Really quickly - for anyone that noticed, yeah, a few days lapsed between leaving Guangzhou and arriving in Guilin. To those concerned, I did head back to Hong Kong that Saturday, on the bus again. I did party hard enough that I'm not going to talk about it for my friend's 18th. There may be a photo or two floating around from the incident. I deny any such photos. I did spend most of Sunday in no stable condition to travel. And I lost a Monday in the inevitable business of inertia that seems to creep up on me any time I'm in Hong Kong and something or other is going on with my depraved friends.
BUT, despite Susie and Neil's pessimism, I did pull it together and head back to Shenzhen Tuesday night, I did visit the Tea lady, I spent more time than I should haggling at the Lo Wu shopping center (couple surprises for you to see), and then I caught the flight back in to Guilin, whereon I passed out as soon as the questionable-morals of the taxi driver saw fit to drop me off at the crappy hotel.
That aside, it pretty much picks up from there as mentioned. So piss off if you want to get on my case about it.
Friday, March 30, 2007
A Red Carnation
I suppose I ought to start this story by telling you about Jimmy.
Jimmy is a Chinese guy from Guilin who happened to notice that I wasn't exactly Chinese. Now walking down the streets of the beautiful picturesque Guangxi city of Guilin, many people happened to notice this particular Thursday morning that I wasn't exactly Chinese, and their reactions to this differed wildly. Most of them tried to sell me something. A couple of girls laughed a bit and pointed, probably noting the caveman-like appearance my beard gives me. One lady even grabbed her small child who ventured perhaps a millimeter too close to me, sharply berating him for the rash action. The beggar kid didn't seem particularly mind my distinct lack of Chinese-ness, and went about his normal course of business, as if I had the faintest idea what he might be saying in Mandarin.
Jimmy, however, took a slightly different approach.
He furtively glanced at me to see if I'd bite, and clearly deciding I was harmless enough, decided to give his hard earned English a go.
"Hello," he declared, quite clearly and with careful attention to accent and intonation.
Alright, so I liked the effort. I decided to humor him. "What's up," I replied, rather noncommittally.
"Walking to town?"
"Yup."
"How long have you been in Guilin?"
"This is my first real day. Got in late last night."
"Ah. I wanted to ask you what you thought of Guilin."
And so I decided to tell him, relating the story of the cab driver from the airport who tried to tell me that my hotel was all booked, but he could find me a much better place and get me some discount tickets to all the attractions. I hadn't realized at the time that the expression "but I wasn't born yesterday" may take some time to explain.
After I realized that Jimmy didn't seem intent on hustling me, we ventured out to look at some of the sites of Guilin. We walked to the Solitary Beauty Peak / royal house, built back in the Ming dynasty. Jimmy carefully inforrmed me to take the left of three staircases.
"The center one is only for the emperor," he explained. "The right is for the path of the writer."
"What's the left?"
"The path of the Kung Fu."
I chuckled softly. "So we take the left?"
"Of course!"
I had a feeling that Jimmy and I were going to get on just fine after that.
We hiked up the solitary peak to gaze at the beautiful (if a tad foggy) vistas of Guilin. Jimmy turned out to be a fan of languages, and was surprised to find I spoke some Spanish. He immediately whipped out his Spanish phrasebook and I helped him with the pronunciation of some crucial things such as, "chica bonita" and "Tu quieres una bebida?" as we wandered back down the cliff into the city.
(It turns out that "May-Nu" is how you say "Beautiful girl" in Mandarin)
Around the corner Jimmy brought me to a place we feasted. We wiled away the afternoon getting to know each other as he provided excellent tour service, dutifully showing me the things to see in Guilin. We caught an amazing afternoon dance and acrobatics performance put on by people of the Yang ethnic minority, giving an insight into their culture and showcasing things that just make you think "ouch" as you contemplate trying to get into some of these positions (without alcohol) yourself.
The rest of the day was spent hackey-sacking (I translated "wandering attention" as "A.D.D." to two young girls kicking the footbag around with us) and drinking tea between occasionally plopping down at an Internet cafe to get some work done. At last, the sunset and the people began to flood en masse to the central square.
After a quick debate that concluded that it was probably too early to hit a club, Jimmy showed me a local bar where we could grab a beer and kill a few hours. The waitress turned out to be a friend of his, and there was a guy picking away at a guitar over at the corner of an outside patio that spilled out onto the street.
Yeah, you probably guessed it. That little detail about the "guy with a guitar in the corner" turns out to be relatively important.
A beer or two in (the Liquan local brew turns out to be pretty good, and I was surprised to find out that the locals quaff the stuff pretty fast), the only guy from a table of all girls went up and conferred briefly with the guitarist. The guitarist nodded, and the guy began singing away something or other in Mandarin that apparently was very well received; at least, the girls at the next table seemed to love it, and that was about the only meaningful definition of "good" that mattered to Jimmy and I at the moment.
He prodded me. "You should play.. You said you play guitar, right?"
"Yeah..."
"Well, go ahead..."
"But... Guitarists don't usually like to let random people just come along and play their guitars when they've clearly already got the gig.."
"Ahh, give it a try."
The waitress-friend of his just happened to overhear the last part of the dialogue.
"You play the guitar?"
"Uh... A little..."
"You should go play!"
"But isn't it his guitar?"
"Is ok, it's not his guitar. You can play if you want."
I waited until he finished off another two songs and layed the guitar down to take a break. Seeing the moment finally arrive, I walked over to him and asked if I might do a song or two. He mumbled something I took to mean acquiescense, and I was off.
The first song went a bit slowly, but then, they always do. I was quite convinced that everyone was struggling through the listening of it at least as much as I was the playing of it, but at the end I received rather more applause than I expected. Getting slightly charged off the energy, I decided to go for something a little more racy.
This time around the applause clearly split the audience in two. Half of the audience believed that I must be Dave Matthews himself and clapped and cheered appropriately. The other half preferred to believe the the first half must have had something odd in the water afflicting their judgment, and preferred to pointedly not make any eye contact with me. After a significant part of the latter half paid their bill and dissappeared, the first half seemed to take the challenge and began calling for "one more song!" as I made motions to put the guitar down. Who was I to ignore their desires?
Five songs later, I broke into a blues riff ("Pride and Joy", Stevie Ray Vaughn) that had people leaping out of their seats, though I was lost in thought wondering exactly what the noise pollution levels might be defined as in Guilin at that hour. Which had become another mystery to me; Jimmy had polished off his large bottle of beer after appearing to nurse it a bit, so I needed to start wrapping things up. I went for a big finish with "El Cancion de Mariachis".
Somewhere in the middle of the song, I heard the earlier group of girls starting to all clap out of time with the music, and heard calls that sounded like they were egging one of their brethren on to do something silly. About a minute later, I saw the nod on the cutest girl of the group, a nod known to anyone who's accepted to do something they definitely would rather not do, but are resigned to carrying out. The girl stood up, and approached the stage.
Concealed in her hand was a Red Carnation.
She stumbled through the words, "You are very good" as she presented the flower to me on stage. I was shocked enough by the moment, that the audience got quite a kick out of it, with poorly contained mirth escaping at every moment. The girl had turned color to slightly match the flower, and I knew that something had to be done to make her know that exactly this sort of behavior should be followed in the future, and not to fall prey to the masses.
So I did the only logical thing I could think of. I bit the carnation in my closest impression of a flamenco dancer, and began strumming a progression taught to me by Ritmo Gitano in Florida, by Aydin himself.
This had more or less the desired effect. Whatever else the Chinese think of us, "crazy" definitely plays rather importantly into the character profile.
After hanging out there for another hour or two, we went out to a local club in Guilin, with me rather eager to see what the local people did for going out on a Thursday. I was pleased to know that they can rock just as hard in the small hidden cities just as well as they move in Hong Kong, even if the town naturally has far fewer people (and venues) at which to rock out. Sooner or later and an adventure in the midst, it was time to go back and pass out, and get ready for Yangshuo tomorrow. That's about the time that Jimmy surprised me again.
I had let him know that I was going to Yangshuo tomorrow. He apparently decided that work wasn't really all that important to go in to (he's a cook at one of the local places) and said he'd accompany me, if I didn't mind. Which obviously I didn't, but I suppose he had just met me, so perhaps it wasn't so obvious at that point.
