China Triposeyo: Dali

Before we get into Dali, two random things.

1. Jay-Z plus Radiohead, remixed, makes Jaydiohead. These are some really, really cool mash-ups. (Mash-ups are songs which take the music of one song and the vocal tracks of another, and edit them together. Like this: Nirvana vs. Beach Boys: Smells Like Sloop John B. or this one, which has bad words and stuff in it, but which is also an incredibly inventive and catchy mash: Beatles vs. Nine Inch Nails: Come "Closer" Together [warning: "Closer" was probably Nine Inch Nails' most controversial song])

So here is Jaydiohead. It's awesome.

2. This was a song I first found on Amanda Takes Off, a repatriated Korea blogger.

The Elephant Song by Eric Herman
Too cute.

And now, China Triposeyo, part Four: Dali

Dali was the prettiest, and most relaxing part of the trip. We started off with a pretty massive move, starting at noon one day, and finally finishing our journey in the early evening the day after. We had intended to go to Kunming and stay there for a few days, but after a very unfavorable first impression of the city, involving hawkers, hawkers, toats, more hawkers, and more toats, we decided to turn right around and head back to the bus station, which was next to the train station where we'd arrived. We had to choose between Lijiang and Dali for our destination, and chose Dali on blind chance, because it was closer, so we would arrive there at a more reasonable time to find a guest house.

Dali was a pretty town.

Things like this ran right through the middle of town.

And even along the sides of the streets, there were channels with water flowing through them.
It gave the city a really peaceful, clean atmosphere, having water running through it at every turn.

(here's the bad part, so we can get back to the great stuff:)
The one drawback of Dali was that none of the buildings were heated, and the weather was. . . April at best. Plus, because of the sides of the building where the sun shone, my guest house room was, I swear, the coldest place in the entire darn town, and there was nothing I could do about it. Dressing in the morning, and leaving the guest house, was the worst part of the day, and I kept overdressing for the cold, on the logic of, "If it's THIS cold in here, it'll be even colder outside" (the way things work in Canada or Korea) only to step outside and be WARMER in the great outdoors than I was in my flipping guest house room.

Good thing I shelled out for a top-notch sleeping bag, or I'd've gotten sick or something.

Gripe two: a few really gross bathrooms. This one took the cake, probably for the whole trip, which was saying something. I was saying, "I'm glad I'm a guy, and I don't have to touch anything."And a pissing trough.


Other than those two gripes, Dali was amazing.

Dali was the capital of an ancient kingdom, the last kingdom to join the Chinese empire, and as such, it maintains more of its unique character than some of the provinces that have been part of China for, you know, three thousand years. Yunnan province in China is both the most biodiverse, and the most ethnically diverse province in China, and honestly, that was one of the things that blew my mind about this trip: see, from the outside, the way China presents itself to the world, and especially the way The World Outside China presents China to The World Outside China is way different than China looks from the inside. Saying "China is . . . " or "Chinese are . . . " is just as ignorant as saying "Westerners are . . . " or "The West is. . . " -- I mean, Danes are different from French are different from Californians are different from Saskatonians are different from Greeks, so to say "The west is . . ." or "Westerners never. . . " is dangerously ignorant. It's the same for China: the difference between China's leadership and PR/Propaganda department, and the average men and women on the street is huge, and China just kept amazing me with all the diversity in that one (granted, huge) country.

Here are some Bai people (the main ethnic group in the town of Dali), dressed in their traditional garb.
These ones were in town, dressed that way to try and get me to come in their shop and buy stuff...but an hour's walk outside town, we saw people wearing their traditional tribal clothing while working in the fields. Not to separate tourists from their money, but because that's what we wear in these parts, silly!

I didn't take pictures of them without asking. I felt like it would have been disrespectful. These folks didn't mind, though.

One way Dali's changed since tourist dollars started rolling in... the layout of the shop was the same as the farmer's produce shops and such, but the product on the shelves. . .
Dali is a walled city, with beautiful gates at the north, south, east, and west, and pagodas and old-style gates here and there throughout the old city.

The town is sandwiched between a mountain and a lake (an embarrassment of beauty, really). I walked to the lake with Matt and Heyjin and took this panorama, including ladies washing vegetables in the lake.


It's also a very photogenic town, countryside, and wall. One morning, I woke up extra early, just to take pictures.

