Taking too long to Post

Hello everybody,

No, I refuse to let this blog go an entire year without another post, but honestly, I haven't been on my wandering project in quite some time, aside from two whirlwind tours of the US that comprised perhaps 25 cities in one go, and a far more modest one that probably only included 8-10 cities that were a subset of the mammoth trip.

That's not to say that I have been up to nothing at all, though. And I am dreadfully sorry that I haven't yet completed the travel blog about that last trip to China. There are some ideas for wandering out again after the recent turmoil with Yahoo (Yes, I work at Yahoo), but I won't elaborate on those at the moment due to their uncertainty.

But I will tell you about the little bit of humor writing I've been up to. And the blog subheading does say that I can talk about "general nonsense and ballyhoo" too, and this stuff is right up that alley.

So, for those of you who may be mysteriously starved of what I've been up to (all possibly two of you), here's the general idea on humor and sarcasm:

• I wrote a fake Bug Tracker for Microsoft / Yahoo takeover issues, since a few of you pointed out that I might be soon working for Microsoft (assuming I'm not in the layoff round) and decided to start sending me Vista bugs, of which there's about a million. I even filed a general vista bug for you already. Yes, it comes complete with a logo for the post-acquisition company.


• I wrote an onionesque article on what happened to worker productivity when Facebook happened to be down for about an hour or so during the middle of the Hong Kong workday. Sorry, no public links on that either, need too many people's permission who are mentioned in it ;)


• I wrote a program that tries to find a significant number of the bad words that you can write in Cantonese, including the Five Great Profanities in the Unihan database; I couldn't really ask my friends here to show them to me since they're considered much worse than seems to be the case in America. And no, I'm not linking to it here. Ask me if you want to see it.


• I have been writing the weekly news letter for Fresco; I wax philosophic occasionally


• I wrote a Frequently Asked Questions list on what I'm doing tonight and getting virtually laid off at Yahoo

In the not-so-humorous-but-possibly-blog-worthy updates category, here's some more stuff I've been doing during wandering isolation:

• I've been trying to get open mic streamed out live on the internet (Fresco is an open source bar, powered by Gentoo Linux if you'd believe it!). In a nutshell, it works, but the webcam mic distorts the audio beyond recognition. Working on patching VLC so that it can handle muxing the desynced audio streams and you can just listen at home, or maybe it's just time to invest in a better camera..


• Drinking plenty of Hoegaarden. Yes, I like the big glass, and am a sucker for their product positioning with it, but it reminds me of the steins back in Munich..


• Trying to help the guys out at the NGO I joined called Aptivate. I like these guys and haven't been good enough about volunteering time to them with all the craziness at work lately, but it's my main new year's resolution for 2008 to improve on. Among other things, they try to aide other NGO's operating in regions with little to non-existent Internet connectivity, assist in the education and deployment of technologies to help close the digital divide, and donate their IT knowledge to try to make the world a better place.


• I'm in a band called "Nolex". We don't have a site yet, but we'll be playing at Fresco at the end of the month (Feb 2008, not sure what the exact date is yet, but it'll be in the newsletter soon, so check there or bug me).


• A few half-baked things that aren't really ready to be discussed publically yet.

Keeping my guitar edge sharp, I have been playing a lot of guitar lately at the open mic nights on Tuesday at Peel Fresco Music Lounge over in the SoHo district in HK. Had the best of times rocking out with a Aussie blues man named Andy last Tuesday (Feb 12, 2008) for about 3 or 4 hours. I think JZ took a couple pictures of the night, so if I can talk him into getting a copy, I'll put them up somewhere online.

Sometimes you just Choose the Wrong Song

So... Let's talk about Chengdu.

Friday night I arrived in Chengdu, having left Guilin with promises of one day returning, into the unknown of the Panda's Paradise. After a quick flight, I soon had a bag and was greeted with the barrage of Taxi drivers explaining to me that I couldn't possibly reach the city without their special services, something I was already quite experienced with turning down. A moment later I was rushing along an unknown bus route, bound for the inner ring road of downtown Chengdu.

After approximating my location to be somewhere near the city center, I hopped off the bus and grabbed a cab over to the hostel, a street the taxi driver had never heard of. Sooner or later he dropped me off with vague instructions and a quick point somewhere off the main set of roads into some all walking areas, accompanied with a barrage of Mandarin probably telling something along the lines of "it's somewhere over there... good luck, you'll need it". 60 pound pack and guitar in tow, I managed to walk just about everywhere but in the right direction. Just as it began to get really dark out, I stumbled onto the dragon town youth hostel, and Harrison managed to find me wondering why I didn't just crash at his place.

