Hard Travelin' in China> Travels

Well, quite a bit has happened since I left Korea on Thursday. First a note, this is being posted by the Pink Wizard for me because China blocks blogger. Anyway, on Thursday I boarded a ferry that would take me overnight across the China Sea to Qingdao, China. I actually booked a bed in business class, which has four beds per room rather than economy, which has 20-30 people per room and was only 20 dollars less than business. I had heard all of the stories about business class and I wasn't going to become somebody's bitch for the night. As they say, you've got to kick someone's ass on the first day to prove you are not to be trifled with. I got into the room before any of the other passengers and hid behind the door. When a short Korean man walked into the room I clubbed him over the head with a lamp and he collapsed to the ground. I then kicked him in the kidneys, shouted in my best Korean, "That's right, I ain't going to be your bitch. Yeah, that's how i roll." Needless to say I wasn't anyones bitch that night.

While on the boat I met a guy named Angelo from the Netherlands. The world for many years has stereotyped Dutch people as speaking fluent English, being very tall and often wearing the color orange. Well Angelo fit that description quite well. He is in fact 6 foot 9 inches and just about the tallest guy I have ever met. (he also wore orange and spoke english quite well) Angelo and I just spent the last two days together, just separating a few hour ago so he can go north and I can go South. Now throughout Asia I have always drawn attention by being white. People want to talk to you, they look at you and giggle and you can very easily become the life of the party. Angelo was a freaking circus walking down the street. There are 5 different ways people reacted to him, and pretty much every single person we saw had some reaction, and keep in mind their are a lot of people here.

1- Stop, stare and shake head in disbelief and/or fear.

2- Point and laugh and call over their friends.

3- Take out their mobile phone and take a picture of him.

4- Raise their hand in the air as high as possible as if to explain to Angelo that he was in fact very tall.

5- Socialize with Angelo in a friendly way and eventually ask to take a picture with him.

Fortunately Angelo wasn't freaked out by all the attention.

So this is the 50th country I have been to so I would like to think of myself as a very experienced, savvy traveller. The following is a warning to all travelers, that no matter who you are and where you have been, there are still some things that make us all the same. You, me, them, everybody. Everybody. We can all have an off days sometimes.

Angelo and I got off of the boat at around 10 am with the goal of locking up our bags and seeing a bit of Qingdao before heading to Tai'an,about 7 hours inland by train, where we would spend the night. The city was covered in a thick, creepy fog. First thing we did was take a taxi into town, who of course tried to rip us off and with whom we had a nice yelling match with in the street. Then we went to the train station, where we could not figure out how to work the lockers and where we weren't able to find out how to get to Tai'an, our next destination. Then we found the tourist information office not to faraway, where the women working there spoke very little English and gave us very little information, which all ended up being very wrong anyway. She told us to go the bus station, a 10 minute walk away. We went there and through a translator found out that the buses to Tai'an in fact went from a station way across town and were three times as expensive as the train, which we were informed only ran in the early morning. We then got on a bus, still with our big packs on our back to head to the other bus station. After a minute on the bus we decided that we would screw the bus plan and go back to the train station and go to Ji'nan, a major city not too far from Tai'in. Angelo talked me into eating breakfast at McDonalds, because we were in a rush. Bad travel karma! After a very cheap chicken sandwich we saw an old german church, which is what Qingdao is know for, as it was for several decades in the 1800's a german owned city. From there we to the train station, were able to buy tickets for Ji'nan, which left us an hour and a half to go to an ATM, draw out money and then check our email before boarding. We first went to the ATM, which worked for me and not for Angelo so I loaned him about 125 dollars and took out 250 for myself to add to some Yuan I had traded for in Korea.