It was one of the best ideas I had all trip.

In this clip, you can hear kids doing some kind of drill -- I'm pretty sure it was a schoolbuilding -- and you can also see the way the Bai people all decorated all their buildings, with paintings, white walls, and grey roofs and trim.



I saw this old guy doing Tai-chi by the wall in the cool morning.


And these people doing sword, and then fan dance/exercises not far away.




That same day, I rented a bike and biked down to Erhai Lake, and met God. We talked for a while, in way that was more sincere and real than I can remember. I can't explain how or why, but in dreams, in moments of heightened awareness or awestruck beauty, I can tell you without a doubt that God, and my late mother were accompanying me on this trip. One night I even had a dream where I was showing mom the trip photo album, and explaining it all to her. Out by the lake in Dali, once things finally got quiet enough, I was startled to discover God sitting down beside me, going, "Look at those birds over the lake. Beautiful, ain't they? What? You didn't notice I was here until just now? Then pay more attention, silly."

Pay more attention.



I took these pictures and video panoramas, and I biked around with my hands off the handlebars, spread out as wide as I could, as if I could give the whole beautiful world a hug. I also biked a ton and wiped myself out...only to meet an awesome Chinese university graduate who was out with his friends; we had a really neat conversation about travel, about China, about life plans, and life in general.

And I met a Belgian lady who told me about living in China as a French teacher: she related an unfortunate experience that some teachers in small-town Korea might be able to understand, when she joined a fitness club, and gave out her phone number to the club, only to have every member of the club phone her and ask if they could meet her to practice their English, over the next week.

I was thinking about several uncomfortable conversations I've had in Korea, where some of my Korean friends bring up the hot topic of the day, not because they really want to hear a foreigner's view on an issue like Dokdo, but because they want to hear the Korean position coming out of a foreigner's mouth, as if that validates it. I said something like, "And your Chinese friends probably all want you to trash CNN or BBC, don't they?"

She answered, "No. Actually not. In my experience, Chinese almost never talk politics with foreigners. It's considered rude and inappropriate."

And for a few seconds, I was ready to walk away from my job in Korea, and try to convince Girlfriendoseyo to move with me to China.
(also because of pictures like this)

Anyway, we met an awesome guy named Lee, with the most comfortable bar/lounge/hangout I've seen in ages. He was an awesome, cool, hippy-ish guy with a pony tail, a really easy voice, and a manner that took you straight on, exactly as you were, and found something to like about it. He and his place were great, and we ended up there just about every evening of our time in Dali.

At night, and all day long, in some places around the town, were projectors playing movies for anybody to sit down and watch.
One outdoor theater was at the side of this gate, in a little culture pavillion.

Sunsets were nice, too.


We took a little horseback trek up the side of one of the mountains, and looked around there for a while.
The Bai food was also delicious, and in town there was a German bakery where the heavy cakes tasted like Christmas at home (good gracious I needed that).

We ate breakfast every day at a place called "Kaiyi's Kitchen" which I highly recommend if you go there,

and the Korean restaurant was pretty good, too, but the best food I had there (and it was a tough call) is between the Bai Feast I had on Sunday night at Marley's Cafe, where they offer the Bai feast only once a week, on Sunday nights, and stuff you silly with light, tasty, perfectly prepared dishes full of fresh vegetables and gentle flavours, well-balanced between spice, sauce, and main ingredients, or the pizza at a place called "Stella's Pizzeria" which you MUST find, if you go there. Because of my milk allergy, they just prepared the pizza with no cheese, and dear readers, any time you walk into a restaurant and you see one of these:
skip what you'd planned to order before you entered the restaurant, and get a pizza. Period.

Le box.

Le pizza.
And dear readers, I can't even tell you how great this pizza was. The crust was crisp and hot but not too crisp, and not too chewy, the toppings were perfectly balanced between the tart olives, the deep oregano in the sauce, the sharp onions, just enough hot pepper kick, and the substantial, but not overpowering crust laying a deep grounding for all the other colours.

Go to Dali. Eat a Stella's pizza. I had it on my last morning, and skipped out on breakfast with Matt and Heyjin just so I could try it, and it was another brilliant decision.

We'd planned to move from Dali on to Lijiang during that week, but we dropped Lijiang from the itinerary, because we just loved Dali so darn much. Great decision. Really great. It was the relaxation I needed.