Sure enough, the next day, we were on the bus to Yangshuo. And what happened there is going to have to wait for another blog.
ttyl
Jimmy is a Chinese guy from Guilin who happened to notice that I wasn't exactly Chinese. Now walking down the streets of the beautiful picturesque Guangxi city of Guilin, many people happened to notice this particular Thursday morning that I wasn't exactly Chinese, and their reactions to this differed wildly. Most of them tried to sell me something. A couple of girls laughed a bit and pointed, probably noting the caveman-like appearance my beard gives me. One lady even grabbed her small child who ventured perhaps a millimeter too close to me, sharply berating him for the rash action. The beggar kid didn't seem particularly mind my distinct lack of Chinese-ness, and went about his normal course of business, as if I had the faintest idea what he might be saying in Mandarin.
Jimmy, however, took a slightly different approach.
He furtively glanced at me to see if I'd bite, and clearly deciding I was harmless enough, decided to give his hard earned English a go.
"Hello," he declared, quite clearly and with careful attention to accent and intonation.
Alright, so I liked the effort. I decided to humor him. "What's up," I replied, rather noncommittally.
"Walking to town?"
"Yup."
"How long have you been in Guilin?"
"This is my first real day. Got in late last night."
"Ah. I wanted to ask you what you thought of Guilin."
And so I decided to tell him, relating the story of the cab driver from the airport who tried to tell me that my hotel was all booked, but he could find me a much better place and get me some discount tickets to all the attractions. I hadn't realized at the time that the expression "but I wasn't born yesterday" may take some time to explain.
After I realized that Jimmy didn't seem intent on hustling me, we ventured out to look at some of the sites of Guilin. We walked to the Solitary Beauty Peak / royal house, built back in the Ming dynasty. Jimmy carefully inforrmed me to take the left of three staircases.
"The center one is only for the emperor," he explained. "The right is for the path of the writer."
"What's the left?"
"The path of the Kung Fu."
I chuckled softly. "So we take the left?"
"Of course!"
I had a feeling that Jimmy and I were going to get on just fine after that.
We hiked up the solitary peak to gaze at the beautiful (if a tad foggy) vistas of Guilin. Jimmy turned out to be a fan of languages, and was surprised to find I spoke some Spanish. He immediately whipped out his Spanish phrasebook and I helped him with the pronunciation of some crucial things such as, "chica bonita" and "Tu quieres una bebida?" as we wandered back down the cliff into the city.
(It turns out that "May-Nu" is how you say "Beautiful girl" in Mandarin)
Around the corner Jimmy brought me to a place we feasted. We wiled away the afternoon getting to know each other as he provided excellent tour service, dutifully showing me the things to see in Guilin. We caught an amazing afternoon dance and acrobatics performance put on by people of the Yang ethnic minority, giving an insight into their culture and showcasing things that just make you think "ouch" as you contemplate trying to get into some of these positions (without alcohol) yourself.
The rest of the day was spent hackey-sacking (I translated "wandering attention" as "A.D.D." to two young girls kicking the footbag around with us) and drinking tea between occasionally plopping down at an Internet cafe to get some work done. At last, the sunset and the people began to flood en masse to the central square.
After a quick debate that concluded that it was probably too early to hit a club, Jimmy showed me a local bar where we could grab a beer and kill a few hours. The waitress turned out to be a friend of his, and there was a guy picking away at a guitar over at the corner of an outside patio that spilled out onto the street.
Yeah, you probably guessed it. That little detail about the "guy with a guitar in the corner" turns out to be relatively important.
A beer or two in (the Liquan local brew turns out to be pretty good, and I was surprised to find out that the locals quaff the stuff pretty fast), the only guy from a table of all girls went up and conferred briefly with the guitarist. The guitarist nodded, and the guy began singing away something or other in Mandarin that apparently was very well received; at least, the girls at the next table seemed to love it, and that was about the only meaningful definition of "good" that mattered to Jimmy and I at the moment.
He prodded me. "You should play.. You said you play guitar, right?"
"Yeah..."
"Well, go ahead..."
"But... Guitarists don't usually like to let random people just come along and play their guitars when they've clearly already got the gig.."
"Ahh, give it a try."
The waitress-friend of his just happened to overhear the last part of the dialogue.
"You play the guitar?"
"Uh... A little..."
"You should go play!"
"But isn't it his guitar?"
"Is ok, it's not his guitar. You can play if you want."
I waited until he finished off another two songs and layed the guitar down to take a break. Seeing the moment finally arrive, I walked over to him and asked if I might do a song or two. He mumbled something I took to mean acquiescense, and I was off.
The first song went a bit slowly, but then, they always do. I was quite convinced that everyone was struggling through the listening of it at least as much as I was the playing of it, but at the end I received rather more applause than I expected. Getting slightly charged off the energy, I decided to go for something a little more racy.
This time around the applause clearly split the audience in two. Half of the audience believed that I must be Dave Matthews himself and clapped and cheered appropriately. The other half preferred to believe the the first half must have had something odd in the water afflicting their judgment, and preferred to pointedly not make any eye contact with me. After a significant part of the latter half paid their bill and dissappeared, the first half seemed to take the challenge and began calling for "one more song!" as I made motions to put the guitar down. Who was I to ignore their desires?
Five songs later, I broke into a blues riff ("Pride and Joy", Stevie Ray Vaughn) that had people leaping out of their seats, though I was lost in thought wondering exactly what the noise pollution levels might be defined as in Guilin at that hour. Which had become another mystery to me; Jimmy had polished off his large bottle of beer after appearing to nurse it a bit, so I needed to start wrapping things up. I went for a big finish with "El Cancion de Mariachis".
Somewhere in the middle of the song, I heard the earlier group of girls starting to all clap out of time with the music, and heard calls that sounded like they were egging one of their brethren on to do something silly. About a minute later, I saw the nod on the cutest girl of the group, a nod known to anyone who's accepted to do something they definitely would rather not do, but are resigned to carrying out. The girl stood up, and approached the stage.
Concealed in her hand was a Red Carnation.
She stumbled through the words, "You are very good" as she presented the flower to me on stage. I was shocked enough by the moment, that the audience got quite a kick out of it, with poorly contained mirth escaping at every moment. The girl had turned color to slightly match the flower, and I knew that something had to be done to make her know that exactly this sort of behavior should be followed in the future, and not to fall prey to the masses.
So I did the only logical thing I could think of. I bit the carnation in my closest impression of a flamenco dancer, and began strumming a progression taught to me by Ritmo Gitano in Florida, by Aydin himself.
This had more or less the desired effect. Whatever else the Chinese think of us, "crazy" definitely plays rather importantly into the character profile.
After hanging out there for another hour or two, we went out to a local club in Guilin, with me rather eager to see what the local people did for going out on a Thursday. I was pleased to know that they can rock just as hard in the small hidden cities just as well as they move in Hong Kong, even if the town naturally has far fewer people (and venues) at which to rock out. Sooner or later and an adventure in the midst, it was time to go back and pass out, and get ready for Yangshuo tomorrow. That's about the time that Jimmy surprised me again.
I had let him know that I was going to Yangshuo tomorrow. He apparently decided that work wasn't really all that important to go in to (he's a cook at one of the local places) and said he'd accompany me, if I didn't mind. Which obviously I didn't, but I suppose he had just met me, so perhaps it wasn't so obvious at that point.
Sure enough, the next day, we were on the bus to Yangshuo. And what happened there is going to have to wait for another blog.
ttyl
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Whiffing and the Zen of Hackey Sacking
I arrived about 2 hours later in the port city of Guangzhou (the current name of Canton as in "Cantonese"), set at the mouth of the Pearl River, at the scene of an argument. I don't know what was being said. I have no idea what they were arguing about. But all of a sudden the driver blew up at the two "bus stewardesses" over something or other, and next thing you know we're pulling off the highway much in the vein of kids driving their parents over the edge (think "one more word out of your mouth and..THAT'S-IT-I'M-PULLING-THIS-DAMN-CAR-OVER" kind of scene), and all the Chinese are hopping out the side with a shake of their head and a clear air of "I hope they cut this crap out someday" with absolutely no expectation that such will ever occur.
