livin' on a prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hanging with buddha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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







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

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

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

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

horns up in the modern sky

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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








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

mao metal than you can handle (part 2)

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

mao metal than you can handle (part 1)

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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

no sleep 'til beijing (part 2)

(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.