Confusion aside, I dumped the luggage and we went over to his pad to collect his roommate and get some drinks. Harrison I had met over in Shenzhen during the warm up trip, and I had some idea that the DC based English teacher knew exactly what he was doing when it came to grabbing a drink and talking to a girl. One of his best friends from home, Phil, had decided to leave DC as well and come over to Chengdu to also give English teaching a go, and it took no more than 5 minutes before I was re-immersed in thick American slang, soaking up the sarcasm as the first drop of water after walking across a wide desert.

We hit a couple of places around town, Phil, Harrison and I all of completely like mind in not wasting a Friday night without extracting every bit of adventure and intrigue we could find before the massive intake of alcohol served to knock us out wherever we may have sat down for just a minute too long. Phone numbers, photos, and a terrific hangover the next day served as silent testament to the success of the prior semi-recalled events, Saturday morning.

Deciding not to take it too hard, we took an easy day with the local food and wandering around the general area, Harrison and Phil quietly adjourning to their respective beds, leaving me to my own devices for a while. I wasn't particularly bent on a hard day of exploring the unknown, so I headed back to the hostel to pick up my stuff to move over to Harrison's. I didn't move too fast when I got there, choosing to blame my inaction on the slight rain outside, and plopped down in the hostel common room to watch a movie or two. With a British couple named Ollie and Lucy.

It was their first time in China, having spent the last 2 years or so traveling around the Asian rim. Most recently they had come from India, so we swapped tales and killed time for a couple of hours until I finally gathered enough steam to pick up my pack and head back over to Harrison's, where he had kindly offered me a couch to crash on for the duration of my Chengdu stay. We all decided to call it an early evening, grabbing some local spicy Sichuan street food (they cook everything on a stick right in front of you on portable grills they drag around usually on bikes - the food was incredibly fresh and tasty, and often an entire dinner ran to only 5 - 10 yuan, depending on how much you wanted).

The next day Harrison and Phil set off with my cell to take some pictures for some articles that they were writing for a new Chengdu magazine hitting press for the first issue soon. I opted for another slow day, where I explored some of the nearby Tianfu Square (the central square of the city) with the massive statue of Mao waving to the people, and some of the surrounding area. I soon found the sister hostel to Dragon Town called the Loft, looking to see if they happened to have any bikes available for rent. At the time, I didn't think it particularly odd that I was carrying my guitar around, as it normally doubled as my day bag while I was in strange cities.

The people waiting in the hostel common room had an entirely different notion of that matter, however.

I began with an awkward sweep around the room, taking in all of the facilities and the rough layout, trying to move slow enough not to be noticed by fast enough that everyone who was staring at me would just piss off for a moment, forget I was there, and go back to whatever the hell it was that they had been doing. A group of 7 or 8 Chinese people, mostly women, were gathered around the bar, a long bench set just in front of it filled to capacity, with an unnatural silence and hushed voices suddenly speaking in low tones with at least one or two of them looking off in my direction to wonder at the aberration that had just entered the room. A tall white guy was playing some kind of game vaguely resembling a chess board at a table with a few girls, all puzzling over the incomprehensible movements that seemed to be the norm in the game. A couple of guys were huddled around one end of the pool table talking in newly whispered tones, one or two of which also perfectly tracked my movement as I traversed the length of the room. I was glad to have a moment to pause significantly at the other end, taking in a glassed off smaller room where everyone was entranced in a television thankfully pointing their vision away from my unknown presence not far behind them.

I swept back around, alternately wondering if I should take off or not. Nearly all the seats were occupied, leaving me with the option of either awkwardly introducing myself to one group or the other, or just giving up and leaving the awkward moment to disappear from everyone's collective memories with a shake, returning my presence to the realm of earlier invisibility.

I wasn't going to give up that easily.

I made my way back across the room, and decided to grab a beer from the fridge. Suddenly having a purpose to being in the room, most of the people went back to whatever it had been that they were doing before I entered, the busy keystrokes of people tapping away emails on the two free-to-use computers on the wall providing the only sound above the slightly raised conversational hum that began to return.

"How much," I inquired.

"6 Yuan."

"Thanks," I replied, dropping a 10-note on the end of the bar. I took the new authority of having entered the realm of paying-customers for a spin, and tapped the guy with about 2 inches of free space at the end of the long bench on the shoulder.

"Mind if I sit here?"

"Go right ahead," he replied in slightly accented English, adding perhaps another 6 inches of behind-space for my pleasure, compressing god knows what against the other mass of people somehow occupying just one bench.

"Thanks."

I went on in the time honored tradition of trying to balance the guitar in some fashion against the glass front of the refrigerator door, desperately trying to avoid the guitar's keen desire to slide one way or the other and happily clang itself loudly and noisily on the floor. The guy offering me the bench gladly offered occasional support in the balancing act, pointing when it began to slide one way or the other, before I just resolved myself to holding it with one arm and slugging the beer with the other.

It didn't take very long for the curiosity to overwhelm one pretty Chinese girl sitting nearby.

"Is that your guitar?"

"Occasionally.."

"Huh?"

