything - or rather, there were way too many options and we just couldn't decide. Plus the teeming throngs of trinket-hungry tourists were driving us (actually, mostly me) nuts - "Oh, the manatee," as Maya and I like to say.

But we did have one strange little interaction with a local which boded well for the rest of the day. As we walked along the gauntlet of shops, an old Japanese man - he looked maybe 70 or 80, but was probably 150 - tugged at my right shirt sleeve, finally getting my attention. He pointed at the tattoo on my arm, said something I couldn't understand. I lifted my sleeve to show him the whole piece - my koi fish on black water with cherry blossoms - and he nodded approvingly, then pointed to my chest as if asking whether the tattoo continued into breastplates as the traditional Japanese-style body art often does. I shook my head but lifted my left sleeve to show him my other half-sleeve. He again nodded approvingly, said something, then pointed at himself (his nose to be precise) and then at...his butt(!) It took us a second to figure out what he was getting at. "You have a tattoo?" we asked...on your butt, we thought but didn't ask (not that he could have understood us anyway). He nodded, and interlinked his hands to make the shape of a flapping bird. We smiled and Maya gave him a thumbs-up sign (before bidding him farewell)...I mean, what else do you do when an old Japanese stranger tells you he has a tattoo of a bird on his ass?

After our failed shopping excursion, we took a couple subways to Kokugikan, the sumo stadium. It just so happened that our visit to Japan was timed perfectly to coincide with the September basho, one of the six big sumo tournaments that take place in Japan every year, and one of only three that take place in Tokyo. From the outside, the stadium looked pretty much like any western stadium, until we noticed three sumo wrestlers in kimonos (one was also wearing a respiratory mask, as quite a few Japanese tend to do, in a heartening sign about the air quality) walking outside.

Inside, the place was crazy, bustling with employees all dressed in traditional garb and eager Japanese fans, old and young, most of whom had boxes on the floor level of the stadium, where the seating was literally on the floor, on mats and pillows. Our seats were on the balcony and were actual chairs (and plushy ones at that). The concession stands were out of this world, especially compared to those at U.S. sports arenas - bento boxes, bean buns, hot green tea, fruit juices, fish chips, and awesome little disposable cups of sake, of which Maya and I had to partake.

As for the action itself, it took place on this awesome clay platform - the dohyo, or sumo ring - with a huge Shinto shrine-like rooftop suspended over it, and was a weird mix of solemn ritual - elaborately attired referees posing with their fans and making dramatic announcements, attendants sweeping the fighting space with big straw brooms, and the competitors slapping themselves, throwing salt, and stretching and squatting pre-fight - and then sudden spurts of blubber-shifting violence.

We watched at least 5 caucasian wrestlers competing - and they all were (as best we could tell from the booklets we had and little radio with English commentary we had rented) from Eastern Europe, most from Russia, one from Bulgaria. This, of course, meant that Maya was particularly involved in their matches and was naturally pulling for them; I, being half Asian, felt obligated to play the contrarian and pull for my slanty-eyed brethen in their efforts to beat whitey at what is, after all, their/our game. Here's a snippit of the action (both the wrestlers', and Maya's and mine). (Oh yeah, and I'm responsible for the, let's call it, impressionistic camera work.)

After the sumo competition, we went back down to the Tsukiji Fish Market area and went to a restaurant called Sushizanmai (we didn't know anything about it beforehand, but it looked good, was relatively inexpensive, and had some English explanations in its menu), which turned out to be fucking awesome. We gorged on the most buttery, melt-in-your-mouth pieces of fatty tuna, medium fatty tuna, broiled fatty tuna, eel, salmon, etc., and it was, Maya and I both agree, one of the best meals we've ever had. What added to experience was that the restaurant wasn't nearly as oppressively over-the-top polite as many of the other eateries we've been to; the staff was friendly and helpful - our waitress complimented Maya's Japanese pronunciation - but in a completely genuine way. They didn't overwhelm us with endless "Thank you"s or, even more importantly, embarass us with endless bowing. We left with our bellies warm with fresh fish and our hearts warm with a newly realized appreciation for Japan. Too bad we have to leave so soon.

