Sensible advice for us all

Beijing

Such a small percentage of my photos are taken "straight"

Thank god for image stabilizer

Beijing (nanloguxiang or something)

Random spurt of green

Beijing

Chinese girls are raised fierce

And, incidentally, with bear ears.

798 is a former industrial complex that's mostly been taken over by artists and galleries. If you look closely you'll see a large photograph of men urinating

Beijing

Beijing

I've sort of dreamt of this day

So, incredibly shitty day aside (the sum of which would make a "great" indie film), it ended with me going to the foreigner's grocery (the really only redeeming part of being out in the burbs with the foreigners is overpriced access to everlasting Gobstoppers, Milk Duds and Duncan Hines yellow cake mix, stuff sometimes not even liked at home) and buying squeezed, not-from-concentrate, unsweetened orange juice for 50RMB (around $8 for the rate at which we exchanged USD). 10 hours of fuckery turns to nothing with a little excess of vitamin C.

I know this might not seem significant, but I've been pretty sick for the last few days, and the one little Chinese grocery I went to was selling some Minutemaid orange juice, but as I recall, that's from concentrate. Anyhow, my snooty-ness was misguided and I had an entire dream about seeking out Lemonade and orange juice for my woes (and nasal drips).

Now I'm going so undilutedly crazy with the stuff you'd think I was aborting a faetus.

(on an aside, Australian orange juice does taste a bit different, as you'd expect, and next time I'll probably seek out that Florida stuff)

Red Cliff (a post where I go crazy)

Watched Red Cliff (xia) today in theatres (which're surprisingly expensive) and omg Takeshi Kaneshiro in period dress. (And they even dubbed over his voice so he also sounded hot as hell!) Did you know that Takeshi Kaneshiro had yet to have his own tag? Hélas but it was only temporary. You know, he even has his own folder on my HD.

Regardless, he and this Chen Chang fellow were very appealing as you see in the trailer. Chen Chang, however, was not dubbed over, unlike his other Taiwanese copatriots. Well, whatevs. He was still omg. And I am still a teenage girl in all but truth.
(Chen Chang shown below, though he looks better in his period armor. I think I just have some sort of weird retrofetish. You know, Orlando bloom only looks good as Legolas.)



oh!

It's so tragic how grainy these come out.

(Somewhere in the second "rung" of Beijing)

Beijing's Willow Trees

A creepy-arse picture for you.

On Firecrackers

As my brother and I accompanied my aunt's largest dog on his nightly jaunt through the park, unseen firecrackers went off in the distance, as they have been for the last two weeks as we approach the new year. Although the firecrackers were almost definitely set by children, their explosions resounded quite loudly and car alarms would be set off in denser parts of the city. Not in this gated community though, with lots of cute little two story houses with fences and dogs; the firecrackers and us were otherwise alone in the still night.

"It's all very World War II," I said, thinking of all those tired movies about London during the war.

"...it is, isn't it?"

The scene was all the more chouetty because we still had our long coats and scarves on, and he even had on his leather dress shoes. Neither of us, unfortunately had hats and I lacked a beau overseas in uniform. Life is hard sometimes.

On the finer things in Life

Things we should all come to appreciate:
- Sleeping in beds (or at least horizontally. Essentially, not in planes without those cool horizontal seats in first class, or Singapore Air's little cabins)
- Toilet paper in bathrooms

The latter would probably seem somewhat trivial, the real luxury instead being seated toilets (as opposed to squat toilets), and while I sort of agree, I think the worst thing ever is to have relieved yourself one way or another and find thyself without tissue. Luckily, those familiar with my person know that I often carry tissue, and everyone here sells lovely little convenient packages of tissue for like half the price of CVS' little packets. I am considering dumping many of the gifts I got and instead filling my suitcase with bulk packages of the stuff.

Anyhow, a little prose for thee (previously posted on someone's fbook wall. She, obviously, could not find a proper way to respond.)
I have encountered squat toilets in the most unlikely of places
Have so far been successful.
Each new instance threatens tragedy though...
O the law of large numbers!

So far, I've been lucky enough to only have to deal with solid(er) waste in the mornings or evenings, where I am accommodated with lovely seated toilets, but you never know. In any event, it's gotten to the point where I just expect the public toilets to be squat ones. Though, when I was at the Xi'an Hyatt (did you know it's a 5 star hotel here? Is it at home?), I was sort of amused to find a seated toilet, but no toilet paper. HA. It turned out, though, that that particular stall had just run out. Still.

On my legacy

Upon my tragic return to Beijing tonight, my aunt presented me with a large figure of an African woman, wrapped in a silk cloth. The quality and color of wood was was beautiful, but the depiction was probably among the most racist I've seen.