This, of course, left me, a baffled looking Indian guy, and a pacifist Chinese freshman-in-college aged youth sharing our bewilderment at what was going on before. Strike that. The Chinese kid seemed to have a pretty good idea of what was going on and was keeping an amazingly neutral face that really was concealing the fringes of laughter, or so I saw when after a particular putrescent sounding verbal barrage rang off and he was looking at me to wonder if I found that as funny as him.
(I probably would have, but my Cantonese sucks. I could tell by how hard he was holding back losing himself in laughter that it MUST have been pretty damn funny. One of the girls, clearly the object of the tirade, even turned her face and concealed a smirk, and he was yelling at her!)
"You uh.. You look confused."
"Yes, er.. A bit. Is this Guangzhou?"
"Of course," he snappily replied. A split second later it occurred to him that it wasn't very 'of course' to me if I were asking, and so he looked for a meaning in the question other than testing him on the obvious. "Oh.. Uh, this is not Guangzhou you need. Uh, hold on."
He tried valiantly for the next few minutes to hail one of the attendants while avoiding stepping into the middle of a hot tantrum before realizing that this probably wasn't going to work. It was about then that I stepped in.
"Let me," deciding to borrow for once all the negative energy pointed at my home stereotype, "I'm an American."
He nodded almost too quickly, understanding the intent without the sarcasm all too well. Well enough, I suppose it's what I wanted for this situation anyway, so it served to fuel my abrasiveness. How's that for the oracle making true the fate?
I stepped about 60% of the way directly into the line of fire. "Excuse me," I declared with perhaps too much gusto, "is this Guangzhou?"
It had more or less the desired effect. Hey, I didn't make the world...
"Huh," the derailed but irate driver mumbled after a moment of stunned silence.
"Er.. Li go hai m'hai Guangzhou ah? Di si, hai bhin do ah?"
"Oh. That way," and pointed in the general direction of the taxi.
"Thanks er.. m'goy." Exit Guy, stage left.
The kid nodded to me as I passed his seat, clearly happy for my part in the little charade. The actors resumed their debate, though much less heated now that the passengers were all gone and the driver had made it clear that he wasn't going a single kilometer/meter/centimeter (I don't know how they reckon these things around here) further. He also helpfully added that there were a lot of other people with my plight and that the bus company had arranged another shuttle to the main station.
When we got off the bus, he showed me over to a queue with just about none of the original passengers from my bus in it, then bid me farewell. I thanked him in English, sparing him the trouble of hearing me debate whether what he did for me was a service ("m'goy") or more of a gift ("daw-shay"). I split the difference and shouted out "shay-shay" (the Mandarin single form) at his back, feeling somehow that the English was inadequate. He waved before disappearing into some nearby unmarked building. Hey, maybe the driver was his father...
I did a lap with the other passengers who ostensibly knew where they were going around the next bus. In the end, we ended up right back where we started. The doors opened up, and the strange lap was seemingly wiped from the collective memory of humanity. The bus sped away to I-haven't-the-faintest-idea-where, and we were in Guangzhou a-bit-more proper.
I hailed a cab, simply wanting to find my hostel as quickly as possible and increase my horizontality as fast as I could manage. After putting the cab driver on the phone with the hotel (it's just easier when you have no idea) and him recovering from some shock or other on the phone, we left the ultimate bus station.
And basically went on a big u turn circle which had the net effect of putting us on the other side of the street.
In retrospect, I probably should have noticed that the ultimate bus station happened to be adjacent to the very large Guangzhou Main Rail Station. Had I noticed that, I might possibly have combined it with the key piece of information that the hostel I had chosen was in the "Train Station Area" portion of my travel guide, and while we're on this hypothetical venture, have then looked at the handy little Guangzhou map included in the chapter clearly indicating that the hostel in question was basically on the other side of the street from the station.
BUT, things as they were, I put none of this together. And had a terrific time trying to explain this to a taxi driver with an amused look on his face in Cantonese, while again wrestling with the correct version of "Thank you" to append to the verbal butchery.
I did, however, manage to pass out fairly abruptly after a brief attempt to rally and see the city which turned more into a brief recon of a few of the surrounding blocks.
Today passed with quite a lot less whiffing. I picked a spot pretty much at random on the subway near what I roughly guessed as a built up part of the city. After a couple of hours of that, I jumped back on the metro to Huangsha and made my way over to Shamian Island, a former enclave of the Dutch, English, and just about all of the old seafaring powers that made their way over to this side of th world at one point or another.
I had been to the bar part of Shamian on my last (and only other) trip to Guangzhou, but Fong and I had had a "get dinner" mentality on our mind at the time which isn't very conducive to wandering about aimlessly. I walked the small island back and forth, stopping about a quarter of the way in when I saw the familiar (and odd) shape of the Chinese hackey sack for sale at one of the local vendor's stands.
"How much," I inquired, cutting through the preliminaries and drawing the young girl minding the shop out of her Gameboy reverie.
"This? This 10 Yuan."
"10? Ok," as I gently placed the sack back down.
"Okok, you make me price." Her rhythm only slightly marred by her lack of experience clearly owing to age. But I wasn't really in the mood to bite, so she had an easy time. I went honest.
"I like 5 better."
"Ok sir, 5 - hey!! You wait for him buy it!"
Right then, much to the dismay of our young negotiator prodigy, her sister bolted around the front of the stand, and proceeded to hack another sack, passing it over to me.
I wasn't one to take that sort of invitation lightly, so I immediately shot a foot out to keep the hack from touching its mortal enemy, the ground. Alas, I could only briefly keep the hack away from its dire quest.
"Here," as I placed my bag on a nearby chair, "Let's do it again."
And off we went; I didn't want the negotiator savant to spoil the fun, so I quickly dropped a 5 on the table before serving the hack.
The girl turned out to be pretty good, but stuck almost solely to her right inside, rather than moving things around. The Chinese hack is a bit strange as I mentioned before because it is basically a stack of plastic 1/8 inch high discs, forming all told about a half inch of "sack". Protruding from the top of this is a plume of feathers, usually four, extending about 5 inches further up. This adds some aerodynamic/distance qualities to the game, but damned if I didn't have the thing land sideways on my foot a slew of times before I started learning to wait for the thing to flip all the way over (and subsequently adjust my kicking style to try to further that agenda).
We went at it for the better part of an hour, much to the amusement of the passing Chinese and foreigners in the area. More than once I heard one of the older people exclaim at the sight of seeing Gweilo hack, I guess it's not the sort of thing that happens around here every day. Or maybe it was my style they were picking at. It better not be the beard...
Finally she begged off, but I knew I wasn't done. I dropped a quick goodbye (skipping over the whole dodgy Cantonese thank-you business) and continued on around the island.
After about 3/4ths of the way all the way around, I was pulled from my idle observer daze by the familiar clack-clack sound of a nearby hack being put to good use. I homed in on the target and found a guy probably 5 years older than me hacking by himself.
His style was entirely different from the girl's. Where I had noted some themes of distinctly non-western origin in the brief back and forth with the girl, there was a fully developed aspect of calm and deliberate passiveness exuding from this guy's presence. And this guy was not limited to the right inside alone. He passed the 4 sides frequently, though clearly favored the toes. But there was a quiet acceptance of the ancient duel between the hackey sack and the ground, and this guy's mission was clearly to assuage the pain of the contest with the barest minimum of effort.
It was the Zen of Hacking.
I weakly tried to get his attention once or twice but failed to pierce the veil of concentration hanging about this man. After what seemed an eternity, he actually dropped the hack, and I took that minute to move in.
When I caught his eye, I pointed at my hack which I had produced off camera to dodge the language barrier. I then looked inquiringly at him and pointed, following by a back and forth gesture between us. He nodded, and I stuffed the inferior hack of mine away and put down my bag efficiently. And then we began.
It went on for hours. I was a sweaty mess by the time I finally begged off, but he smiled gladly and seemed to hint that I should come back some time. We had kicked, we had stalled, we had jestered, we had slapped the late afternoon away, and I had felt completely sated at least within my body's limits for the moment, parting ways in the end. I caught just the barest inkling into this man's world of hacking zen, the calm persistence and accuracy, while still keeping some of the flare for the fun. Movements just so, not over exaggerated. No force misused, nor tiredness hurried on. Just simple hacking.