"Sorry, I meant yes. Do you want to see it?"

"Sure."

You can guess roughly how it went after that. At some point, the tall white guy came over when I happened to hit just the right song, and introduced himself as a Canadian named Dave. Helen and a girl in Electrical Engineering both humored me by acting interested through the set. The Chinese people at the bar loved it. The people on the Internet managed to keep from acting too annoyed from the quiet solitude of Internetting being completely destroyed. And one or two of the people from the pool table starting throwing out requests.

"Mind if I take a few pictures," one guy asked, camera in tow.

"Sure," I called out between songs just as I began starting to play an old favorite, Denis Leary's "Asshole" song, "go right ahead."

"I'm Bill by the way."

"I'm Guy, nice to meet you," I managed before the intro ended and I launched full force into the song.

It didn't quite come off the way that I had expected it to. It damn well didn't come off the way that I had pretty much ever played it. Here I was, winding up to one of my favorites, that usually had the audience in tears or at least good cheer, and when I finished the damn thing, everyone failed to make eye contact and a hushed silence came.

Dave bailed me out. "Love that one, man."

"Thanks, I was wondering if anyone heard it," I managed before the hush resumed in force.

Bill put his camera away and shook my hand again. "I guess I'm going to have to get a guitar for the hostel. You're pretty good, you should have a lot of fun doing this in this city."

"Thanks a lot, really appreciate it."

"I'll put the photos on the hostel website if you don't mind. Still trying to get this room just right."

"Ahh, cool," I muttered, starting to pick up on the hidden mention of authority in his last statement, and choosing not to draw it out. "That's cool. Do you work here?"

"Yeah, I run the place."

"Ah, of course. Thanks for letting me play here."

"Anytime Guy. Gotta run, have fun in Chengdu."

"Thanks Bill. Talk to you later."

And he took off. The silence turned into scandalized smiles as the other people all decided to make eye contact with me once more.

"We all work here," one of them spoke up as the self-nominated spokesperson, "and he's the boss."

"Yeah, maybe that wouldn't be the best song to play," another quietly added.

"Ah well," I replied, something of a pro in the art of whiffing and generally screwing up, "sometimes you just pick the wrong song to play."

They all laughed, and we got back to the business of playing some slightly more general audience kinds of music. The beers started to fly by again, and Dave learned a move or two of Kung Fu from the spokesperson in the empty space behind. The pretty Chinese girl requested a few more songs to perk me back up, while letting me know that she worked at the desk downstairs during most of the morning. She managed to stuff a few pringles in my mouth in between versus as well, since I let her know that I was somewhat starving at the time.

A short while later, the electrical engineering girl retired, and I had broken enough strings on the guitar to make me want to put it down. Someone threw on some hip hop music, and Dave, Helen, and another tall guy had adjourned to a side table to talk about the day and map out some ideas for where to adventure tomorrow.

I joined them a little later, finding out that the tall guy was a Brit named Chris, and had been traveling with Helen since somewhere around Beijing. Helen had studied Mandarin in college for a few years, and was able to translate a few of us out of some corners we'd painted ourselves into during some of the discussion with the Chinese. All and all a good start to things, and it wasn't long before I headed back to Harrison's to rediscover that the guy near the gate that closes off the 3 or 4 apartment buildings where he lived locked the gates every night at about 10, and you needed to tip him a couple of yuan for the trouble of waking him up. Him, Phil and I did a quick recap of the day before I lay down on my new domicile, the couch in the living room, and passed out, knowing that I was in Chengdu now, for real.

Writings of the Soul Weary

Hello my three confirmed (not really) readers.

At least one of you got on my case today about the fact that I haven't
written anything in a while, and now the guilt is keeping me from
thinking about much other than putting something in the blog (though I
admit there were a couple of funny moments in the Chinese dubbed version
of the Karate Kid I, not the least of which was that when Daniel Laruso
was screaming out "WOOHOO!!" at the end of the movie, apparently that
didn't translate as well as the other things they just left alone in
English like "Hey" and "Do it" that seemed to have slipped by unscathed).

I arrived tonight in Changsha in the Hunan province, fairly close to the
birthplace of Mao, much as the plane ticket indicated that I would. On
the plane trip I spent a little time brainstorming about the events of
Chengdu, the place I was for the last week, and found myself stuck on
one or two of the days that magically "disappeared" in the recollection,
promising myself to try cross indexing the notes with the text messages
in my cell when the plane was on the ground. Most of the events were
recalled, so I figured it would be fairly easy to write up the mess, but
something went wrong every time I tried to start the write up.

The events of last night kept creeping up on my mind.

Well, I don't have an editor, so when I spend long enough staring at a
blank text document and nothing starts to materialize, I usually let it
slide and figure that the few readers out there won't particularly mind
a minor setback in the press release time table regularity, and promise
myself to pick it up again later with a fresh mind and let the ideas
roll. Sometimes picking it back up is more like forcing a square peg
into a round hole, but the job usually ends up getting done sooner or later.