Yay Dali.
More Dali pictures by OTHER people here. You can see the rich blues of the traditional clothes in these pictures.

Whew! Next stop: Beijing, and then, we'll finish off Triposeyo 2008-09 with Hanoi. We're more than halfway there now, folks.

Kim Yu-na, Yu-na Kim: Plato's Perfect Skate: 김연아 Rocks!

Proud uncle side-note: my sister-in-law caught my nephew's first steps on video. Yeh.


Now in other "Videos of awesome things" news: Kim Yu-na.
As you know, somewhere in every philosopher's mind is a little cave carved out by a cat named Plato, where the most perfect, flawless form of everything in the universe exists in its unsullied state.

Somewhere in there, there's a little, perfect TV playing this Figure Skating women's short program:

Watch it once: just watch it. Even the TV announcers realize they're watching something flippin' awesome, and shut up, about halfway through the program.

Kim Yu-na (the Korean way, with the family name first) or Yu-na Kim (the western way, with the family name last), is a teen-aged figure skating phenomenon out of Seoul. She's only eighteen years old now, and she's been kicking the crap out of the ladies' singles category for a few years already. She's telegenic and cute: she appears in TV commercials here in Korea and sells, better than most of Korea's other "Best in the world/Korea at X" stars, for example Park Ji-sung (family name Park), the Soccer (that's Football to the rest of the world) star who is holding his own impressively on Manchester United, but who's so ugly, and un-charismatic in front of the camera, that they can only make commercials like this: keep the camera at a distance, and show him kicking stuff, because that's the only time he looks impressive. (Notice at the end of the ad, when the close-up is as short as they can make it and still have him be recongnizable, as if the camera's afraid to get close to his face)



(Mind you, as a soccer player who DOESN'T have a face for advertising, he's certainly not alone.)

But Yu-na Kim is cute, holds the camera, and is carrying herself quite well for a young star under the microscope that is Korean celebrity-worship. She even sings pretty well.



Drink your milk.


For Nike Women


However, the thing she does best is skate. She traveled to Toronto a few years ago, and she and her mother camped out on Brian Orser's front door until he agreed to train her, they got themselves a really good choreographer, and little Yu-na's natural athleticism blossomed. The other best skater in the world is a Japanese lady named Mao Asada, who is the same age as Yu-na, and they've been vying with each other for world number one ranking, and despite the bitter, WWE-type rivalry some nationalist Korean netizens would probably love them to have, all reports say they're friends.

Yu-na Kim has won other world championships and major international competitions before - read more on her wikipedia page; I'm too lazy to copy it out here -- and this is a short program she's used before in competition, but this time, she comes in at full health, in Canada (she really likes Canada, girlfriendoseyo told me), in Vancouver -- on the rink where the Olympic skates will be next winter == and her first triple is absolutely perfect; from there, she gets more confidence, and lands her other two jumps perfectly as well, and ultimately sets a world record for the highest score ever in a women's short program (72.24). Her technical score is off the charts, because she got bonus points for each perfect jump, Girlfriendoseyo explained to me. Watch the video again, and let that sink in, and pay special attention to the look on her face at 3.29 in the video, just as she completes her skate: it's the pure bliss of someone who knows she just did something really, really special.



There it is.
And in a nice change, even the Korean announcers' heads do not explode when her world record is announced (unlike certain races during last year's Summer games, when you might have thought the Korean announcers were on speed. Follow this link, skip to 5.00 in, and watch the excitement build until the end of the race, or skip to 7.00 to just hear the announcers orgasm over their guy winning... yah At least some people realize it sounds a bit silly).

Way to go, Yuna! I haven't watched figure skating regularly since my sisters used to make me sit through it when I was a kid, back in the days when Elvis Stojko was turning the men's skating world on its ear by doing routines with songs that had beats, instead of all snoozers and string quartets, but even a rube like myself knows when something amazing just happened. The other reason I'm happy about Yuna's success is because she's an awesome role-model for all the young Korean girls who don't want to be popstars.

(Speaking of popstars, listen for the WonderGirls' "Nobody" playing in the background as the arena waits for her scores.)

Congrats, lady.

Quick Shots: Andong and a funny text message

The Dali Post is in the works, but it's gonna be long and full of photos.

If you'd like to hang out with me and some blog pals, I'm planning a trip to Andong to eat the best food in Korea: Andong JjimDalk. See here for more gushing about Andong jjimdalk's perfect-ness.