Word.
This, of course, left me, a baffled looking Indian guy, and a pacifist Chinese freshman-in-college aged youth sharing our bewilderment at what was going on before. Strike that. The Chinese kid seemed to have a pretty good idea of what was going on and was keeping an amazingly neutral face that really was concealing the fringes of laughter, or so I saw when after a particular putrescent sounding verbal barrage rang off and he was looking at me to wonder if I found that as funny as him.
(I probably would have, but my Cantonese sucks. I could tell by how hard he was holding back losing himself in laughter that it MUST have been pretty damn funny. One of the girls, clearly the object of the tirade, even turned her face and concealed a smirk, and he was yelling at her!)
"You uh.. You look confused."
"Yes, er.. A bit. Is this Guangzhou?"
"Of course," he snappily replied. A split second later it occurred to him that it wasn't very 'of course' to me if I were asking, and so he looked for a meaning in the question other than testing him on the obvious. "Oh.. Uh, this is not Guangzhou you need. Uh, hold on."
He tried valiantly for the next few minutes to hail one of the attendants while avoiding stepping into the middle of a hot tantrum before realizing that this probably wasn't going to work. It was about then that I stepped in.
"Let me," deciding to borrow for once all the negative energy pointed at my home stereotype, "I'm an American."
He nodded almost too quickly, understanding the intent without the sarcasm all too well. Well enough, I suppose it's what I wanted for this situation anyway, so it served to fuel my abrasiveness. How's that for the oracle making true the fate?
I stepped about 60% of the way directly into the line of fire. "Excuse me," I declared with perhaps too much gusto, "is this Guangzhou?"
It had more or less the desired effect. Hey, I didn't make the world...
"Huh," the derailed but irate driver mumbled after a moment of stunned silence.
"Er.. Li go hai m'hai Guangzhou ah? Di si, hai bhin do ah?"
"Oh. That way," and pointed in the general direction of the taxi.
"Thanks er.. m'goy." Exit Guy, stage left.
The kid nodded to me as I passed his seat, clearly happy for my part in the little charade. The actors resumed their debate, though much less heated now that the passengers were all gone and the driver had made it clear that he wasn't going a single kilometer/meter/centimeter (I don't know how they reckon these things around here) further. He also helpfully added that there were a lot of other people with my plight and that the bus company had arranged another shuttle to the main station.
When we got off the bus, he showed me over to a queue with just about none of the original passengers from my bus in it, then bid me farewell. I thanked him in English, sparing him the trouble of hearing me debate whether what he did for me was a service ("m'goy") or more of a gift ("daw-shay"). I split the difference and shouted out "shay-shay" (the Mandarin single form) at his back, feeling somehow that the English was inadequate. He waved before disappearing into some nearby unmarked building. Hey, maybe the driver was his father...
I did a lap with the other passengers who ostensibly knew where they were going around the next bus. In the end, we ended up right back where we started. The doors opened up, and the strange lap was seemingly wiped from the collective memory of humanity. The bus sped away to I-haven't-the-faintest-idea-where, and we were in Guangzhou a-bit-more proper.
I hailed a cab, simply wanting to find my hostel as quickly as possible and increase my horizontality as fast as I could manage. After putting the cab driver on the phone with the hotel (it's just easier when you have no idea) and him recovering from some shock or other on the phone, we left the ultimate bus station.
And basically went on a big u turn circle which had the net effect of putting us on the other side of the street.
In retrospect, I probably should have noticed that the ultimate bus station happened to be adjacent to the very large Guangzhou Main Rail Station. Had I noticed that, I might possibly have combined it with the key piece of information that the hostel I had chosen was in the "Train Station Area" portion of my travel guide, and while we're on this hypothetical venture, have then looked at the handy little Guangzhou map included in the chapter clearly indicating that the hostel in question was basically on the other side of the street from the station.
BUT, things as they were, I put none of this together. And had a terrific time trying to explain this to a taxi driver with an amused look on his face in Cantonese, while again wrestling with the correct version of "Thank you" to append to the verbal butchery.
I did, however, manage to pass out fairly abruptly after a brief attempt to rally and see the city which turned more into a brief recon of a few of the surrounding blocks.
Today passed with quite a lot less whiffing. I picked a spot pretty much at random on the subway near what I roughly guessed as a built up part of the city. After a couple of hours of that, I jumped back on the metro to Huangsha and made my way over to Shamian Island, a former enclave of the Dutch, English, and just about all of the old seafaring powers that made their way over to this side of th world at one point or another.
I had been to the bar part of Shamian on my last (and only other) trip to Guangzhou, but Fong and I had had a "get dinner" mentality on our mind at the time which isn't very conducive to wandering about aimlessly. I walked the small island back and forth, stopping about a quarter of the way in when I saw the familiar (and odd) shape of the Chinese hackey sack for sale at one of the local vendor's stands.
"How much," I inquired, cutting through the preliminaries and drawing the young girl minding the shop out of her Gameboy reverie.
"This? This 10 Yuan."
"10? Ok," as I gently placed the sack back down.
"Okok, you make me price." Her rhythm only slightly marred by her lack of experience clearly owing to age. But I wasn't really in the mood to bite, so she had an easy time. I went honest.
"I like 5 better."
"Ok sir, 5 - hey!! You wait for him buy it!"
Right then, much to the dismay of our young negotiator prodigy, her sister bolted around the front of the stand, and proceeded to hack another sack, passing it over to me.
I wasn't one to take that sort of invitation lightly, so I immediately shot a foot out to keep the hack from touching its mortal enemy, the ground. Alas, I could only briefly keep the hack away from its dire quest.
"Here," as I placed my bag on a nearby chair, "Let's do it again."
And off we went; I didn't want the negotiator savant to spoil the fun, so I quickly dropped a 5 on the table before serving the hack.
The girl turned out to be pretty good, but stuck almost solely to her right inside, rather than moving things around. The Chinese hack is a bit strange as I mentioned before because it is basically a stack of plastic 1/8 inch high discs, forming all told about a half inch of "sack". Protruding from the top of this is a plume of feathers, usually four, extending about 5 inches further up. This adds some aerodynamic/distance qualities to the game, but damned if I didn't have the thing land sideways on my foot a slew of times before I started learning to wait for the thing to flip all the way over (and subsequently adjust my kicking style to try to further that agenda).
We went at it for the better part of an hour, much to the amusement of the passing Chinese and foreigners in the area. More than once I heard one of the older people exclaim at the sight of seeing Gweilo hack, I guess it's not the sort of thing that happens around here every day. Or maybe it was my style they were picking at. It better not be the beard...
Finally she begged off, but I knew I wasn't done. I dropped a quick goodbye (skipping over the whole dodgy Cantonese thank-you business) and continued on around the island.
After about 3/4ths of the way all the way around, I was pulled from my idle observer daze by the familiar clack-clack sound of a nearby hack being put to good use. I homed in on the target and found a guy probably 5 years older than me hacking by himself.
His style was entirely different from the girl's. Where I had noted some themes of distinctly non-western origin in the brief back and forth with the girl, there was a fully developed aspect of calm and deliberate passiveness exuding from this guy's presence. And this guy was not limited to the right inside alone. He passed the 4 sides frequently, though clearly favored the toes. But there was a quiet acceptance of the ancient duel between the hackey sack and the ground, and this guy's mission was clearly to assuage the pain of the contest with the barest minimum of effort.
It was the Zen of Hacking.
I weakly tried to get his attention once or twice but failed to pierce the veil of concentration hanging about this man. After what seemed an eternity, he actually dropped the hack, and I took that minute to move in.
When I caught his eye, I pointed at my hack which I had produced off camera to dodge the language barrier. I then looked inquiringly at him and pointed, following by a back and forth gesture between us. He nodded, and I stuffed the inferior hack of mine away and put down my bag efficiently. And then we began.