I managed to mostly expunge the events of last night from creeping back,
and set myself anew to composing the tales. Then after a long stream of
one focused though after another, I realized that I really wasn't going
to get anywhere. I had a growing feeling of connectedness and sadness
to the world as my range of recollection ran beyond my focus of one
week, and the comments that had been eating away from those outside of
China, those in the US, and those of the new people met tonight and the
ones remet from not long ago began to add up. The walks between the
places we were tonight weighed heavier than they should have, as my mind
wandered to a disembodied third person point of view looking back at me
with the group of few men keeping the honor guard of showing the
entirely too hyped up guitarist one place after another around the
campus of the polytechnic university in Changsha, while the pretty girls
hinted of such wonders as may soon be seen in the city environs and
worried after my comfort with the new confusing surroundings. I kept a
mind to what they were seeing, the energy clear and the curiosity peaked
in this entourage about me, while keeping my thoughts to the sheer
unreality of the whole experience, reminding myself it was all real.

And then we were saying our goodbyes and I was back at the comfortable
hotel. Plans made to somehow wake me up at an absurdly early hour
tomorrow morning.

Leaving me here, with all of you.

It's a heavy feeling, this one I want to show you and yet struggle for
words as to how to describe. I'm getting a lot of flashbacks, small
bits of memories, some good, more not so good, and perfect fidelity in
the mistakes made and the visions of the people missed. It's a feeling
you get when you have something lying in front of you to do on the bed,
but your head is sorta stuck upside and sideways over a misaligned
pillow, and you just can't seem to summon the will to pick up a hand and
begin the process of taking up to do whatever it is that you were going
to do when you put whatever it was on your bed in the first place to be
done. I can hear the notes of the songs I sang coming back to me with
all of the vivid nature as they were actually played in the memories I
recall, complete with the soft scratch of my hand sliding along the neck
of the guitar and the twang when I didn't quite pluck the string at
entirely the right angle with the perfect bit of force. The rich
imperfection of nature, without it's synthesized sounding exactitude,
every single time you play the same note.

I had thoughts of a girl (don't worry, you'll read about Shannon soon
enough), twisted with the comments Enny and Chris left me with when they
listened to the lyrics of my song about wandering. The half formed
image of Phil and Harrison slapping my hand in goodbye sunk into my
deeply sleep filled state, reversely echoing the loud thumping techno
bass beats from Club 7 that left me wanting sleep so badly. A text from
Susie complemented another from Fletcher, with the call to come play
guitar by the Chengdu bar owner icing the cake. When all of these small
little things added up, they added to complete inaction, as I found I
couldn't reach forward and pick up the keyboard to type about any of the
events of last week.

I will, I just wanted to ramble for a little while. Thanks for humoring me.

Greetings from Changsha! So long Chengdu...

To Mail a Wander Blog

Just a quick note / test.

It's been a lot of trouble lately getting the blog to post with the
difficult bandwidth requirements and connectivity issues I've run into
in China, so I decided to poke around the blogger website a little bit
to look for an alternative. It turns out that they have a mail to blog option ( http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41452 ) which allows you to send your posts as emails, and
publish them for you automagically.

So let's see if this works, and life gets just a tad easier for me!
Talk to you all later.

The Happy Buddha

As you already know, I rose Thursday afternoon in a haze of confusion as my mind stuttered like a rusty old starter motor squaling in protest at the notion of trying to turn the engine in its days well past its prime. Jimmy's comment had the effect of taking a solid hammer and giving it a carefully applied good whack to snap things into operation.

"I-- what--"

"You--"

"Right," I abruptly cut him off, knowing as a man damned by his own hand exactly what he had done, "I forgot. I better go apologize to Mickey--"

He laughed. "Oh no no," he managed between chuckles, "you misunderstand. You need not worry, she thinks you're rather funny. I think they might come out again later, with today being your last night in Guilin."

I had closed my eyes during the flashback of the memory. It seemed appropriate to slowly bring my hand to the bridge of my nose to banish the pain, though for what reason completely escaped me. I shake my hand when I stub my toe to get the pain out, and I suppose that that makes about the same amount of sense, on reflection. None of these actions had the desired effect of undoing what I now knew I had done last night.

"Come on," Jimmy said, coming to my rescue, "Let's go meet the girls, they're at the train station. Then we get some dumplings like you like."

"I don't know if I'm ready to face Mickey just--"

"Mickey? No! Mickey and Kari, they're at work! Lisa and Linda, they come from Yangshuo."

"Oh." This had the kind of motivational effect he desired. At least this was a different kind of trouble I could wrap my head around. Balance in all things, as Jimmy constantly taught me.