motivational words

2007-09-17T03:59:00.000-04:00

Sunday (our last day in Kyoto) was a pretty lazy day. We were worn out from too much walking, sightseeing, sweating, panting, trying to communicate/navigate in a language we don't know, itching (from our ever mounting mosquito bites), and barely being able to sleep (on the comfortable-as-concrete Ryokan matresses). We spent the better part of the day at Yu Kuhan, the 24-hour internet cafe/"neo synthetic culture space" that I keep raving about. All the shrines and shit were nice, but that really is my favorite place in Kyoto.

Another of my other favorites places? The hotel along the way from Ryokan Yuhara to Yu Kuhan, inspirationally/absurdly named ExcelHuman. Here it is at day and at night.

Every time we pass it, I look up at the sign and say, "I'll try, hotel, I'll try."

gold, vodka, and japanese schoolkids

2007-09-17T03:14:00.000-04:00

Saturday we took an uptown subway, a crosstown bus, then hiked uphill through savage heat and humidity (the weather the whole time we were in Kyoto was truly miserable - ranging between blistering sunshine and dreary drizzling, with the oppressive stickiness of the air never letting up under either condition) to visit Kinkaku-ji, or the "Golden Pavilion." The two top stories of the structure are covered in actual gold leaf!

Needless to say, the thing was fucking stunning, even in the light trickle of rain that started as soon as we got there, and which failed to break the heat or humidity one bit. We asked a random Japanese schoolgirl to take a photo of us in front of the pavilion, and the next thing we knew, we were posing along with five of her classmates for six photos (each kid wanted one)! When Japanese young people pose for photos, they unfailingly flash the two-fingered peace sign - we don't know why, but we figured we should play along - while the person snapping the shot, in this case their teacher (we think), counts to 3 in English and then exclaims, "Cheese-zu!" The result?

Absolutely sweat-soaked and heat-exhausted from all the walking (and posing), I demanded that we stop for a flavored ice at the stand outside the pavilion grounds. What I got was a true culinary atrocity - a massive softball-sized mound of shaved ice drenched in the most digustingly artificial-tasting red food-coloring, then dribbled with some mysterious white cream, and topped off with three tapioca balls. Here I am licking one of said pale, slimy balls.

Near the ice stand, we spotted this awesome Cup of Noodle vending machine, complete with boiling water tap on the left side. We didn't see a single Japanese person partaking, however, despite their love of ramen. Maybe it was just too fucking hot. Or maybe it was because these cups of noodles, judging from the bottom of the machine, were of extraterrestrial origin...

That night we got dinner at what turned out to be an overpriced-considering-it's-not-so-good-food restaurant along the bank of the Kamo River, which bisects Kyoto from north to south. The evening didn't prove to be a total bust, however, since on the way back to our Ryokan, we stumbled on this seemingly very-out-of-place vodka bar which had its name displayed in large Russian letters and the Russian stacking dolls (Matryoshki) in the window. There was a write-up by the door from a Russian newspaper about the bar and how the owner speaks Russian, having learned it while working for a Russian restaurant in Kyoto called "Kiev." For those of you who don't know, Maya hails from the Ukraine, from Kiev, in fact, (she immigrated to the States when she was 11), so obviously we had to go inside.

As soon as we entered, Maya greeted the owner in Russian and asked if he spoke Russian, to which his reply was a shy gesture indicating "just a little." The walls were covered in an unbelievable array of vodka from all over the world, including one called Red Army in a bottle shaped like a missile (I wanted to sample that, but unfortunately it wasn't for sale). We took some time choosing and finally settled on a Russian lemon-flavored vodka called Limonovka. Then Maya noticed a platter containing "piroshki", little pastry puffs filled with meat that she had been eating since she was kid, and ordered two. When we bit into them, they tasted, according to Maya, very authentic, but when we examined them closer, we found all kinds of very Japanese ingredients like glass noodles and tofu inside. Still, she told the owner they were delicious and asked him, in Russian, where he got them and who made them, to which he replied, "Ya zdelal" ("I did"). Here's Maya enjoying a taste of home (her first home, that is).