It is from here things went awfully wrong. At some point during the twenty minutes where we were checking email I lost my wallet. Whether it was pickpocketed or I left it on a table, or it fell out of mypocket i don't know, but when I went to pay for the internet it was gone. Of the 40 people in the room no one spoke english, or at least volunteered to. Angelo and I searched and even frisked the two people who were sitting next to me but it was to no avail. [Did you frisk Angelo? You should have. - ed.] My credit card, bank card and about 360 US dollars worth of Chinese currency were gone. (Also lost was my diving licence, driving licence, really cool wallet, several pictures, swisscard pocket knife and perhaps most important of all, my University of rochester student ID card. Yeah, I graduated in 2000 but I have saved roughly 20,000 dollars in the past 6 years on student discounts. I am now officially in the real world.)

So that sucked. Angelo could have given back the money I had loaned him and headed out to Tai'in by himself, but being a true Dutchman, he stayed by his fellow traveller to be of help [and to see if anything else could be stolen from his American friend. - ed.]. We went to a post office, which had a Western Union wiring service available and with the help of some great non-English speaking, non-homicidal, postalworkers I was able to contact my mother, who is a saint. I woke her up at about 2:30 AM to ask her to wire me 700 dollars. A half an hour later I had the money. Thank God (or Buddha, or I guess Mao?) forM others and Western Union.

From the post office we went to the mcdonals again to eat a pre-5-hour-train meal. Yes, I ate in a mcdonals twice in the same day. I also used a squat toilet there too. It was a weird day. From there we caught a train to Ji'nan and luckily were able to find a train from there to Tai'in. While waiting for the train we entertained about 40 or so Chinese people crowded around us in the waiting room. I spoke Chinese phrases from Angelo's Mandarin phrase book (Such as, "Are you interested in Fang Shui?) and Angelo was tall. Very very tall. The train left about a half an hour late and was packed and then for more fun, stopped for an hour for apparently no reason whatsoever. We got into Tai'in at 1AM where we were helped by two really nice Chinese college students in finding a hotel near the base of the mountain we planned on climbing the next day. The hotel was not allowed to have non-chinese guests so we were checked in under assumed Chinese names. Mine was Wu Tang. The room cost us 4 dollars each. China may be totally dysfunctional but it is cheap.

Today we woke up and with our Chinese friends we had met the night before and climbed Tai Shan, a 1545 meter high Mountain. It has been considered China's most sacred holy mountain since hundreds of years before Christ's birth and I'll say they picked a good one.

I'm now in Qufo, Confucius's hometown, which has one of China's biggest temples in his honor. Got to run. -Larry

Banned in China > by Larry Beethoven, edited and compiled by the Pink Wizard

Like forks and spoons, blogspot is banned in China.

So Larry has sent me what he has to say, and I am to post it for him. Here it is:

Initial Impressions of China> Travels

Most of you reading this have been to a Chinatown in a Western city,whether it be in NYC, San Francisco, Toronto or London. An island of something different in a sea of white people. Well what I have seen so far looks a lot like those few blocks of Chinese writing and Chinese food. It's just a lot grubbier and chaotic and those blocks stretch into cities with many millions of people. Chinese people. Chinacities in a Chinacountry. Did you know there are more Chinese people in China than anywhere else in the world? It's a fact. I looked it up and I have anecdotal evidence to back that up. So my initial impressions, disregarding getting my wallet stolen:-People here are pretty nice. If they do speak English they will go out of their way to talk to you and help you when you need it. That said, it can be very difficult at times to find an English speaker. Strangely, several people have offered to help in an unusual dialect of Welsh.
When I walk down the street people all look at me and often smile and say hello. It's always a strange feeling to be an item of interest, as I often am in places that don't see to many foreigners.

-It is a stereotype in the US that Chinese Americans drive poorly.Well Chinese Chinese people are frighteningly appalling drivers, or to put it kindly, daring. My taxi driver usually passed slower moving cars by crossing into oncoming traffic. On a six lane highway. Yup. He also would beep his horn constantly.

-Getting from city to city is very difficult. Ticket sellers for buses and trains never seem to speak English and even if you get someone to translate for you, seats always seem to be sold out or a route non-existent. For instance, I am stuck in Qufo for an extra day because there are no sleeper train tickets available tonight. It took me me several hours to find this out.

-They like to spit. I think Mao gave them spit amnesty during the cultural revolution.