We ventured forth from the warmth of the hotel into the strength of the cold that had unseasonably come to Guilin to shake the natural order up a bit. The train station was only a 5 minute walk from my hotel, but Jimmy let me know that the girls might be waiting as I'd taken a little longer than he predicted, so we made it in 2 to head off any trouble. I had taught him the oft-broken maxim to "never keep a lady waiting" as we headed out in the fast-style Hong Kong walk.

Lisa and Linda were already there, and must have observed our racing pace when we arrived before we noticed them. They were all smiles at the brief reunion, and we soon set off for my new favorite dumpling place, the girls recanting their tales of their visit to the ancient city of Xingping, about an hour away from Yangshuo.

As we came to the street where stalls lined the already narrow pedestrian boulevard, a young girl selling flowers approached the group, choosing some likely targets in Jimmy and me seeing us paired with two girls. She moved away from Jimmy as he managed to nonchalantly gesture that he wasn't interested, and began plying me with her surprisingly fluent English.

"Rose sir buy a flower sir perhaps the pretty girl would like a flower," she managed all in one breathe.

"No, I--"

"Buy flower sir only 2 Yuan," she continued, and then suddenly switched gears as she came up very close to me. Her free hand immediately darted out and rubbed a rough circle on my stomach. "Happy Buddha," she declaimed, taking in my smile and belly in a slightly louder voice.

I laughed. The others laughed. I gently disengaged and chose to try out some of my Mandarin with her. After following us for about a block away occasionally correcting my pronunciation, she finally lost interest and began to head back.

The dumplings weren't quite as good as they had been the day before, but you still got a large heaping plate of steamed dumplings for around a buck. The girls let us know that they had to be back in Yangshuo in a couple of hours, so we set out to do some site seeing along the Li Jiang river. We caught glimpses of the glass bridge / gazebo and one of the pretty local parks in Guilin, before settling down for a cup of coffee at a small restaurant set over the river (through the Dragon gate, as they let me know remembering my Chinese name). A middle aged woman had the horizontal harp looking ancient Chinese instrument (the one you hear the blind man play during the fight seen in the movie Hero) and offered to play one of about 20 songs for a couple of Yuan; we took her up on it, gently allowing the fusion of the eastern harmonies with the western liquid stimulant as the sun set over the river. What must have been a few hours later, we brought the girls back to the train station and huffed it towards the main bridge where Mickey was waiting to meet us.

Without much say in it, I was definitely indirectly teaching Jimmy that the whole "never keep a lady waiting" idea wasn't one that we managed to make good on very often. I won't take all the blame for it though, cause Mickey was getting out of work earlier than we'd expected, so we went for the next best thing and came as close to a running walk as we could reasonably manage.

She was waiting with a smile and probing eyes, with the look of an innocent girl wondering what scandal I might cause today. I started to mumble an apology but she brushed it off before I had any traction with it and let me know that she had had fun last night. Conferring briefly, we decided to go for some Korean BBQ, but were interrupted by the airline service letting me know that they were going to drop off my ticket now rather than the time they'd indicated. A quick cab ride or two and Kari met up with us, and we began grilling away food on the small Korean grill set in the center of the table.

Leaving the restaurant, we paused awhile to watch a few kids trying to work out some new tricks on a skateboard, a few ramps and pipes set up to mess around on. There was bar right there we decided to try out, where I set to teaching them an old favorite dice game (7/11/doubles for those of you who've had the misfortune of trying it out). All in all a fun night, but a relatively calm night. And sooner or later it was time to say our goodbyes.

Jimmy met me the next morning as had become his ritual, helping me to avoid catching the late check out fee and managing to talk the hotel into giving me some hot water (they still were shutting the damn thing off somewhere around 10:30 instead of 12 like they promised). We decided to grab some food and chat for a couple hours at one of the sidewalk coffee shops, and then I got a text from Harrison in Chengdu.

"Yeah man, I'm here. Chengdu is pretty cool. Hit me on this number when you get to town."

I relayed the gist of it to Jimmy and then added, "I guess it's time to hit the road."

"Hit the road. I will remember that."

"Take care man."

"Yeah.. And come back like you said!"

He began to show me the way to the airport bus station, when another small kid walked up to me, flower in hand.

"Flower sir? Buy flower?"

"No," I laughed, recalling the incident with the girl, "the Buddha doesn't need a flower."

Perfectly on cue, a small hand darted out and began the same circular motion and programmed response.

"Happy Buddha!"

A Brief Visit to Disneyland -- In Guilin

It took me a few days to find something to write about, after falling asleep Sunday, of what struck me earlier that night as a perfect day, but time barrels on and so did the adventures. Despite the happiness Sunday gave me, I didn't embark on this trip or in life to just search for one day as the pinnacle of being, then throw in the towel (yes, I know exactly where my towel is) and jump off this mortal coil knowing that the job of living was finally done. More has since happened, not to overthrow the perfection of that day, but rather to sneak up beside it to complement it, and just be a little bit different.