It went on for hours. I was a sweaty mess by the time I finally begged off, but he smiled gladly and seemed to hint that I should come back some time. We had kicked, we had stalled, we had jestered, we had slapped the late afternoon away, and I had felt completely sated at least within my body's limits for the moment, parting ways in the end. I caught just the barest inkling into this man's world of hacking zen, the calm persistence and accuracy, while still keeping some of the flare for the fun. Movements just so, not over exaggerated. No force misused, nor tiredness hurried on. Just simple hacking.
Word.
Friday, March 23, 2007
"Ok, but I keep the Box!!" (aka "China, Ho!")
..as if it's been a long time, I will say hello once more..
Hello! Or as my Mandarin book just told me, "Have you eaten yet today?"
I haven't gotten the hang of saying "hello" in China yet (Mandarin, Cantonese, or otherwise). I still tend to fall back to an american style "hey" (which I know means something else in Cantonese, since there's even a club in Hong Kong called "Hei Hei") which tends to put people off, but I'm still thrown by the two phrases I've picked up:
The latter comment is apparently a holdover from some periods of very long famine in Chinese history, and I've been told has fallen into disuse, so I'm not about to whip it out next time I'm lost and asking a person on the street for directions. While I'm probably going to sooner or later get the hang of the first one, I still just jars me when I think of it in psuedo English. "you good". I don't even really like to ask people "how they're doing" in English, preferring things like "word" or "what's up" as openers, and if they want to tell me, they're perfectly free to. I think it ties into my whole heavy distaste for the phrase "good morning". It's morning people. What the f@#k is good about it?
Thoroughly disgusted with technology (see last post if you can digest it), I began reclaiming my stowed-away sense of adventure after crossing through the Lo Wu border checkpoint into Shenzhen, in the Guangdong province of Southern China. I've been to Shenzhen before (if you haven't heard the stories, buy me a beer sometime and we can kick back for a couple hours somewhere), so in some sense it has some familiarity in that I'm not totally disoriented the second I walk through the checkpoint and get out into the semi-fresh air. My initial skills in street bargaining were honed in the Lo Wu shopping center, a massive 4 or 5 story maze nearly attached to the immigration building, chock full of hole in the wall hawkers peddling their wares (though you get used to the shouts of "DVD! DVD! Nolex? Nice Pen? Sir sir! Massage-ee?" when you do a couple of laps around the place). I wasn't up to it then, having hardly slept the last week or so, so I just made a B-line for the GuoMao Metro stop and checked in and passed out at the MyLittleHut hostel as quickly as I could.
(Amy, the hostel keeper, was happy to see me... but that may have more to do with the fact that business is slow now ;) ).
I dove immediately onto the Chinese style rock hard I-guarantee-if-you-sleep-on-your-side-your-arm-will-be-dead-when-you-wake-up style mattress, and passed the bonk out. Sure enough, I woke up with half my body still asleep, but it helps when you know that it's coming.
I assured Amy I'd be staying one more night and made off to wander a little bit in the city, and sort out the rest of junk that was still lingering from work and needed an internet connection. I needed a day to unwind after the madness that is Hong Kong, and here was the opportunity. The bread place was... well, bready. The hand pulled noodles were... hand-pulled. And a brief chat with hostel mate Maya assured me that people were still trying to source components as strongly as ever in China.
I mucked around taking it slow, and passed out again way too early. I rarely control my sleep, so when it comes, I don't fight it. Could you call me a narcoleptic with my single minded passion to seize it when it's available?
The next day after a groggy start and more dead-side-syndrome, I had the energy, so I made for the Lo Wu shopping center. The Tea Lady, an old friend from previous pilgrimages was still at her stall, and we wrangled for a while in my very broken Cantonese and her not so broken English, as we sampled tea after tea and made notes on language in our pocket notebooks. One girl who happened to be working in a stall close by dropped a few pieces of jewelry when she heard me almost get something right in Cantonese. "GuangDongHua?!" she shouted at the tea lady, obviously shocked to hear a Gweilo trying out their language.
"Keui gong!" (he speaks it)
I had to butt in before it got past me, "Hou siu! Hou siu!" (Only a little!)
From a book I just read called "How to Learn Any Language", Barry Farber, a self-confessed linguaphile points out (bad memory paraphrase) that people are generally very happy if you try to learn their language, as long as they get the sense you're trying to give it a go and not just chopping it out any which way you want. He goes on further to point out that this is more common with less "international" style languages, using French as a prime example - if you try to speak French, well, at one point just about everyone was trying to speak French, so it's not terribly impressive to a Frenchperson, especially if you kill the pronunciation. But you go to work in a niche language (he pulls out serbo-croat as his favorite example), he's ended up with being invited to family dinners of strangers and free cab fares, among some of his other tellings. Ok, so the best I've gotten is maybe an extra bag of tea thrown in for free, but hey, you gotta start somewhere...
(In good faith, Barry also HIGHLY advises against learning Cantonese - he's probably right, when all's said and done, considering when I read his footnote in the appendix on it, he pretty much nailed every one of the reasons I'd given for wanting to learn it in the first place and shown their fallacy. But that's not entirely fair either, he does say any language learning is good, guess I'll have to ask him someday..)
I finally left my favorite teashop and went into the throng of Lo Wu proper. I had been noting that in recent times, my shoes were pretty much worn through to the point that they might just spontaneously fall apart at any point. That's about the point when a kid hawking shoes happened to catch me walking by after he shouted out something in Spanish.
I went a full 3 more paces before what just happened hit me. Yup. It was definitely Spanish. I stopped, paused, and then slowly turned around. The action was deliberate enough to completely throw the kid off his usual ramble and pace.
"Did you just say 'zapatos'," I asked him, rather more directly than I intended. I get direct when I'm shocked, it wasn't really his fault.
"Hey sir, shoes, you want shoes? Yes yes, zapa-toes!"
"Za-pa-tozzzzzzzz" I shot back at him.
"Za-pa-tozz" he correctly sounded out.
"Tu hablas espanol?"
"Heehee. No sir. But a little. But you want shoes, you come here."
I slowly glanced down at the disrepair of my footwear. Ok, the kid had spirit, and damned if I know why a Cantonese guy is speaking Spanish, but ok, let's see where this goes.
"You know, I could use a new pair of shoes. These ones are a bit shit."
"Huh sir?"
"DeNG!"
"Oh... hehe.. Guangdonghua... Okok, you come in."
So I went in. We fenced. We bargained. We cajoled. We "my friend!"ed and slapped each other on the back. The kid's sister's were looking on in fine form, watching the dance of lowu canto bargaining take shape. But alas, I think he was the master.
"How many you buy?"
"I think too much money. I can't buy."
"But SIR! Fit is perfect! Good quality, look look!"
"No no, can't afford. I think too much."
"No too much. Very good price."
"I think hou GWAI!"
"Haha.. No, not very expensive. You see. I make you special price. Here, this what I usually charge," as he pounded away at the traditional 4-function large button calculator used in bargaining stalls across Hong Kong and Shenzhen (maybe more!), and tapped in an absurd figure.
I took a look. And just laughed. But if we're acting, I'm going to go for the oscar. Complimenting the chuckle was the perfect nonverbal accompaniment of delicately putting vastly too expensive shoes back into the box from which they came.
"Yup. Hou gwai. Thank you for the fun though."
"SIR! No, I say, I already give you discount."
"I no care discount," (the Chinglish helps in these affairs), "you discount whole thing? No matter! Too much money to discount!"
"Okokokok... this price your price," as he tapped out about 10% off, "but you pay this, you in Heunggong," and slapped the original price plus about 30% on the calculator.
"It's ok. I must be leaving," as I stood up from the chair.
"Okokokok.. You make price. Give me good price, we do deal. I can make more barato."
"BARATO!? Esto no es barato, esto es loco! Tu no sabes la significa de la palabra 'barato'!" (ok, so my spanish is usually a little weak, but I think I got across that he didn't know what the hell 'cheap' meant)
"Hahaha.. no speako spanish. You give me barato price, we make deal."
and on.
and on.
If you're going to have a go at this, you really ought to not be in any particular rush when you're about it.
We riposted. We en garded. We wrangled away and amused the spectators and shopkeeps alike. "Whatever else", they all would later say, "it was worth the price of admission".
Finally, we hit a deal.