-Things here are cheap and there is always room to bargain. I boughta "I climbed Tai Shan" T-shirt for $1.50 and my hotel room costs $8.Bargained down from 10 dollars and $30 respectively. Dinner lastnight cost $1.

-Chinese people know who Andre Agassi is and think I look like him.

-The sites here are really really old. I just went to a huge forest that is exclusively a graveyard for Confucius and his descendants.All 100,000 of them. That's 2,500 years of one family being buried inone place. It's quite amazing and unique. The Mountain that i climbed yesterday was also climbed by Confucius 2,500 years ago.

-All developing nations have wild street dogs. Luckily the ones in China seem to all be very small and puntable.

-I have been asked about 10 times so far to pose in pictures withother people. Maybe they think i am actually Andre Agassi? If that'sthe case I am going say, "You've got to be kidding me!" and tell them I am in fact Vin Diesel.

Blixed>Travels

Yesterday I went into to the DMZ on a half day bus tour. It was raining the whole time and visibility was crap so I couldn't spot that missile they plan on testing, that could reach targets in the US. We did get to go into one of the 4 found infiltration tunnels that the north Koreans dug deep underground for future invations of the South. Again, no missiles down there. I guess this is what Hans Blix felt like.
This afternoon I will board an all night ferry to China. I am not sure if I will be able to blog from there. Larry B may write some things that the (China)man just isn't ready to hear.

What's on TV in Korea?> Travels

Currently:

Channel 1: I believe this must be the Kimchi channel.

Channel 2: Some kind of dance contest variety show. The host looks a bit like Kim Jong Il.

Channel 3: Lois and Clark: The Adventures of Superman.

Channel 4: US Army programming. Wow this is creepy. They have US television shows interspersed with commercials specifically aimed at our forces stationed in Korea. Also lots of PSAs informing the army soldiers to wear motorcycle helmets, avoid raping the locals and too report any sex slave trafficking. They even have a news show anchored by a woman in fatigues. All of the news in Iraq seemed pretty rosy. Looks like Bush is doing a good job. I guess I will vote Republican next time.

Chanel 5: Smells like rich lady

Channel 6: Soccer highlights

Channel 7: Korean game show called "Name that fish."

Channel 8: Korean soap opera?

Channel 9: Some show about cockfighting

Where the streets have no names> Travels

I arrived in Seoul yesterday and have spent the past two days going to tall places to look down upon this enormous city. It's ringed by mountains so all of the smog gets trapped in, which makes for foggy pictures. Like Japan, they don't name the roads here. (Maybe Bono would want to live in Seoul.) To find an address you need to know which neihborhood it is in and then the name of the block. The actual building numbers are handed out in order of when the building went up. I wish I were making this up. This makes for a tricky time in finding anything: restaurants, hotels, bail bondsmen... Come on Asians, get it together! You invented gunpowder, paper and kareoke yet you can't name your streets?
So last night I decided I would take it upon myself to name some of the streets. Tonight, with the help of a French couple I met, I will go around town with a permanent marker and write some street names on the buildings. My hope is these will eventually be accepted by the city and used in future maps. They can thank me later.

Annyeong Korea!> Travels

Thank you Arrested Development. Having an adopted South Korean child as a character that is mistakenly called Annyeong (hello) has seared that word into to my foreign language deficient skull. So my first impressions of Korea:

These people really like to hike.

I have seen lots of couples wearing identical shirts.

It would be lonely to be single here. Many of the meals can only be ordered for two or more people.

Korean food is spicy.

They smell like cabbage. (They also have small hands. Perhaps they are descended from Carnies?)Even though they are pretty much a first world nation, in comparison to Japan, there is a very big difference in the cleanliness, modernity and wealth in Korea from what I have seen so far.

The woman here are not nearly as attractive as the Japanese.
The Korean temples are much older and less attractive than the Japanese temples (remember attractive is subjective).
Which may be a result of the Japanese pretty much destroying everything in this country at some point (1590's and 20th century).
Which makes me think they must hate the Japanese.
Ok, so they don't smell like cabbage.