When we were about to leave, Maya asked the owner (who was a rather solemn dude with awesome gray hair tied back in a ponytail) if she could take a picture with him, and he obliged, very seriously. Sorry for the blurry pic, it was dark, and the vodka was taking effect.

Maya bid him farewell ("do svedanya"), and he said, "Prihoditye eshcho" ("Come again"). And if we ever do make it back to Kyoto, we definitely will.

white castle

2007-09-17T00:55:00.000-04:00

On Friday we took a day trip to Himeji Castle, which is an hour-and-a-half train ride outside of Kyoto. Known also as "the castle of the white egret" because of its color and grace, the castle has appeared in two of the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's films, Kagemusha and Ran, the latter being one of the most soul-crushing, heavy-as-hell movies ever made - and that's a recommendation.

But first, on the way to the train that morning, we stopped into a western-style diner that we had stumbled across for some breakfast (you can only eat so much sushi, soba, and tempura). Maya got buttered toast, fruit, and yogurt, while I got waffles with ice cream and fruit. It was pretty great, but the best part to me was my ice tea - which, instead of coming with a shaker of sugar grains, came with a separate little cup full of sugar water. Amazing! Anyone who's had to sweeten their own ice tea knows how virtually impossible it is to get sugar to dissolve in the cold liquid; the Japanese, brilliant minds that they are, solved that by providing the sugar already dissolved.

Now Himeji. Really the pictures speak for themselves. Though what doesn't quite come across is just what a shitty little tourist town Himeji is, and how strange it is to see this majestic and yet serene structure looming over the main street/mall as you walk toward the castle from the train station...

What also doesn't come across is how fucking hot and humid it was. Which meant it totally ruled when we finally reached the castle entrance and were able to step inside the invigoratingly chilly halls. It also didn't hurt that there were cool artifacts from the fortress' history inside, including these two awesome sets of samurai armor.

We climbed up way too many steep-as-fuck stairwells to get to the top of the castle - though the view was worth it (maybe).

On the train ride back to Kyoto, we had a classic "Maya moment": We were sitting near the entrance of our car, which was filled to capacity. A young blind man came onto the train at one of the stops, guided by a woman. I whispered to Maya, "I guess we should offer our seats to the blind man, huh?" and she responded with the sort of no-bullshit attitude that everyone who knows and loves her has come to appreciate and expect. "Why?" she said with genuine incredulity. "His legs aren't fucked up."

loss and gain

2007-09-15T23:14:00.000-04:00

Thursday something momentous happened: I accidentally deleted a whole day's worth of photos. That night we had just discovered Yu Kuhan, the rad 24-hour internet cafe (located in the Wao Cube building, a self-described "Neo Synthetic Culture Space," and my new favorite place in Japan), and I had been trying to upload pictures to flickr.com. First of all, I should tell you that all the computers we have been using so far in Japan are in Japanese, which makes all the programs just a little harder to use. Plus, the computers have all been PCs, and Maya and I are both Mac people. So, apparently in Windows OS, or at least Japanese Windows, or at the least the Japanese Windows I was using that night, there's a button in the software where you view pics on your digital camera that deletes all the photos on the camera. And it does so without the little "Are you sure you really want to do this?" warning box that usually pops up when you're about doing something major, like, oh, say, delete all the fucking photos on your camera. Nope, one click, and everything's - poof! - gone. So, yeah, I accidentally clicked this button, and watched as the thumbnails of the whole day's photos instantly vanished.