"Ok, this is my price," I declared, "I know you can get no trouble with your boss for that."
"Sir! You get me in trouble."
"Ok, but I have to go. Thank you for the fun."
"Ok sir, but I keep the box!"
I laughed. Fair enough, bargaining is about giving, and that box woulda been the first thing that I chucked in the garbage back at the hostel when I put the shoes in my pack away. "Ok, you get the box."
Next thing you know, I was the proud owner of shoes I probably still paid too much for, even considering I got them for 30.76% the price he originally offered them. Ah well, I needed shoes, and my American friends, you'll probably kill me anyway if you found out how far I was nitpicking him down on the damn things.
I took a last stop over at the hostel to say goodbye to Amy, pick up my stuff, and head back to the bus terminal. After a couple of missteps and some very amused bus attendants (after my various attempts to say "which bus go to guangzhou?" I found it, and was sitting on the bus, heading for Guangzhou.
Hello! Or as my Mandarin book just told me, "Have you eaten yet today?"
I haven't gotten the hang of saying "hello" in China yet (Mandarin, Cantonese, or otherwise). I still tend to fall back to an american style "hey" (which I know means something else in Cantonese, since there's even a club in Hong Kong called "Hei Hei") which tends to put people off, but I'm still thrown by the two phrases I've picked up:
- Ni Hao (Cantonese: Neigh Ho): Literally "You good", not asked as a question. You need to tack on a "ma" at the end in either language to imply you actually want an answer.
- (don't have the pinyin on me): Have you eaten yet today?
The latter comment is apparently a holdover from some periods of very long famine in Chinese history, and I've been told has fallen into disuse, so I'm not about to whip it out next time I'm lost and asking a person on the street for directions. While I'm probably going to sooner or later get the hang of the first one, I still just jars me when I think of it in psuedo English. "you good". I don't even really like to ask people "how they're doing" in English, preferring things like "word" or "what's up" as openers, and if they want to tell me, they're perfectly free to. I think it ties into my whole heavy distaste for the phrase "good morning". It's morning people. What the f@#k is good about it?
Thoroughly disgusted with technology (see last post if you can digest it), I began reclaiming my stowed-away sense of adventure after crossing through the Lo Wu border checkpoint into Shenzhen, in the Guangdong province of Southern China. I've been to Shenzhen before (if you haven't heard the stories, buy me a beer sometime and we can kick back for a couple hours somewhere), so in some sense it has some familiarity in that I'm not totally disoriented the second I walk through the checkpoint and get out into the semi-fresh air. My initial skills in street bargaining were honed in the Lo Wu shopping center, a massive 4 or 5 story maze nearly attached to the immigration building, chock full of hole in the wall hawkers peddling their wares (though you get used to the shouts of "DVD! DVD! Nolex? Nice Pen? Sir sir! Massage-ee?" when you do a couple of laps around the place). I wasn't up to it then, having hardly slept the last week or so, so I just made a B-line for the GuoMao Metro stop and checked in and passed out at the MyLittleHut hostel as quickly as I could.
(Amy, the hostel keeper, was happy to see me... but that may have more to do with the fact that business is slow now ;) ).
I dove immediately onto the Chinese style rock hard I-guarantee-if-you-sleep-on-your-side-your-arm-will-be-dead-when-you-wake-up style mattress, and passed the bonk out. Sure enough, I woke up with half my body still asleep, but it helps when you know that it's coming.
I assured Amy I'd be staying one more night and made off to wander a little bit in the city, and sort out the rest of junk that was still lingering from work and needed an internet connection. I needed a day to unwind after the madness that is Hong Kong, and here was the opportunity. The bread place was... well, bready. The hand pulled noodles were... hand-pulled. And a brief chat with hostel mate Maya assured me that people were still trying to source components as strongly as ever in China.
I mucked around taking it slow, and passed out again way too early. I rarely control my sleep, so when it comes, I don't fight it. Could you call me a narcoleptic with my single minded passion to seize it when it's available?
The next day after a groggy start and more dead-side-syndrome, I had the energy, so I made for the Lo Wu shopping center. The Tea Lady, an old friend from previous pilgrimages was still at her stall, and we wrangled for a while in my very broken Cantonese and her not so broken English, as we sampled tea after tea and made notes on language in our pocket notebooks. One girl who happened to be working in a stall close by dropped a few pieces of jewelry when she heard me almost get something right in Cantonese. "GuangDongHua?!" she shouted at the tea lady, obviously shocked to hear a Gweilo trying out their language.
"Keui gong!" (he speaks it)
I had to butt in before it got past me, "Hou siu! Hou siu!" (Only a little!)
From a book I just read called "How to Learn Any Language", Barry Farber, a self-confessed linguaphile points out (bad memory paraphrase) that people are generally very happy if you try to learn their language, as long as they get the sense you're trying to give it a go and not just chopping it out any which way you want. He goes on further to point out that this is more common with less "international" style languages, using French as a prime example - if you try to speak French, well, at one point just about everyone was trying to speak French, so it's not terribly impressive to a Frenchperson, especially if you kill the pronunciation. But you go to work in a niche language (he pulls out serbo-croat as his favorite example), he's ended up with being invited to family dinners of strangers and free cab fares, among some of his other tellings. Ok, so the best I've gotten is maybe an extra bag of tea thrown in for free, but hey, you gotta start somewhere...
(In good faith, Barry also HIGHLY advises against learning Cantonese - he's probably right, when all's said and done, considering when I read his footnote in the appendix on it, he pretty much nailed every one of the reasons I'd given for wanting to learn it in the first place and shown their fallacy. But that's not entirely fair either, he does say any language learning is good, guess I'll have to ask him someday..)
I finally left my favorite teashop and went into the throng of Lo Wu proper. I had been noting that in recent times, my shoes were pretty much worn through to the point that they might just spontaneously fall apart at any point. That's about the point when a kid hawking shoes happened to catch me walking by after he shouted out something in Spanish.
I went a full 3 more paces before what just happened hit me. Yup. It was definitely Spanish. I stopped, paused, and then slowly turned around. The action was deliberate enough to completely throw the kid off his usual ramble and pace.
"Did you just say 'zapatos'," I asked him, rather more directly than I intended. I get direct when I'm shocked, it wasn't really his fault.
"Hey sir, shoes, you want shoes? Yes yes, zapa-toes!"
"Za-pa-tozzzzzzzz" I shot back at him.
"Za-pa-tozz" he correctly sounded out.
"Tu hablas espanol?"
"Heehee. No sir. But a little. But you want shoes, you come here."
I slowly glanced down at the disrepair of my footwear. Ok, the kid had spirit, and damned if I know why a Cantonese guy is speaking Spanish, but ok, let's see where this goes.
"You know, I could use a new pair of shoes. These ones are a bit shit."
"Huh sir?"
"DeNG!"
"Oh... hehe.. Guangdonghua... Okok, you come in."
So I went in. We fenced. We bargained. We cajoled. We "my friend!"ed and slapped each other on the back. The kid's sister's were looking on in fine form, watching the dance of lowu canto bargaining take shape. But alas, I think he was the master.
"How many you buy?"
"I think too much money. I can't buy."
"But SIR! Fit is perfect! Good quality, look look!"
"No no, can't afford. I think too much."
"No too much. Very good price."
"I think hou GWAI!"
"Haha.. No, not very expensive. You see. I make you special price. Here, this what I usually charge," as he pounded away at the traditional 4-function large button calculator used in bargaining stalls across Hong Kong and Shenzhen (maybe more!), and tapped in an absurd figure.
I took a look. And just laughed. But if we're acting, I'm going to go for the oscar. Complimenting the chuckle was the perfect nonverbal accompaniment of delicately putting vastly too expensive shoes back into the box from which they came.
"Yup. Hou gwai. Thank you for the fun though."
"SIR! No, I say, I already give you discount."
"I no care discount," (the Chinglish helps in these affairs), "you discount whole thing? No matter! Too much money to discount!"
"Okokokok... this price your price," as he tapped out about 10% off, "but you pay this, you in Heunggong," and slapped the original price plus about 30% on the calculator.
"It's ok. I must be leaving," as I stood up from the chair.