Thoughts on Japan>Travels

I really enjoyed my time in Japan and I would like to have the chance to live there at some point. Actually, I'd recommend teaching English there for a year to anybody who has just graduated college and is looking for something to do before getting a real job. The Japanese people were for the most part very nice and tried to be helpful. Their culture is wonderfully different than ours and I guess the best way to describe them for me would be cute and weird and I mean that in the best possible way. They have actually inspired me to write a book I plan on titling, "Japanese are cute." It's the sequel to "Canadians are polite" and the prequel to "Koreans smell like cabbage." Some tips for those who plan on visiting Nippon:

Go out of your way to see a baseball game. Try to see one in Osaka or Tokyo for the best stadiums.
It is pretty easy to get templed out. Try to figure out which ones are unique and seek those out.
Make sure you stay at a few Ryokan and at least one night in a capsule hotel.
If you want any nightlife in Tokyo, stay near the night life districts as the subways stop running at midnight and the taxis are expensive
Eat as much shaved ice as possible
Always carry around a trash bag or small plastic garbage can. They have no public garbage cans so this is how they do it. I told you they were weird.
Avoid direct eye with people older than you. Wait for them to look you in the eye first. Otherwise you will be showing them a great amount of disrespect.
Get any travel guide other than the lonely planet Japan, which sucks.
Putting wasabi in someone's green tea ice cream is NOT funny.

Somewhere between a womb and a tomb> Travels

So the capsule hotel was great. I think I may have gone to an upmarket one as the place was pretty flash and looked like a three and a half star hotel from the outside and the inside. I actually lost a bit of face when I didn't take off my shoes when walking into the lobby. One of the receptionists quickly ushered me to a nearby locker and had me lock up my shoes. I then checked in and recieved a key that was on a plastic bracelet like you would get at a water park. I was told to put all of my things into another locker on the second floor and change into pajamas. The PJs had an asian design and were kind of silky. The top was short sleaved and bottoms were shorts. I then took the elevator to the fourth floor to find my capsule. It was in a very large room with hundreds of other capsules stacked two high. I had an upper capsule. Inside there was a pretty large screen tv, radio, alarm clock, fan and enough headroom to sit up.
I then went upstairs to the rec area where I found many hundreds of 40-50 year old Japanese business men in identical pajamas eating, watching soccer on personal tv sets or reading manga cartoons. It was odder than that sounds. Please note I was the only white guy in the hotel (Also, this, like most capsule hotels, is men only) and I got a lot of strange looks.
I then went to the top floor spa. I kind of followed the actions of the other pajamed men and disrobed, storing my PJs in a little locker and then went to one of the sit down showers that were arranged in rows. They had tooth brushes, disposable razers, shaving cream, hair stuff, brushes and so on. I sat on a stool and washed myself up good before walking over to one of the many multi tempertured onsen bathes (hot tubs), all the while keeping a little wash cloth over my junk as all the other men seemed to be doing. Later I watched some world cup soccer on a big screen tv in a sauna. It was too hot to cheer.
The whole things reminded me of the Sienfeld episode where Kramer had three Japanese men sleeping in a dresser. I actually slept pretty well that night. My capsule felt somehere between a womb and a tomb, which I guess it technically is.

It's not a virgin, but it's still under warrenty> Travels

I am now in Fukuoka on Japan's western tip. this keyboard has a lot of trouble with caps locks so please just let it go already. enough! anyway, I am staying in a capsule hotel tonight which i can write about later and also just drank a big glass of warm sake. thinking about it I also took a lot of pictures today, so i guess i am turning japanese. i really think so. interesting fact: Fukuoka was the original target of the second a-bomb, but after several passes of the city which was covered in clouds, our pilots flew over to nearby nagasaki which unfortunatly for them had a break in the clouds. have so many lives depended on a cloudy sky in any point in history?