"I think I just deleted all our photos," I said, half to Maya, half in shock to myself, and then explained to her/myself what had just happened. And amazingly, bless her soul, Maya, instead of instantly ripping my head off (which is pretty much what I felt like doing to myself, if not commiting Harikiri then and there with my swiss-army knife's corkscrew), stared at the screen for a second, stared at me (and perhaps seeing the utter horror and remorse on my face), said calmly, "That's alright, babe. They're just photos. Just because we don't have the pictures doesn't mean we didn't have the experiences, which is the most important thing." She explained that one of the books we had gotten about taking around-the-world trips had even suggested that you try to take less pictures and go out sometimes to explore without your camera, since the camera can become such a barrier between you and the native population and authentic experiences. She also pointed out that we hadn't even been allowed to shoot most of the truly awesome things we had done that day anway.

It was true. That day we had gone to the Sanjusangen-do Temple which contains 1,000 golden lifesize statues of the so-called Thousand Armed Kannon. It was a jaw-dropping sight - literally an army of figures, which had been handmade over a 100 year period, lined up down an endless hallway, each statue subtly different from the last. And photography inside the shrine was strictly forbidden. Here, however, is an official photo that gives you a sense of how insane the sight was:

Then we had made the long climb up to Kiyomizu-dera Temple, a sprawling complex of many different shrines and pagodas. But perhaps the highlight of that visit had also been uncapturable by photography. Under one of the main shrines, we walked down these stairs into a winding basement path of complete darkness - you couldn't see your own hand in front of you - guided only by a handrail of large prayer beads along the lefthand wall. This led you eventually around a bend to a dimly and magically lit spherical stone that seemed to be floating in mid-air; you were supposed to touch this, make a wish, and then spin the stone slowly clockwise. Then, as legend has it, your prayers will come true, and you could follow the beads back out into the sunlight. In the words of Maya, it was "fucking awesome."

While there, we also visited the nearby Jishu-jinja Shrine, the "love shrine." There we saw the "love stones," two sacred rocks placed 18 meters apart - you're supposed to walk from one stone to the other with your eyes closed, and then your romantic wishes will be granted. This might sound like a daunting task already, but what amazed us was that the courtyard between the stones was full of other tourists, which made the challenge all the greater. Still, after observing a number of giggling Japanese high-school girls completing the blind walk, Maya stepped up to the plate, and with a little guidance from me ("Left! Left! Right!"), completed the trek. Among the many other rituals that you could partake in at Jishu shrine, Maya also took part in one involving pieces of rice paper cut into basic Gingerbread Man-like shapes - you write your troubles on one of the paper pieces and then drop it into a sacred vat of water - once the paper dissolves, your troubles are supposed to go away.

But what has made my trouble, my guilt, my sadness over deleting all our pictures from Sanjusangen-do,Kiyomizu-dera, and Jishu slowly dissolve (though I'm still occasionally haunted by the flashing mental image of a photo that was lost) are Maya's rather disarming words of wisdom. Deep into Thursday night we talked about why we are taking this trip and it's not about collecting pictures, or being the typical tourist and hiding behind a camera; it's about the life-changing, priority-shifting experiences we hope to have, and the lessons we hope to learn - and maybe this accident is meant to be one of those lessons. I had been getting too wrapped up in trying to take pictures of everything, trying to capture for posterity the ultimately uncapturable instead of focusing on the here and the now, and, in particular, soaking up the Buddhist go-with-the-flow spirit that Maya apparently had absorbed far more than I, considering her superior ability to let go of those photos. I thought about the main character in Fight Club and how in the beginning of the book/movie, his apartment and just about everything he owns are blown up, it turns out, by his own alterego, Tyler Durden, in order to free him/himself from his own possessions. It makes me think that maybe my Tyler Durden deleted all those photographs.

kicking it in kyoto

2007-09-15T22:16:00.000-04:00

So we've been in Kyoto for the last four days, and it's been, I think Maya and I can both agree, pretty amazing (in some good and not so good ways). People often describe Japan as a country of contradictions and contrasts, where the very old and the ultra modern sit side by side in sometime harmony, sometime conflict. This seems to be particularly true in Kyoto.