"Okokokok.. You make price. Give me good price, we do deal. I can make more barato."
"BARATO!? Esto no es barato, esto es loco! Tu no sabes la significa de la palabra 'barato'!" (ok, so my spanish is usually a little weak, but I think I got across that he didn't know what the hell 'cheap' meant)
"Hahaha.. no speako spanish. You give me barato price, we make deal."
and on.
and on.
If you're going to have a go at this, you really ought to not be in any particular rush when you're about it.
We riposted. We en garded. We wrangled away and amused the spectators and shopkeeps alike. "Whatever else", they all would later say, "it was worth the price of admission".
Finally, we hit a deal.
"Ok, this is my price," I declared, "I know you can get no trouble with your boss for that."
"Sir! You get me in trouble."
"Ok, but I have to go. Thank you for the fun."
"Ok sir, but I keep the box!"
I laughed. Fair enough, bargaining is about giving, and that box woulda been the first thing that I chucked in the garbage back at the hostel when I put the shoes in my pack away. "Ok, you get the box."
Next thing you know, I was the proud owner of shoes I probably still paid too much for, even considering I got them for 30.76% the price he originally offered them. Ah well, I needed shoes, and my American friends, you'll probably kill me anyway if you found out how far I was nitpicking him down on the damn things.
I took a last stop over at the hostel to say goodbye to Amy, pick up my stuff, and head back to the bus terminal. After a couple of missteps and some very amused bus attendants (after my various attempts to say "which bus go to guangzhou?" I found it, and was sitting on the bus, heading for Guangzhou.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
yeah yeah, I knew it would happen, but I left Hong Kong
Alright ye few listeners.
That's right, like the subject says, I damn well knew it would happen. It did happen. As soon as I tried to pin down a date that I would leave for China (a la the last post), I was promising the fates that the day that such action, should it ever actually happen, would absolutely unequivocally not happen on the date that I mentioned.
(but don't worry, I'm not going to leave you hanging forever in suspense... if you read the last page of the mystery novel right now, you'd find out that I am in writing this to you from in China, so bear with me)
I'm going to split this into a couple of posts, so you can skip ahead if you wish. This one is going to be about the bit from getting out of HK, the other(s - we'll see how motivated I am later) will be about going into the Middle Kingdom. So go read what you want!
I suppose I should start with a disclaimer - this Sony microlaptop is a bad ass piece of hardware engineering. But you know that if I'm going to start with a disclaimer like that, it wasn't all peaches and cream since I got it.
When the thing finally arrive (FedEx left it sitting in Norwalk all that weekend after the 8th, so it didn't go on a plane until the 12th, and showed up at my friend's pad on the 15th), my boss decided to fly in to town. What with what's going on in the VoIP world on his agenda, suffice it to say I ended up crunching an average French workweek for hours into Thursday and Friday. I wasn't exactly jazzed to come home and go deal with another large IT problem, so I did the next best thing I could think of - I buried my head in about as much alcohol as I could find.
After the dreadful alcohol shortage of 2007 in Southern China ended (oddly coinciding with when I put the bottle(s) back down in the no-longer-so-wee-hours-of-Saturday-morning), I wasted basically the whole weekend mucking around with the thing. It's really a terribly boring drama, so the summary is that when you get the machine, you have 4 gigs of space left out of the 32 that you were sold. I wasn't about to go try spending a couple months wandering about the world and bringing 4 gigs with me, so I spent all my time (re)learning about win32 debugging and figuring out where the stupid recovery disc creation utility (since every manufacturer of laptops is too cheap to send you actual CDs/DVDs of install media anymore, came about the time of the revolution in non-metallic twist-ties holding the cables together) kept failing so I could reinstall the thing and have more than a pittance of space available.
This dragged on. And on. And keep going. Don't pass go. Then..
..finally. If you buy the same damn machine and get stuck with the same damn problem, send me a comment / email and I'll be happy to walk you through how to do it. Perhaps I should document that somewhere else, since anyone who's not happy with 4 gigs of space on a fresh machine and can't get out of the catch-22 sony traps you in is probably going to have the same problem sooner or later. (hint tech guys - they write out the DVDs from the hidden recovery partition TWICE - first as a folder collection in %USERHOME%\AppData\Roaming\temp (4.4 gigs) and then AGAIN as an iso in the same directory.. I ultimately got around it using an NTFS junction to an external HD, when I stopped looking in the wrong places for the problem)
bah. I want to send Sony a bill for the part of my life they wasted. Ah well, suppose this is why tech people have jobs in the first place - any sane person wouldn't put up with this sort of shit, or just wait out the tech to get better (a 60 gig HD and this is all academic).
I broke with tradition by not formatting the thing linux, but I did bring with me a whole bag of tricks. KNOPPIX boot CD and USB bootable key, an SSH client that works over AJAX / SSL with no install and one time passwords, the NCK from Sony to unlock the SIM card EDGE / GPRS / GSM cellmodem, and enough memory cards to shuffle a 3 player hand of hold-em with.
Enough geek. Probably for the rest of the trip (assuming all this crap doesn't get lost / stolen / broken / etc) you won't really be hearing about it again.. It's finally the idea I had for telecommuting from Tibet on just about any hardware / internet situation; for now on, it's a deus ex machina, just assume I can be yelled at by my boss from just about anywhere (or however you guys define the Employment Situation).
Despite the foregoing, the rest of my premonition was pretty much accurate. I did stay the weekend. I did rock the Wanch with some music that they just plain weren't prepared. My friend Damian (check him out over at nudz.org, awesome domain name dude) just got back into town from NY, so I stuck around for a reunion and some ranting about wandering. Killed the computer problems Tuesday afternoon and then went for the border Tuesday night.
and then, at last, the wandering began.
...I jumped on the Kowloon-Canton Railway for Lo Wu, HK.
...I "alighted" from the left (as the interesting English announcement told me to get the hell off the train)
...I bolted for the sleek air-conditioned automated turnstile precision of the Hong Kong emigration point.
...I calmly walked across the 100 yards of bridge into mainland China.
...I scribbled furiously through the non-working pens and waited in the endless lines of the Chinese immigration checkpoint (the A/C was temporarily off for reasons I couldn't make out)
...and I entered the middle kingdom.
That's right, like the subject says, I damn well knew it would happen. It did happen. As soon as I tried to pin down a date that I would leave for China (a la the last post), I was promising the fates that the day that such action, should it ever actually happen, would absolutely unequivocally not happen on the date that I mentioned.
(but don't worry, I'm not going to leave you hanging forever in suspense... if you read the last page of the mystery novel right now, you'd find out that I am in writing this to you from in China, so bear with me)
I'm going to split this into a couple of posts, so you can skip ahead if you wish. This one is going to be about the bit from getting out of HK, the other(s - we'll see how motivated I am later) will be about going into the Middle Kingdom. So go read what you want!
I suppose I should start with a disclaimer - this Sony microlaptop is a bad ass piece of hardware engineering. But you know that if I'm going to start with a disclaimer like that, it wasn't all peaches and cream since I got it.
When the thing finally arrive (FedEx left it sitting in Norwalk all that weekend after the 8th, so it didn't go on a plane until the 12th, and showed up at my friend's pad on the 15th), my boss decided to fly in to town. What with what's going on in the VoIP world on his agenda, suffice it to say I ended up crunching an average French workweek for hours into Thursday and Friday. I wasn't exactly jazzed to come home and go deal with another large IT problem, so I did the next best thing I could think of - I buried my head in about as much alcohol as I could find.
After the dreadful alcohol shortage of 2007 in Southern China ended (oddly coinciding with when I put the bottle(s) back down in the no-longer-so-wee-hours-of-Saturday-morning), I wasted basically the whole weekend mucking around with the thing. It's really a terribly boring drama, so the summary is that when you get the machine, you have 4 gigs of space left out of the 32 that you were sold. I wasn't about to go try spending a couple months wandering about the world and bringing 4 gigs with me, so I spent all my time (re)learning about win32 debugging and figuring out where the stupid recovery disc creation utility (since every manufacturer of laptops is too cheap to send you actual CDs/DVDs of install media anymore, came about the time of the revolution in non-metallic twist-ties holding the cables together) kept failing so I could reinstall the thing and have more than a pittance of space available.