Jimmy and I did recognize the fact that Monday morning that it was time to go move on to elsewhere and with little speech reassembled our packs and dropped them off behind the hotel desk after checking out. We managed to catch Lisa (the monitor) and her friend Linda for a leisurely brunch, swapping notes on the festivities last night and making the standard promises to find each other again. They were both coming up on a week break from school and were heading back to their home town of Changsha in the Hunan province, suggesting that I throw it on my near future itinerary. We lingered briefly on the goodbye, and Jimmy and I collected our gear and caught the bus back to Guilin.

The next few days were a blur that a Filipino friend of mine (Douglas) likes to refer to Boy's Kind of Days, after he confessed that he hadn't shown me much of the sites in Cebu, but rather the relaxing massages, the bars, and regional techniques for initiating conversation with the enemy camp (women). We did go for a massage. We did exchange regional techniques. There might have even been a bar or three thrown in for good measure. But after Douglas' confession came to mind at the end of my first time in the Philippines, I was careful to make sure to build in at least a couple of things in the agenda not in the sole province of Boy's Kind of Days.

Jimmy and I began Tuesday with a faint plea that I had to do some work by acquiring an Internet (GPRS) enabled SIM card. This turned out to be a Herculean task of refusing to accept that China Mobile didn't have such a service, as we competed with the long lines of cash bill-payers (most transactions in China are settled by cash-in-person type payments; credit exists, but largely remains in the hands of the few and foreign), to chase down a product that nearly none of the local representatives had heard.

Perseverance proved its worth. It was the third major China mobile store that held the answer, the vaunted 800 megabyte-transfer-per-month GPRS enabled SIM (200 yuan). Finally the dream of being able to hike up the side of a mountain in Yangshou and still be fair game to be yelled at by my boss was a reality, and I could try to earn income while seeing the world in the information age. I'm fairly split on this, remembering the very technologically free neo-luddite travel style of backpacking in Europe as a happy way to go, but it seems like the best bet for now.

The errand out of the way, Jimmy and I set to carousing the endless stalls of the night market, searching for small trinkets of cultural and aesthetic value while trying to avoid the plunge to commercial mania of the endless racks of Beijing, 2008 (Olympics) paraphernalia. One or two things jumped out at me, so I dusted off the bargaining skills to see if they were still sharp.

Jimmy's laughter and the occasional good humored curse but promise to return of a hawker let me know that the skills were still ok, despite dulling a little bit from misuse. While I needed to acquire some presents for the family back home, sometimes I wonder if the only reason that I like shopping in China is the process of actually haggling over the goods, rather than acquiring the goods. And family, you can skip over reading that last bit, of course the treasures that I acquire for loved ones is the sole reason that I go shopping at all.

That night we caught a couple of drinks and decided to change it up a little bit and sing some karaoke. Sooner or later the bed began to call and we passed out at our respective abodes a tad inebriated and more than a little hoarse. Hey, you can't have everything.

Wednesday I awoke to the pounding of Jimmy on my door. I had gone into a deep sleep after stubbornly refusing to rise for the incessant calls of housekeeping, trying desperately and without rest to turn the perfectly nested and comfortable lay of my sheets into a more ordered and tightly made bed; come on, you know how hard it is to get the pillow just right and the cold just perfectly locked away into some kind of cocoon... Let's not be hasty here with imposing the harsh rigidity of order.

Jimmy didn't give up, and soon was sitting in a chair by the window patiently waiting out the difficult process of me coming to rise without the promise of coffee and a bagel. I'll really should pay him for putting up with this crap. Well, you all know I'm not much of a morning person, so I'll let it pass. As consciousness began to form, Jimmy presented some ideas for parks, rivers, and bridges to go see, before running into Mickey at 5 when she got off work.

"Huh," I mumbled inquisitively, a creeping doubt telling me that something was out of place there, but my mind refusing to yield its nature.

"We will go to the park and--"

"Yeah yeah. Something about a friend."

He laughed and straightened with alacrity. "Oh yes, Mickey! Mickey Mouse."

"Like... The Rat?"

"No, he's a mouse, Disney and all--"

"Yeah yeah," my Florida culture overriding euphemism, "The rat. What about Mickey Mouse?"

"Yeah! She's my friend! She's very small, like a mouse, so I call her the Mickey Mouse."

"Minnie is the--"

"No, Mickey."

"Right. We see Mickey Mouse."

"Ok! But not til around 5, she has work. We go to the park find--"

"Right. Let me try the shower, shake off sleep."

Jimmy was half way to the phone when he heard my yell. A few moments later, I stormed out of the bathroom with all vestiges of sleep removed, and a cold look of hatred directed at the world, as I vigorously assembled the guitar and hack.

"You okay Guy? What's wrong?"

"There's.no.hot.water," I mumbled between chattering teeth in a rather flat tone.