Much of the city isn't so different from the bustling megalopolis of Tokyo - garish, neon-lit Pachinko/video-game arcades, wstern-style fast food joints, big flashy hotels and nightclubs all abound - but then sandwiched right between such establishments, like strange powerful living dinosaurs, sit some of the most stunning ancient Japanese shrines you can imagine. And then there is Gion or "Old Town": blocks upon blocks of what looks like a samurai-movie set full of traditional wood-and-rice-paper buildings with sliding doors and laterns out front, except that the buildings are all in full use, and cars and mopeds rumble by them, through the claustrophobically narrow streets and alleys. On our first night in Kyoto, walking through Gion, entranced and amazed, we saw 5 Geishas - two separate pairs in full makeup and head-dresses, gorgeously intricate kimonos, and teetering platform shoes being escorted into cabs by solemn older women that we could only assume were their "trainers," heading off to who knows where to do who knows what; another Geisha was simply strolling down the street. We were too in awe - and unsure of the etiquette - to ask if we could take a picture of her.

We're staying at this crazy Ryokan, which is a traditional-style Japanese inn, called Ryokan Yuhara - think of it as a Bed & Breakfast, just in our case, with no breakfast and no beds. The place is super cool-looking, as you can see below...

But as excited as we were when we first arrived at the Ryokan and saw how quaint and cute it looked, we soon discovered that every apparent Pro comes with a hidden Con:

Pro: Beautiful, authentic traditional accomodations with screen doors, scrolls on the walls, traditional seating right on the tatami floor, as well as traditional sleeping arrangements - futon matresses right on the floor.
Con: Maya and I have hardly been able to sleep a wink on these hard so-called matresses, the even harder bean-bag "pillows" (we've had to swap them with the much softer pillows from the traditional floor chairs), and the ridiculously small comforters (which literally are only big enough to cover half of my body).

Pro: Friendly, familial attention from the Ryokan staff, in this case just the owner, Mrs. Yuhara, and her grown son.
Con: Friendly, familial attention from the son, who is one of the freakiest dudes Maya and I have ever met. Maya says he reminds her of a scene in Pulp Fiction, when the young Butch is watching some strange old cartoon on TV and there's this creepy little Eskimo dude with a bizarre accent - that's the son. See what we mean below:

Pro: A traditional Japanese bath.
Con: A traditional Japanese bath is basically a small tub of scalding hot water that doesn't get changed all day, meaning that every guest in the Ryokan gets to enjoy whoever came before them's sloppy seconds. (You're supposed to soap up and rinse off before getting in the bath, so I guess theoretically it's sanitary, but, well, let's just say that Maya and I have yet to try the thing.)

Pro: Tranquil location along a small creek, with crickets chirping.
Con: Damn crickets get so loud at night Maya has had to sleep with earplugs, and the creek seems to be a breeding ground for mosquitoes because the two of us have awoken every morning covered in excruciatingly itching bites. I have no less than 8 bites on my left foot (the right foot has been myteriously spared), 3 bites forming a perfect straight line on my right forearm, and a bite on my right ear; Maya has 2 bites on her right foot, 2 on her right ankle, tons on both legs, and a huge swollen one on her left temple!

My left foot (heh).

Maya's temple.

This, needlessly to say, does not bode well for when we get to Southeast Asia where a lone mosquito bite can mean contracting any number of horrible, debilitating diseases. As I think I've said before, say a prayer for us, you heathens.

bad day, happy endings

2007-09-11T19:38:00.001-04:00

Sorry I haven't posted anything new up here for a while - we've been in Kyoto for the last few days and Internet access has been much harder to come by here than it was in Tokyo (where there were three free computers right downstairs in our hotel lobby). But now we finally have located a good place to log-on - a totally awesome 24-hour internet cafe called Yu Kuhan where you can also rent little cubicles with televisions and sofa loveseats in them, and where there are free drinks (mostly coffee - the Japanese love coffee) and a library of anime, manga, and games - I thought I'd first fill everyone in on our last day (Tuesday) in Tokyo before coming to Kyoto (we're actually heading back to Tokyo for a few days in a bit), which really sucked. Everything had been going (relatively) smoothly with our trip so far and maybe we were getting overconfident - then came Tuesday and the proverbial shit hit the fan...