This dragged on. And on. And keep going. Don't pass go. Then..
..finally. If you buy the same damn machine and get stuck with the same damn problem, send me a comment / email and I'll be happy to walk you through how to do it. Perhaps I should document that somewhere else, since anyone who's not happy with 4 gigs of space on a fresh machine and can't get out of the catch-22 sony traps you in is probably going to have the same problem sooner or later. (hint tech guys - they write out the DVDs from the hidden recovery partition TWICE - first as a folder collection in %USERHOME%\AppData\Roaming\temp (4.4 gigs) and then AGAIN as an iso in the same directory.. I ultimately got around it using an NTFS junction to an external HD, when I stopped looking in the wrong places for the problem)
bah. I want to send Sony a bill for the part of my life they wasted. Ah well, suppose this is why tech people have jobs in the first place - any sane person wouldn't put up with this sort of shit, or just wait out the tech to get better (a 60 gig HD and this is all academic).
I broke with tradition by not formatting the thing linux, but I did bring with me a whole bag of tricks. KNOPPIX boot CD and USB bootable key, an SSH client that works over AJAX / SSL with no install and one time passwords, the NCK from Sony to unlock the SIM card EDGE / GPRS / GSM cellmodem, and enough memory cards to shuffle a 3 player hand of hold-em with.
Enough geek. Probably for the rest of the trip (assuming all this crap doesn't get lost / stolen / broken / etc) you won't really be hearing about it again.. It's finally the idea I had for telecommuting from Tibet on just about any hardware / internet situation; for now on, it's a deus ex machina, just assume I can be yelled at by my boss from just about anywhere (or however you guys define the Employment Situation).
Despite the foregoing, the rest of my premonition was pretty much accurate. I did stay the weekend. I did rock the Wanch with some music that they just plain weren't prepared. My friend Damian (check him out over at nudz.org, awesome domain name dude) just got back into town from NY, so I stuck around for a reunion and some ranting about wandering. Killed the computer problems Tuesday afternoon and then went for the border Tuesday night.
and then, at last, the wandering began.
...I jumped on the Kowloon-Canton Railway for Lo Wu, HK.
...I "alighted" from the left (as the interesting English announcement told me to get the hell off the train)
...I bolted for the sleek air-conditioned automated turnstile precision of the Hong Kong emigration point.
...I calmly walked across the 100 yards of bridge into mainland China.
...I scribbled furiously through the non-working pens and waited in the endless lines of the Chinese immigration checkpoint (the A/C was temporarily off for reasons I couldn't make out)
...and I entered the middle kingdom.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
super duper ultimate travel computer!
Hells yeah!
The super duper ultimate travel computer** just arrived in the US! For whatever reason, Silly Sony refuses to admit the existence of this machine in Hong Kong, despite me going to a couple Sony stores and even pointing it out on the Sony website much to the bewilderment of the store managers. I don't know why - it's probably because of the stupid bundled Cingular locked plan they try to force on you with the thing.. I mean, don't they know TMobile's plan is like infinitely better for GPRS data? EDGE is just about no where in the US anyway, so what's the point?
er.. sorry, the inner geek showed a little there. I'll firmly lock him back up.
Anyway, aside from assorted odds and ends for reasons ("it's jam night tonight? Aww, I can't leave Hong Kong during Jam night..."), I've been waiting on the deep incursion into China for this computer to show up on my doorstep. Younger sister has agreed to forward the now-arrived box to HK and Fedex (who seems to lie a lot less than everyone else about shipping) says I can probably get this thing Monday, so I'm sitting tight on venturing out. I definitely don't want to go carrying my HP zv6008cl portable computer and boat anchor in my pack, so I went with something in the UltraMobilePC (UMPC) line. The Sony is a little over a pound, and with big pocket pants(tm), it can fit in your pocket.
So if that thing shows up say Monday, and I manage to sort out the Linux and whatnot by Weds, I'll either leave Weds night or end up caught in the open mic night/friday drinking binge/weekend silliness roundup and then head in next Monday.
We'll see. But the technical element of plan wander looks to be satiated..
** (For reference, the super duper ultimate travel computer is probably going to be quickly out super dupered, but for the moment it's a Sony VGN-UX390N. It's a bit overpriced at the moment, but that's probably because they know they've got the only serious contender on the market. Well, at least until OQO gets its act together..)
The super duper ultimate travel computer** just arrived in the US! For whatever reason, Silly Sony refuses to admit the existence of this machine in Hong Kong, despite me going to a couple Sony stores and even pointing it out on the Sony website much to the bewilderment of the store managers. I don't know why - it's probably because of the stupid bundled Cingular locked plan they try to force on you with the thing.. I mean, don't they know TMobile's plan is like infinitely better for GPRS data? EDGE is just about no where in the US anyway, so what's the point?
er.. sorry, the inner geek showed a little there. I'll firmly lock him back up.
Anyway, aside from assorted odds and ends for reasons ("it's jam night tonight? Aww, I can't leave Hong Kong during Jam night..."), I've been waiting on the deep incursion into China for this computer to show up on my doorstep. Younger sister has agreed to forward the now-arrived box to HK and Fedex (who seems to lie a lot less than everyone else about shipping) says I can probably get this thing Monday, so I'm sitting tight on venturing out. I definitely don't want to go carrying my HP zv6008cl portable computer and boat anchor in my pack, so I went with something in the UltraMobilePC (UMPC) line. The Sony is a little over a pound, and with big pocket pants(tm), it can fit in your pocket.
So if that thing shows up say Monday, and I manage to sort out the Linux and whatnot by Weds, I'll either leave Weds night or end up caught in the open mic night/friday drinking binge/weekend silliness roundup and then head in next Monday.
We'll see. But the technical element of plan wander looks to be satiated..
** (For reference, the super duper ultimate travel computer is probably going to be quickly out super dupered, but for the moment it's a Sony VGN-UX390N. It's a bit overpriced at the moment, but that's probably because they know they've got the only serious contender on the market. Well, at least until OQO gets its act together..)
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
A Plan Wander, the Creation
Hello readers! All.. er.. well, we'll get around to finding a few of you in a little while. Maybe I'll get lucky and you won't cost too much either.
I created this blog to handle the non theory of whiffing related day to day of wandering, starting off with a current foray to the Far East (Hong Kong at the time of this writing, though I'm planning on heading North pretty soon). Maybe some day I'll get around to integrating it with the regular Plan Wander site, but really, one step at a time.
I'm taking a bit of a break from the road for a moment here in Hong Kong to get ready for the trip into China and beyond; I realized during my short hop over into Shenzhen last week that I wasn't really ready to try maintaining a job requiring a computer and not travel with one, and my bulky laptop was just not the kind of thing that I wanted to be lugging around from hostel to hostel (nor trying to fit into my bag much less be able to pick the thing up). Picked up a few ebooks and one or two movies for good measure (PDA's and Cell phones make for wonderful reading devices after the lights go out without all the weight of lugging the books around), and a couple sets of extra guitar strings.. The last time I tried asking for a string in China, I was told in fairly broken English that I would receive a fine if I tried playing in the station. And that was about the clearest understanding I got on the topic of finding a music store...
I created this blog to handle the non theory of whiffing related day to day of wandering, starting off with a current foray to the Far East (Hong Kong at the time of this writing, though I'm planning on heading North pretty soon). Maybe some day I'll get around to integrating it with the regular Plan Wander site, but really, one step at a time.
I'm taking a bit of a break from the road for a moment here in Hong Kong to get ready for the trip into China and beyond; I realized during my short hop over into Shenzhen last week that I wasn't really ready to try maintaining a job requiring a computer and not travel with one, and my bulky laptop was just not the kind of thing that I wanted to be lugging around from hostel to hostel (nor trying to fit into my bag much less be able to pick the thing up). Picked up a few ebooks and one or two movies for good measure (PDA's and Cell phones make for wonderful reading devices after the lights go out without all the weight of lugging the books around), and a couple sets of extra guitar strings.. The last time I tried asking for a string in China, I was told in fairly broken English that I would receive a fine if I tried playing in the station. And that was about the clearest understanding I got on the topic of finding a music store...
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