Is this from Africa?
Oh, no, your uncle bought it in Beijing.
Ah.
He got one for your brother too. It was of a bull.
Really. (ok, I didn't say this, but you would have)

Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about it since taking it into my possession. I obviously can't display it, and to get rid of it in any manner would raise the question of why I attained it in the first place. After I die, this figure will be discovered among my possessions and my biography will portray me as some sort of horrible racist, colonial fetishist.

Hélas.

On a related note
Before I left the country, my family found that we either lost or recycled my birth certificate at some point. Well, rather, I probably recycled my birth certificate. My future biographer can only rely on local folklore to ascertain my origins.

(For her future reference, it was in a shady opium den next to an Ethan Allen in Connecticut.)

The Shi Familial Manor

So, none of you have ever been to my house and I am a little embarrassed to admit it's because the place still needs a little work. Anyhow, it's in a lovely part of Xi'an. My family is decently established over here. Some miles outside of the city, an old, distant uncle of mine, Shi Huangdi, perhaps you've heard of him, currently resides with an entourage. Some time ago he was engaging some hooligans and other local characters in a community-building activity when some sort of horrible skirmish with a Medusa creature took place. Horrible pity, but many of their remains have been petrified in a most charming manner.



Why, look at this dandy!

On traveling

The above isn't horribly representative of either the "vehicular" distribution or the congestion of city streets, but I had really wanted to get a decent shot of one of those bicycles-cum-trucks. Isn't it horrible how that last phrase sounds both nasty and painfully unnatural given the current state of the English language? Anyhow...

My father is an aggressive (and law-breaking) driver, but I've never appreciated how crazy roads could be until I got here. The roads here are how one would imagine traffic in the Wild West, only clogged full of Toyotas, Hyundais, VW Santanas, Peugeots (seriously), Audis and unidentifiable-branded cars with tinted windows. Instead of lights and traffic rules, it's a matter of will and force. Blinker use is an odd ritual practiced by new drivers and soon shed. Drivers honk during red lights. Cabs and level 80 drivers use oncoming traffic lanes to pass. Walk and Stop lights are ornamental and crossing roads (mostly of six or eight lanes) is the most dangerous game of Frogger I've ever seen.

Learning to drive in the U.S. seems much less daunting.

Chinese children

The occasional estrogen rush you get over all these adorable bundled-up human-esque things is sort of ridick. Look at the cute accessories this one comes with!

On a semi-related note, I found out that my mother will retire as soon as she has grandchildren to take care of instead of claims to audit. Fair enough trade. It's also an interesting and previously unexplored facet of her whole dreamed-up dilemma in case of my pregnancy.

I do love the Muslim Hui minority; their food (and sweets!) are absurdly pleasing. (is this even of Hui people? randomly in Xi'an's historical museum)

(could've been better taken and edited, but hélas!)

The ridiculous smog might almost be romantic, if you weren't reminded of exactly what it was when you cleared your nose and saw specs of dust everywhere as if you were in Europe.

It does add a nice sepia touch to photos...

Xi'an

Xi'an is still lovely, meals are still overwhelmingly filling, and times are always right for sweets.

thoughts on Beijing two days later

I am still sorely disappointed that all those signs and buildings for China Unicorn were instead for China Unicom. That's just fuckery.

How I came to have bangs

Had a very Seinfeldian experience the other day in Beijing. I was having my hair cut at some salon that was capitalizing on the whole Korean craze, so my stylist was this Korean guy with a goatee. I had around me a translator for Mandarin to Korean, and a handful of English to Korean translators. No one knew the word for "bangs."

Perhaps they will grow out.

Xi'an

One of the things I remember from my visit in the early '90s was these walled porches... (okay, I just really like lit things in the dark.)

...

This morning (I think I still have the blog set on EST, but whatever), they said that we would be going to a cheap, but still moderately classy (foreigners shop there!) mall. A wonderland, really.

They took us to IKEA. My mom practically threw a fit when my aunts wanted to have their Swedish meatball lunch.

Ahoy from Beijing

Beijing alternates between beautiful and tacky, although the two categories aren't mutually exclusive, as you see above.

The cousins haven't paid their broadband bill, so I'm temporarily stealing wireless from the aptly named "NETGEAR." ("wireless" disappeared late last night, and "linksys" has been unreliable. I suppose people with enough character to give distinctive names to their wireless also know to password protect.) As my connection to you all is so tentative for the moment, I'll try and post little vignettes as my little airport bars increase.

From the future

20-some hours spent traveling actually wasn't as bad as it could have been, since on international flights that are essentially trial periods of purgatory, they have this whole cache of tv shows and movies that you can watch. Unfortunately, my ADD and quest to optimize my experience meant that I would watch 10-30 minutes of a movie and then decide I should try something else.

I finally found something that wasn't so bad- Dead Poets Society-then my mother leans over about 50 minutes in and asks, "doesn't he commit suicide in the end because of his father's disapproval?"

I suppose it wasn't an entire loss; we had already passed the inspirational part of the movie and were then getting into the pain of adolescence blah blah blah blah blah