Before coming here i spent the day in the Aso-san region. Aso-san has the world's largest active volcano caldera.
On a side note, my cheap digital watch, which i use for travel, somehow had a function turned on over the past five days where it beeps on the hour every hour. this is pretty damned annoying. well today i needed it because I was in a time crunch to do my hike and turn around on the trail in enough time to make it back for the last bus. Well I noticed the watch wasn't beeping anymore and then i noticed that it was stuck on the date function and i could no longer see the time. So it was now useless instead. listen, I am no charity and if you can't be usefull you're not going to be on my wrist for very long. This watch had pissed me off one to many times. I attached it to a big rock and approached the edge of a caldera with a smoking lake of sulfer boiling below. it was then that the watch started working showing me the time.
unfortunatly for the watch, that time was 2:59 and 58 seconds. three seconds and one beep later the watch was well on its way to a very painful end. yeah, that's how i roll. i hope i appeased the volcano gods with this new gift. luckily i had my ipod to keep time for me, which thankfully still works. (and if you don't think that was a thinnly vieled threat to the ipod, you don't know me well enough)

Kyoto-Himeji-Hiroshima-Beppu> Travels

So Kyoto has a lot of temples.　Yup. I will post some pictures at some point, but there were many and they were varied. I also went to Nara. There were plenty of temples there too including the biggest wooden building in the world. Yesterday i left Kyoto early in the morning and went with Jeff, a fellow traveler from Seattle, to Himeji castle. There we killed a ninja. I am not sure what his intentions were, but when in doubt, club with a stick and ask questions later. In retrospect, it may not have even been a ninja, but instead a toursit dressed in all black.
After hiding the body and finishing our tour of the castle we got back on the bullet train and randomly bumped into a guy I had met back in Kyoto, Mike from Toronto and went to hiroshima together.
There the three of us saw a baseball game. Hiroshima Carp V Fakuoka Soft bank hawks. It was pretty different from your average Yankee game. First, the players are all Asian　(besides this one big black guy). 2nd, the fans cheer often and very loudly, but in unison, led by trumpets and drums. They also rhythmicly clap together pieces of plastic.
After a couple of beers (poured by a woman wearing a beer backpack) and a few bowls of udon soup we became a bit rowdy and desided to cheer for the visiting hawks. When I yelled out, "It's Hawk Time!" the whole section turned and looked at me. In general people seemed entertained by our chacanery. The Carp came out on top 2-1 in the end on back to back home runs. Good times were had by all in attendance. After the game we got some dinner and walked by the hypocenter for the A-Bomb. It just had a little memorial and was next to a parking lot.
This morning the three of us went to the peace museum, which kind of gives you a holocaust museum feeling. Interesting though. We then got on board another bullet train and arrived in beppu, a resort Onsen town. Onsens are Japanese saunas and are an important part of their culture. We checked into a traditional Ryokan, a japanese style hotel and went to a sand bath where they buried us in hot sand for ten minutes. Good times also. Got to run.

A New Land Speed Record!> Travels

I took the bullet train down to Kyoto yesterday. I think I may have set a new personal landspeed record at 200mph. The rice paddies intermixed with ugly concrete cities wished by pretty fast. Mt Fuji was hiding out there somewhere in the clouds. Two Taiwanese guys sat across from me on the train even though there were plenty of open seats. One of them, the one pictured on the left, nervously introduced himself to me. He explained to me, voice shaking, that he had never spoken English to anyone outside of his classroom and I was the first white person he had ever spoken to. He kept explaining that he was very nervous, but excited for this opportunity to communicate with me. Over the course of the two hour ride he would ask a question, I would respond and then he would sit back close his eyes and think carefully of another question. Here are some that I can remember:

Do you like Baseball?
Who is your favorite player?
Do you have any siblings?
Are you left or right handed?
Are you scared of spiders? (He was, I am not)
Have you ever been to a Turkish prison?
What are your feeling on Chinese/Taiwanese relations and how do you feel the US would react in case of a Chinese of Taiwan?
Is there a God and if so, how does he/she tolerate so much suffering?
If you were a color, which color would you be?
Do you like Ron Howard more as an actor or a director?
Why don't women find me attractive?