Get in touch with me if you'd like to come; if you live in Seoul, and are willing to meet me on Saturday morning, I'll even reserve train tickets for you (you'll be paying me back though. Got it?).

If enough people want to come, we'll see what we can do about lodging, too.

Next:

I was feeling down a few days ago: end-of-vacation blues, plus grey skies, plus not accomplishing much this week, plus cracking my coffee pot, rendering my coffee-maker with its specially fitted and difficult to replace pot useless, does that for a fella.

So I sent a text message to a few pals, saying, "Hey. I feel blue. Tell me something to cheer me up." I got a pretty good response, but the best one was from my pal Evan, who is proving himself over and over again:

"An anagram for your name is Nude Hobo War."

And he's right. How he thought running my name through an anagram generator would cheer me up, I don't know, but that mental picture still makes me laugh.

So here: now you can find anagrams for your name, too. I don't know if they have a "sort results from funniest to least funny" option, but you can give it a shot.

Hope you get a few as funny as mine.


(ps: the only anagram that came up for Roboseyo was "Rosy oboe," but "Doucheburns" turned up "Crude hub, son" and "Sun bred. Ouch.")

Golden Klogs

the Golden Klog Final Results are up at The Hub Of Sparkle. It was great taking part in the discussions, and now, it's finished. Roboseyo won "Best Personal/Diary Blog" and my collaboration with Gord Sellar, The Korean and others tied for "Best Post or Series," but Eat Your Kimchi beat me out for "Happiest K-Blogger".

Now that the creator of the survey can no longer skew results with his own opinions, a few last thoughts:

I'm sad that The Grand Narrative and ROK Drop didn't take home any awards: those are two of my favorite blogs, and I'm sad they were shut out. Gord Sellar is another favorite, but it's less surprising he got shut out, because less than half of his posts are about Korea; the others are about his mounting success as a Science Fiction writer.

I think that Brian in Jeollanam-do winning "Angriest Blogger" does a disservice to the excellent coverage he's given to life, festivals, travel, and other such business in Jeollanam-do. He would have been my vote for most misunderstood K-blogger.

While it's hard to argue with Korea Beat, Brian might have also been my vote for "Most Current and Timely Blog," especially for his Coreana coverage early in the year, and his tireless work promoting the causes of Bill Kapoun, Mike White, and Nerine Viljoen.

Favorite New Blogs I found out about through this:
Eat Your Kimchi
White Man in Korea,
Korean Class 101
Korean Food Blog
Big White Barbie Does Busan

The conversations on the comment boards were also really interesting, especially James Turnbull's treatise on how to get your blog noticed.

Finally, I would have been happy if some of the multiple-award winners had only gotten one award, in order to make room for some of the other worthy blogs: Ask A Korean!, Korea Beat, Brian in Jeollanam-do, FatMan Seoul, Roboseyo, and Mike Hurt/The Metropolitician, and Eat Your Kimchi all got two awards (or more) and while I'm not saying any of them didn't deserve the awards they won, I'll also say I would have been happy to see even more blogs win a Golden Klog Award.

OK. Enough Meta-Blogging. Back to normal life again...

China Triposeyo: Yangshuo

Good news out of North Korea: newly released photos show that Kim Jong-il is alive and well.

And up to some healthy pasttimes, just to show off his excellent condition.
In China, I took this picture:
Plugs like this were in all kinds of guest houses around South China: they're weird-looking, but they'll take any, but ANY plug, whatever shape, whatever country. Howzat?

A horrible, "He's white. He'll do" model selling some kind of product. He was everywhere: billboards, sides of buses, and everthing, tantalizing us with his eyebrow like that.

Every year, at Christmas or New Years, my mom had a tradition of going from one family member to the other, asking us what made us thankful that year. Now, Christmas Eve was a travel day, but on Christmas, we sat in Shire Hobbiton coffee shop, and I asked Matt and Heyjin what they were thankful about, then they turned the camera on me.

Here's a shortened version of the video I sent to my family, of some of the things I was thankful for in 2008: 2008 ROCKED!


We took a boat trip to a town called Yangshuo, which was full of people, including a really annoying guy trying to sell his photos. He stood right beside us and barked into the ship microphone for ten minutes, and then came back for ANOTHER round. Matt cut the annoyance by daring me to punch him...somewhere.