Jimmy laughed a moment before deciding that I probably wouldn't immediately see the humor in it, when he quickly cut it off and kindly kept the joke to himself.

We ventured out to get some food (the plates of local pork dumplings are not to be missed) and kill some time before heading over to the large bridge near the famous elephant trunk hill where Mickey worked. The "elephant" is a large rock peninsula rising sharply to form a hill, with a natural spill of rocks falling without motion into the water, giving the surprising effect of an elephant drinking water. After some sightseeing, we headed over the bridge to a nearby park, where a small building to the left of the entrance held a small "pearl museum" and pearl store, where Mickey worked.

Mickey turned out to be quite a little bundle of energy. Clear seeing eyes laced with intelligence looked out from a cute little Chinese girl, flowing black hair echoing her movements with a mercurial demeanor. She had a ready smile and spoke in clear English as she introduced herself, before turning back to Jimmy and explaining away a host of things I couldn't possibly follow in a high pitched Mandarin. This left me to the business of haggling for some pearls, without much intention of making a purchase. The history and dose of shiny were enough to keep me occupied, before we headed outside and hackey-sacked and played guitar for a while.

Mickey soon joined us with her friend Kari, a slightly taller girl with asian style bangs and more than a hint of trouble wafting around the air near her as she walked. Equally friendly, Kari had spent even more time mastering English communication, so naturally we found something or other to talk about while we continued the endless fight between gravity and the hackey sack. Both girls proved themselves as reasonably adept at the game, Jimmy excelling after plenty of practice in the last week or so.

Having the critical mass to make it worth while, we spent some time dipping meat and vegetables in the boiling soup in the center of the table for some spicy hotpot. I knew Sichuan province was around the corner, so it was time to begin boning up on my spicy food intake to be ready for game time. Despite the language barrier, the girls quickly realized I was a joker, and we proceeded to get to know each other in true form, Jimmy obviously happy that the people he'd brought together were hitting it off.

We aren't going to talk about the crazed frenetic packed environment of the LV club later that night. Oddly enough, Jimmy mentioned something to me in the morning ritual of him sitting by the window as I slowly fought away the fog of slumber something that had slipped my memory.

"I didn't realize you were that strong."

Uh oh. "Uh oh," I said on reflection, as I chose to vocalize that thought.

"But then, I suppose Mickey Mouse is pretty light, after all..."

A Perfect Day

As I already hinted at in the last message, I wasn't exactly in stellar condition when Saturday morning rolled around, but at the least I did manage to let the 'rents know I was still alive and managed to set some kind of Yangshou record for staying in bed most of the day. There was a brief attempt to rally late in the afternoon and even to try to stomach more than a couple of bites of solid food, but after stumbling along after Jimmy for an hour or so and a very poor attempt to hackey sack, I called it a wash and went back to the Hotel to nurse my misery.

It may be noted that it really takes a day as useless and crappy as that to truly appreciate what happened Sunday. I agree with Jason Lee's character in Vanilla Sky - you can't have the sweet without having the sour; the sour just makes the sweet sweeter.

The sour was pretty damn low end, even amongst bad hangovers. Something of a leader, that recent memory can recall.

Sunday began with the simple appreciation that I was whole again, and able to maneuver. It was immediately followed by a ravenous hunger that quickly reminded me that I hadn't really had much at all yesterday; after a quick conference with Jimmy (he was already up), we threw some things together and hit the road.

After another failed attempt to get mobile data service (the thought of being able to send the blog in from the side of a mountain somewhat appealed to me) - more on this in the future, Jimmy and I rented a couple of bikes and took off for the countryside. It's been probably 10 years since I've been on a bike, but you know what they say about "Once you know how to ride a bike..." so I figured it was time to give it a shot. Taking pictures from a cameraphone while riding on a dirt road isn't a very exact science, so I definitely lost some of the more vivid images from the journey, but the pictures that I did get (when I figure out how to get them online) will probably give you the general idea of how beautiful it is out there among the valleys and sharp rises of the small mountains. I did manage to sneak one online though - take a look here at Moon Hill.

It's something of a truism to say that a lot of people bike in China, but I wasn't really prepared for the enormity of it. That particular Sunday we raced in and out of tour groups, school kids taking an afternoon, families going for a peaceful ride, and foreigners that I was happy to notice were generally looking a lot more lost than I was. Things being what they are, I tried to remember a couple of my old mountain bike tricks and managed to jump the bike off of the shoulder on a road back to blow by one particular slow going group that'd been giving us some trouble in passing.

What I didn't expect was the middle aged father looking guy dressed in black to come blowing by me clearly looking to race. It wasn't until I saw his cute little daughter smiling in that impish sort of way and give me a wave that unambiguously stated, "haha slow poke" who was sitting in a basket chair affixed over the black rider's back wheel.

That was just not going to stand.