Thank You Very Much Mr. Roboto!> Travels

Tokyo was OK. It is a big bustling city with the attractions pretty spread out. Lots of modern architecture and interesting uses of technology. My favorite bit of the latter was the 200 or so robot guides they have throughout the city. They are humanoid in shape, but have wheels, kind of like Rosie from Jetsons, but instead of complaining (Like Rosie) they help tourists get the most out of the city. I met one named Akira. It was hanging out by itself near the Imperial Palace Park standing still. I walked over to it and its motion sensors must have noticed me because it asked me first in Japanese, then in English, then in German, then in Spanish, then in French, where I was from. I said the United States and it then said in English, "Ah the good old USA. Well welcome cowboy." It then told me that it could follow me around, but not up steps, and answer any questions I might have. It was great. It guided me around the gardens and then to the Ginza section of town. Besides answering my questions it occasionaly threw in some strange banter that seemed to be US themed. Some tidbits that I can remember:
So how was the game last night?
I worry about terrorism.
You are pretty slim for an American.
Boy do I like ketchup. I wish I could jump in a tub of it right now.

The other funny thing about the robot is it didn't like physical contact. I touched it to see what it felt like at somepoint and it politely said, "please don't touch me." I touched it again and it said, "I wish you wouldn't do that." I then left my hand on the robot's head and it said, "I am not very comfortable with this" and "you are going to regret this." Then it started yelling for help so I let it go. Anyway, domo arigato Mr. Roboto for being there when I needed you.

A Most Unwise Decision> Travels

I woke up really early this morning, at 4:44AM, totally on purpose, so I could go to the Tsukiji Fish Market. It is here that all of the restaurants in Tokyo buy their fish. Between 4-6 AM they have auctions where they sell huge frozen fresh fish in these enormous warehouses. I watched one of the auctions for a 250 pound tuna. The auctioneer talked really fast to lots of guys wearing hats with numbers on them, standing on bleachers, bidding occasionally. Everything was very rapid fire and it looked like a lot of fun and in a moment of stupidity I raised my hand to place a bid. The men looked at me and the auctioneer said some more things and before I knew it I had bought a linebackers worth of fish for 500$. One of the other bidders offered to buy it from me for 400$ but I understand that it is important in Japanese culture not to lose face so I carefully loaded the fish into my backpack with the help of some of the other bidders and set off. My first stop was a sushi restaurant very close to the market. I traded them a chunk of the fish for nine pieces of sushi. It was probably the best sushi I have ever had, besides the squid, which made me almost throw up. After that I set the fish down on the sidewalk and sold chunks of sashimi to passerbys. Sales were slow as the Japanese are very mistrusting of white people with Swiss army knives. After several hours I became worried about the freshness of my once frozen fish and decided to move my operation into a mall in nearby Ginza. Mall security didn't' like that. In the end I carved the remains of the fish into that shape of a bigger than life size baby. Like the meat baby, only more healthy. An art dealer bought it and I think I've finally been discovered!

Pack your bags kids>Travels

So I arrived in Tokyo yesterday and I was overwhelmed by new experiences.　I have used the word "weird" to describe so many things here. I am pretty much constantly lost and confused and that's great. Within an hour of walking around I wanted to uproot my wife and kids and move them here. Until I have a family I will have to put that off to a later date and time. Even the fight clubs here are a refreshing change. Their martial　arts training makes the beatings a whole new experince. According to the encyclopedia britannica, 1953 edition, Japanese people are the most agile race in the world! Well it showed! It was wierd how I blanked out for twenty minutes. Maybe it was the daze induced by the 17 hours of flights or perhaps it was the concusion, but yesterday left me in a very happy place.

Sayonara Bitches!> Travels

Tomorrow morning, 6/6/06, I will fly to Tokyo to start two months of travel in Asia. I'll try as often as possible to post about my adventures. The past two weeks in NJ were fun and somewhat relaxing, although I could have used and extra week. The picture is my parents home, taken with my new camera. It's an 8.4 megapixel Panasonic DMC-LX1 with a 28mm Leica Lens with 5X optical zoom that shoots panoramic shots like this one with out cropping the original. My shots should look a little more epic from now on. Anyway, I'm off to Japan.