1) We both tossed and turned all Monday night - maybe it was residual jetlag, maybe the seemingly increasing hardness of our bed, who knows. But we both woke up groggy and grouchy.

2) The weather sucked - gray, overcast, humid, not quite raining but clearly about to bring the fucking fury.

3) Our stomachs were all out of whack - Maya kept ducking into the bathroom; I had the opposite problem, plus nonstop burping. Maybe it was the all-too-fresh raw fish from the night before. Or the bento box we had had for lunch. Only the gods of digestion know.

4) Had to do laundry (when you've only packed two or three changes of clothes, and it's typhoon season, that's what happens)...in a tiny washer and drier tucked into a tiny corner in out hotel's kitchenette where you can't even open door of either machine all the way...and where someone had left their wet laundry in the washer so we had to move it all to the dryer to do our wash, then when we had done our wash, said dickhead still hadn't shown up and we had to move his/her clothes back to the washer to dry our shit...and where said drier took about three cycles before it achieved anything even approaching dryness. (My jeans were still damp the next day.)

5) Went to buy Shinkansen (bullet train) tickets to Kyoto for the next day - Maya went to try and figure out the ticket machine, I got in the long-ass line to a teller. She thought she had figured shit out, called me out of line, only for us to discover we were still plenty confused, so we got back in line, finally got to the teller...who didn't speak English, but we somehow communicated to him what we needed, upon which he took my credit card to charge the fare, then a second later handed the card back and crossed his index fingers in an "X" sign - card denied. So I gave him my ATM card - again, card denied. We don't have enough cash on us for the tickets, so we're fucked.

6) Return to the machines, thinking maybe the teller dude just didn't know what he was doing. Nope, cards still denied, which was extra mysterious since I had used the credit card just this morning as well as the night before.

7) Fearful that my bank had shut down my card(s) suspecting identity theft due to all my recent charges in Japan - even though I had called them a month before our trip, telling them I'd be in Asia for the next few months in order to avoid just this sort of thing - we looked in our guidebook for a Citibank in Tokyo. Then proceeded to take the train to Shinjuku (where the nearest one was supposedly located), got out, and, again, the problem encountered the night before with the sushi restaurant - no street addresses! After walking around pretty much aimlessly, we finally spot a Citibank sign, run over, and try the ATM. My card works fine! What the hell? Take out enough money for the Shinkansen tickets, plus plenty more in case of god knows what.

8) Now we go to Ikebukuro (home of the Sunshine City mall) to return this camera that we had bought a few days ago from this electronic equipment superstore called Big Camera. Long story, but basically the camera we had brought with us has been kind of bugging out since we got here, and while we were on the way to Harajuku the other day, it really started bugging out and since the sky was looking like rain and since we didn't want to miss out on snapping shots of the Harajuku kids in full regalia, we bought this new camera very hastily. Turns out the camera sucks, and the next day our original camera started working again fine... So we get to the camera store, manage to track down an employee who speaks English, tell him we want to return the camera, whereupon he consults with his manager for a disturbingly long time, then comes back apologetically: Sorry, no return (cue long, barely intelligible explanation in broken English). Uhhh... Maya tries to convince him otherwise, but her efforts are clearly going nowhere fast, so we try another route: Can we at least exchange it? He consults with the manager again for a suspensefully long time. Finally, yes, manager says we can exchange. So we're set to swap the camera for this Canon Powershot, which we had looked up online the night before and discovered was much better than the camera we had gotten. We go to the checkout counter, hand the cashier my credit card, on which the original purchase had been made. Shit doesn't work! The poor barely-English-speaking employee has to call my credit card company, sort out some shit about how they were just processing the original charge so they couldn't cancel it or I don't know what beauraucratic absurdity. Eventually, after much ado about nothing, we work out a way around it all: The cashier will give us cash back for the original purchase, which we will then give right back to the store to pay for the new camera. Ye gods.