I brought my gearless wonder of a mountain bike to bear on the matter and engaged in the race. I blew ahead of him by surprise until he realized that I wasn't going to take the matter lying down, and soon we were both standing on peddles pushing for all we were worth. I figured his handicap of carrying along the 20 pound cute menace was more than offset by the fact that I hadn't done much physical exertion other than lifting the beer mug to my mouth in a few years, so the race seemed fair by all reasonable accounts. A couple of kilometers later he began to flag after I'd held the front position for a while, despite some of the chinese protests being emitted by his daughter.

At least until his very able bodied niece decided to do something about it.

I didn't even see her coming, but this time it was very clear exactly what she was saying in the international parlance of our time as she proceeded to smoke me and cut me off rather abruptly with a loud more mature tone of "take that!" in her native tongue. Jimmy had just managed to catch up and was explaining to me that I was a bit of a crazy rider on a bike, something I must have picked up from my past, as he smiled from the immediate understanding of whatever it was that the girl had told me in a syllable or two before the abrupt unseating of the front position. He dropped off his philosophizing and only nodded to me and smiled as he quickly saw midsentence my facial expression telling him, "I mean no disrespect to your current dialogue, but I have a terrible need to go racing after that girl and it just can't bloody wait another second". A quick wave and a "go" followed shortly after, but the gesticulation and verbalization only reflected damply off the nearby trees as I was already long gone.

I'll cut to the chase. I almost had her, but she was making me work for every inch of it. And there was no way that I could keep up the long journey back at the level of expenditure I was forced too just to keep my tire in line with hers, let alone to get ahead. I abruptly exhaled my surrender and began to fall off to a more reasonable face.

For a bit of gloating that was well below the level that I expected, she soon dropped back to a reasonable pace and began breathing just 10% less than I was going; it was some small measure of recompense for the loss. Soon the others caught up (Jimmy adding some kind consolation about her incredible skill that he was kind enough to inflate for the sake of my ego) and we rode back the last few kilometers as a group, joking around and one of the guys who was hanging on to the fast girls bike to use as a tow practicing his English with me. All in all, an excellent afternoon.

Back in town, I nearly fell off my bike when Jimmy told me that we'd done about 35 kilometers in a little over an hour, including the breaks for observation and water along the way. I weakly told him that I needed to stick to walking for a while, and we returned the bikes to the shop and began to head back to the waterfront where the hotel was located.

After a quick stop back at the hotel to grab the essentials, we went back out for some entertainment. The people of Yangshuo are very friendly, and soon enough we had a pretty decent hack circle going and some accomplices in crime for the day. The girls invited us to a social of some sort that their school was putting on that night, and we decided to take them up on it.

We met up with a couple of the people we'd run into the first day and visited a couple more of the sites around town. Later that night, we went over to the English school and spent some time doing all the sorts of things that you can imagine one can do at a college level school function that doesn't have fancy attire or anything even mildly resembling alcohol at it. After a few rounds of some odd language games, they pushed me to start playing.

I went at it for perhaps an hour, the audience providing all of the feedback I needed to know there was some sort of musical fit being found. One of the people that I met there was Lisa, a monitor of some sort (I knew from the difficulty that it took Jimmy to render the word that it wasn't the sort of thing to directly translate), who encouraged me to play a few more songs than I probably intended, and all of the students were completely ecstatic for the opportunity to try out their English with a native. I had to applaud their hard efforts, even though it served as a reminder for how little my Mandarin had progressed thus far.

Emails and SMSs swapped, the students had to turn in much not the manner of American college students to make it to class early the next morning. Our hungers for the night far from sated, Jimmy and I proceeded to hit the bar strip for a drink or two before calling it an early night ourselves. That was how we found ourselves at the Red Capitalist Club.

Obvious logical contradictions aside, the place was awash with smoke machine and laser lights that had long been banned from the US and kept to such non-US-frequented destinations such as Cancun. The place was dominated by a large dance floor with a bar cutting out a corner, with two sides forming a U filled with tables. At the corner was a small raised platform with some instruments arrayed, giving at least one backpacker hopes to fill a wild imagination.

After a couple of songs went by, a few musicians got on stage and started to play. The crowd seemed happy by the local tunes, while I tried to put away some drinks and muster some courage.

Suffice it to say, though I doubt the people understood most of what I was saying, the music communicated something or other after the waitress told me it was ok to play a song and I was fed a barrage of "one more song!" every time I tried to put the guitar down and sneak off the stage. We eventually left the club to pass out back at the hotel, taking only a few minutes to reflect on how the day had gone.

"That was it, Jimmy."

"It was what?"

"That.. was a perfect day."

"Yeah. I think... Very good day."

"Night," I muttered, knowing sleep was nowhere nearby after my brain cyclically rehashed the fun of the last 24 hours.

"Goodnight," he replied, with the tone of finality that let me know he, of all people, could actually just fall asleep.