Mwahahaha!

Yangshuo was a pretty nice little riverfront village, and all it took was a bike rental to go out and see stuff like this:


Or climb a mountain and see this:
Guarded by this sign:


Or take a cave tour and see this:
and this:and this:

and this: (wacky)
I don't know how, but people were endlessly clever in finding new places or ways to sell things.

This was nice if you wanted to, you know, buy stuff, all day long, but if you DIDN'T want people to follow you around, saying, "Hello? Hello? Postcard. Buy Postcard. Hello? Hello?" it was a bit annoying after a while.

Anyway, that was a jewelry shop in a cave under the ground. Blew my mind.

They must have had trouble getting foot traffic before the cave tour opened. These vacationers (and many others) had silly plastic red flower-wreaths around their heads, which just goes to show, people on vacation will buy anything.
There were lots of shops like this in Yangshuo, too.
This one made me smile when I saw this:
Buddha and Chairman Mao, right next to each other.

We played around with putting motion into a long-exposure photo in a restaurant one evening.

This one's my favorite.
Meanwhile, if you ever wanted an Osama Bin Laden or an Adolph Hitler t-shirt, this was the artist for you.
He wasn't even the only one.

Yangshuo's main stretch was full of shopping, a bit noisy, but kind of pretty if you like shiny things.I do. Hong Kong was fun at night, too.

You could buy things like hand-made Santa Buddhas (that threw me off)
Yangshuo was probably the peak of the silliness in our trip: the initial "Hey! We're travelling!" excitement hadn't quite warn out (would soon), and the second wind wouldn't wind up until Beijing, but we got these two videos taken one goofy night.



And what china trip would be complete without two Canadians singing the "Hockey Night In Canada" theme with the word "Beer"? None, I say. None.

heh heh.

The two biggest downers of the Yangshuo were...
1. The second day we rented bikes, we were TIRED: we'd biked about 18km. the first day, and then did another 14 or so the next day, including a break to climb a mountain. We needed to stop riding, so we pulled over at a little corner in the road and, after getting a bit tired of being razzed for a bamboo boat ride, a postcard purchase, a scarf or a dumb, wooden toy everywhere we went, an old lady materialized out of nowhere, and robo-hawker hassled us to buy something, ruining yet another lovely lookout point. That took us from tired to completely beat -- hawkers are worse than crowds, because crowds are in your space, but hawkers are in your face.

2. The first day in Yangshuo, we wandered into the local produce market, which was really dark, dank, and fresh.
We saw this (warning: dead dog):We got another picture that was worse... if you want to be convinced not to eat dog meat any more, click here.

And I've decided I'm not eating dogs anymore. Nope. Not cool anymore. I did it once, but, uh, no. New Year's Eve was in Yangshuo, and we had a silly time that night in a bar run by a Canadian guy who was pretty cool.

Yangshuo was nice. We met a few funny and/or cool people there, had trouble staying warm (my guest house room's heater died -- but the super-warm sleeping bag saved the day).

Better yet, this coffee that we discovered on a menu in Shenzen, called "Blue Mountain," which I had heard of on one of those "foods to eat before you die" lists -- it turns out this coffee was in vogue a few years ago, it's a bit pricey, but it's a deep, lovely coffee that has a really complex, yet beautifully balanced flavor, right from beginning to end.

This was in Shenzen...But the star of the Yangshuo trip was not the brick oven-baked pizza (unfortunately), but the apple tarts at a place called "Drifters' Bar" -- you should go there if you visit Yangshuo. You had to wait 25 or 30 minutes for it to be ready, but once it came out, it was sweet and rich, with just enough crumble and just enough thickness, the apples were roasted and lovely with cinnamon, and I spent a good long time writing in my travel diary, waiting for it to come out. Happy, easy days on the China trip, dear readers.

That's it for now; next travelogue, Dali.

Also...

Go vote for my blog!

Today is the last day of Golden Klog voting.

Click Here to take Part One
Click Here to take Part Two

An open letter to Blogger about an ongoing glitch.

Hey there blogger.

This letter is short.

There is no way to write you directly at Blogger, so I'm going to complain about it here. I have mentioned it on the help columns, and it seems to be an ongoing problem for numerous blogs, but it has not been repaired in two months.