9) Having completed the whole insane transaction, we practically run for the store exit before any new complication springs up, and discover that it's fucking pouring out - "it's like a typhoon or something," as we've been kidding everytime the weather has gotten shitty (which is often). We're starving at this point, so we make a mad dash for a restaurant at a moment when the rain seems to be letting up. Shit starts right back up again, of course, and we're drenched. The streets are basically flooding, and we see the manhole cover bouncing up and down as water gushes up from around it.

10) The storm finally subsides, we duck into the Sunshine City mall and go to this soba noodle place, where there's no English menu and no one speaks English and we accidentally order a whole extra meal.

11) At least with some food in our bellies, we decide to try and find the arcade where we had first seen those medical gauze-wrapped, blood-dripping "Gloomy Bear" dolls which everyone reading our blog seems to be crazy about. We were set on trying to win one, particularly for Maya's niece, Anna, who is subletting our apartment right now. Wandering in circles, we finally realize we're in the altogether wrong neighborhood. The arcade was in Shibuya (not Ikebukuro where we still are)!

12) On the way back to the train, we run into someone in an awesome ultra-cute teddy bear outfit bobbing side to side in front of an arcade - we need a picture! So we grab our (original) camera (which had been working fine again) - the thing goes totally bonkers. So then we scramble to get out and set up the new camera, give it to this young girl who works for the arcade and ask her to shoot a picture of us with said teddy bear, but the new camera also refuses to cooperate! Finally, after much desperate button-pushing and mode-changing, we get the fucking thing working and the girl snaps the hardearned pic below (see the exhaustion and exasperation on our faces?).

13) So we go to Shibuya, somehow find the arcade with the Gloomy Bears, and end up wasting 2,000 yen (approx. $20) trying to win this totally rigged, impossible, bullshit game - you know, one of those deals with the machanical arm that you have to control and try to pick up stuffed toys with. Has anyone ever actually won a toy with one of those hell-spawned contraptions? (So anyway, sorry Anna, we tried.) I'm pissed, pissed, pissed - I had decided (a stupid idea, I admit) that if I at least could win a goddamn Gloomy Bear that this godawful day would have been salvaged, but no, the day was officially fucked.

14) Maybe it was inevitable considering the endless horrors we'd been enduring since we woke up, but Maya and I end up getting into a monster of a fight. Tears are shed, I think, though it's hard to tell, because, of course, it has started raining again and we're getting sopped.

Somehow, under an awning of a big bookstore, we made up just enough to decide that since we're in the neightborhood and since we don't really have that much more time in Tokyo, we should try to find "Love Hotel Hill," which is in Shibuya. If you don't know, Love Hotels are these distinctly Japanese things that evolved because of the tight living quarters that most Japanese people not only habitate in themselves but share with their extended families. This has meant that many people, particularly young people, need a place outside the home to, uh, get it on, so to speak. Enter Love Hotels, little getaways that you can rent out for a few hours - a period referred to as "Rest" - or for the whole night - "Stay." For extra discreetness, you rent out your room by machine. Many of these rooms have themes - S&M, hot tub, bumper cars(?) - and you can often buy lingerie and sex toys on the premises; most of the rooms, however, are just basic walls-and-a-bed setups. Love Hotel Hill features the largest concentration of these hotels in one area in all of Japan - and all of the world. Unfortunately, Maya and I were in no mood to put a Love Hotel to use - any Hate Hotels available where a pissed-off couple can whale on each other for a few hours? - but we did want to see them and it ended up being pretty nuts. And you know what, the strange, rather cheesy, a little sketchy, but somehow still endearing sight of them all (and of all the couples stepping in and out of them, basking in their pre- or post-coital glows) kind of cheered us up and even brought back some of our own love.