At the bottom of blogger pages which are linked in my sidebar, dozens of links to my site have been appearing, from pages which do not directly link to those sites.

At the bottom of my page, links to dozens of other blogger blogs have been appearing, which have ME on their sidebar, but which do not directly link to my page.

This has not been repaired in two stinking months! The only choices I have are to 1. systematically, painstakingly go through each one of two months worth of posts and delete all the junk links, which is a huge time suck, 2. clear my sidebar link and hope that fixes it, but it also means my blog becomes much less useful for people interested in reading blogs. 3. leave it, and have cluttered and useless "links" bars or 4. switch to a different blog server which fixes glitches when they appear.

Now sure, with bogger and these free blog hosts, I'm getting just what I pay for, but if I'm going to keep blogging anyway, and if blogger doesn't seem to be fixing this, and if there's not even any way to contact them, the balance is starting to shift toward switching hosts.

If this is happening to your blog, post about it. If there is no way to directly contact Blogger about this glitch, maybe enough people posting about it will remind them, or alert them.

Take it easy, folks.

A Few Notes, a Cool Site, and Guangxi Province

1. A Geek In Korea got a really nice gift from a reader of his blog. Awesome, mate. What a cool idea, for a blogger's readers to show they like him by sending nice gifts! (hint hint)


2. A blog buddy sent me a super-de-duper cool link which, while it would be off topic on his blog, fits my blog just fine, unfocused goof that I am (he described my blog as quirky and random, not unfocused and goofy, because he's nice). This page gives you an updated world map showing sunlight and darkness across the globe, and even cooler, it shows cloud-cover as you go. Thanks, man. Keep'em coming!

3. If you're an internet nerd, and you know what rick-rolling is, this mash-up will confuse you: was it a rick-roll, or a cool mash-up? If you're not an internet nerd, and you don't know what rick-rolling is, then you'll be happy to know I was lucky enough to catch the funniest one-liner of our entire China trip on video. Click here to see the video. (And if you want to get meta...)

4. Guangxi Province, China.

Guilin Highlights:

Mountains like this. Everywhere.

Two famous lakes in Guilain; this one had these awesome pagodas. They were even prettier at night, but those pictures didn't quite turn out.Sunset, same park as that first photo.

This waterfall was in that same park, too where I took the first landscape picture. That was a seriously good walkabout day.
Shire Hobbiton Coffee: Matt is a huge Lord of the Rings fan, so finding the best coffee in Guilain, in a place named after Frodo Baggins' home, was just too perfect.
Interior was nice, too: full of LOTR themed painting...the nice, "Mist over the Fields of Pellinor" kind, not the geeky "Orc With Armor vs. Elven Warrior Prince" kind.

Walking around downtown Guilain, we saw this cool statue of a totally badass painter: that's totally a paintbrush. We took this picture...And then later, when we came back through Guilain to catch our train to Kunming, we saw another group of tourists posing the exact same shot. I guess it's the Guilain equivalent to doing the cheesy hands-out Titanic pose on the prow of a boat.

And we ate the hottest Szechuan Hot Pot you'll ever find. The broth was about two parts broth and one part peppercorns and hot peppers. Ridiculous. Hotter than squid fried rice, hotter than jjuggumi, hotter than bbul dalk (fire chicken) in Korea. Silly.

Matt got a jet of boiling hot, hot oil right down his throat, and I ate a spoonful of peppercorns and spice oil, just for kicks. It was Christmas day.



This cute kid was at that same restaurant when we went there again, on our last day in Guilain.


One day, we took a bus down to a place called Longji. (Some nice, professional photos here and here.) The terraced rice fields there went right to the top of the mountain, and that day was mysterious and misty: one minute, fog would be hiding everything in view, and all we could see was a nice trail; then a wind would kick up, the fog would clear out, and we'd have scenes like these.

This picture was also taken up there.

It was just lovely, kind of tantalizing, the way you never knew when the mist would clear and stop your heart with beauty.

This was one of the best meals of our whole trip. We hiked up to a village in the mountain -- a five minute walk from the peak -- and the tour guide led us to this little restaurant...
The lady in the pink apron was burning bamboo chutes in a fire, and above the fire...They had rice and chicken stuffed inside the baboo chute, roasting over flames. She'd take the chutes and dip them in water regularly, to prevent the chutes from burning up.

When we ordered food, they came out like this...
and it was, pretty much, the best chicken I've had in my life. And that's saying something. Stewed in its own juices, with bits of berries and ginger packed inside to deepen the flavor, melt-in-your-mouth tender, all bathed in that bright, lightness that comes in bamboo cooking.

Warning: one sh-poop word in this one. (My sister follows this blog with my nephew and nieces, so I gotta give the heads up. Hi, Beckles. Love ya! Hi Matthias, Bethany and Carrie-ann!)


So that was Guilain and Longji. Yangshuo, Dali, Beijing and Vietnam coming soon.

China Triposeyo: Hong Kong and silly stuff

Now, I know that when bloggers post about their trips, a lot of readers just scroll through the pictures, so I'll try to keep the text minimal.

Hong Kong was overwhelming. So much, so high: we only spend four days there, and that was enough, because after living in Seoul, city travel just isn't what a bunch of burnt out teachers are looking for.

So we spend four days before moving on, three in Hong Kong and one quick day-trip to Macau.

The buildings were high. So high: it was like taking two Kangnams and stacking them on top of each other. City busses were two stories, not for local color like in some cities, but just because there was no space, and they had to fit the people somewhere.
These apartment buildings were run-of-the-mill for Hong Kong. In Seoul, they'd be top two percent in height. They had buildings like these all the way up a mountainside.

Christmas decorations.
We also took a bus up to the highest point on the island (Hong Kong's an island) and got some really nice photos.


The harbour was just unreal. Busiest in the world (for number of containers) - according to this page.


The trip to Macau involved some great Portugese food, a beer called Sagres, a fortress, and a casino.

We also climbed a hill to see a fortress, and in a playground, a few high-school students were blowing bubbles off the equipment. It was lovely.

Two highlights of the Hong Kong leg of the trip were the light show across the harbor, and the Sunday morning, special pink dolphin tour. You can learn more about the unique, pink dolphins here, and especially how to help protect their dwindling numbers. They're amazing animals, and meeting them was a wonderful experience, and even the tour guide said they really put on a show for us: we go really close, and saw two unique pods of them, along with two others later in the tour: a really rare turnout. You can watch some video here.


After that, we'd had enough of the city, and needed to get out of town.

HK was overwhelming, and expensive, too, though we had some of the best food of our entire trip during our time there.

Macanese food on the first night, wonderful duck at the night market, and good old British pub food at The Pickled Pelican, as well as the discovery of Tetley's beer, a really nice, drinkable beer that is exactly the same colour as Tetley's tea.


In Macau, we saw the remains of a cathedral, climbed the fortress hill, lost money at a casino, and sang silly versions of Christmas songs (we were there on December the 23rd). A lot of silliness took place during the trip... here's video of some of it... I'm just going to throw it on here without context, and explain parts of it as I go.

Warning: there is some potty mouth in the video. If hearing Roboseyo cuss, or seeing a video with cussing posted by Roboseyo will diminish your opinion of me...don't watch it.

A very important Seoul Podcast

Well... if you haven't already, go down to the Golden Klogs Survey and vote for me:
Part one

Click Here to take survey

Part two

Click Here to take survey


I'm nominated in a few categories, and without my readers' support, I'll never manage to squeeze out my ballot-box-stuffing, dirty, low-down rivals.


However:
This silly survey is unimportant. So, so, so, so unimportant, trivial, trite, and asinine, next to this:

SeoulPodcast has done an amazing podcast concerning unexplained deaths in the expat community. Three ladies, survivors of expats who died under mysterious circumstances in Korea, discuss the loss of their loved ones, and the difficulties they went through trying to get the full stories of their losses, and the unwillingness of numerous parties to help them get help, answers, justice and, most of all, closure.

As expats living in Korea, we should be mindful of the fact tragedy can strike any of us, at any time, and we have the responsibility both to be prepared for the day our nightmares come true, and also to support these people and their searches for truth.

Go listen to the podcast. Get some tissue ready.

You can visit the homepage Stephannie White, the mother of Mike White, one of the expats who died needlessly, maintains, here, at http://www.mightiemike.com/ and she has a facebook page called a mother is looking for answers about here son. Think about supporting her, by comments, by money transfer (for lawyers fees), by writing an article about it for your local newspaper, magazine, whatever, and by contacting your embassy, your local political representative, or the Korean politician who represents the area where you live.

Go listen.