see? caught red-handed.

Stepping into our first chinese temple of many, I realize that they’ve all become meccas for vendors selling cheap souvenirs and toys.    These little stands are everywhere, extending up the temple steps all the way to the very platform where the few non-tourists are burning incense to their gods.  i’m promising myself i’ll find a site that hasn’t been quite as engulfed in the cheesy tourism that we’ve seen so far.  That’s not to say that the places we’ve been to are undeserving of their crowds—I’d just kill to be able to get a view of an old temple without twenty other clamoring tourists taking their photos with the object in front of me.

My uncle  shared with me a very funny saying…I’ll try my best to remember it:

zhou de lu shang jiu shui jiao,

ting zai lu bian han niaoniao.

lai dao jingdian jiu paizhao,

kan wan shenmo ye bu zhidao.

which translates to something that isn’t nearly as clever because it doesn’t rhyme.

on the road they only sleep,

and when they stop the want to pee.

reaching what they want to see, they only take pictures.

in the end, they still know nothing.

this doesn’t make me feel any better though…i don’t know how to read chinese, so it’s difficult to grasp the full meaning of the sites we visit, especially when so much of chinese culture is written within its calligraphy. and oh..you might not have noticed but i like to take pictures…

says an item on the menu downstairs in the lobby.  in Guangzhou, we drink soup like soft drinks.  hot day? have a bowl of steaming hot soup.  if you’re skeptical, come try it…i actually think it works (but only if it’s got the right chinese vegetables and roots in it)

more beijing: the forbidden city (is huge and FILLED, ABSOLUTELY FILLED with tour groups)

kewl:

This makes me happy.

I wish I thought to paint that.

are you sure you didn’t paint that rich?  perhaps you did unconsciously?

samnesia:

now that’s blazin

but i still don’t get what “gnitirw” is.

kewl:

Clearly the solution is to add anthopomorphic things…!

yay!

yayyy fap.   it’s been mad tiring to plan for, but it’s a tangible connection back to my more-normal-than-it-is-now life, and that I like.

speaking of richarr and this shirt design:

Richard: and i asked about sizies

okay  i’d like a small:)

me: oh to show your pecs?  =)

Richard: medium’s for like

i dunno

it’s so baggy on me

usually

me: haha im just kidding

Richard: small’s usually small

TOO

i’m a small and a half

or a third

they dont have that size though  !!!!

me: haha

Richard: w’eva girls like

show off ther things

other

with their tight shirts

———

hrmph.

i want a break. just one night back on b1 with everyone there, and add some human twister, please?

china’s been really amazingly fun during the last month (possibly because I’ve been with my family and vacationing) but every once in a while i snap back to my suspicious pre-summer self.

• I’m glaring hatefully at the two slick-looking police walking in the opposite direction on the boardwalk before I’ve even found a good reason to dislike them. I don’t know that they’re corrupt, I don’t know if they’re affiliated. Hell I don’t even know what it means anymore for a person to be either corrupt or affiliated or both…those ideas have gotten so muddled in my mind over the course of my stay.  But why in the world are they dressed in their unnaturally crisp suits and shiny badges, looking so entitled (AND MEAN!!!) marching down a freaking boardwalk among a sea of beachgoers in the middle of the day? Ehhh, at any rate I glared right at them and they glared back.  For a moment, I thought, am I in trouble now?  Did my freedom-nourished American mind break loose from the Chinese wariness I’ve since evolved? Did I forget that I look Chinese?  I didn’t even have my passport with me. Gotta be more careful.
• At a thoroughly drunken lunch party I was lectured by a woman I had just met about the biggest difference between China and most Western countries.  In the West, societies are built on the rule of law.  China on the other hand is built on human relationships. In China, it is of utmost importance to make people who matter to you happy.  At the dinner table, that means endless rounds of flattering toasts.  In the working world, that means promoting your son or your landlord’s son in order to secure future favors.  At the same time that the latter may seem plainly corrupt to the Western eye, many cases also deserve some empathy.  1) It seems that the average person in China would never get very far in life without caving in to this culture I have been speaking of.  So it’s hard to blame them.  2) In a giant step one might just say that Chinese culture is just really social.  Maybe it’s just because there are that many more people here—you need to be “social” beyond the western understanding of the word.
• Holy crap the bank guards have giant guns.  I would have taken a picture had I not been scared shitless.

i tried today but failed. wah.

so happy to have freedom from the chinese web scourers, but this celly internet is soooo slow.  and i’m so behind!

eggplantparmaygiano:

mahfablife:

found out first hand that tumblr is blocked in China! so no more updates from connie. twitter is also blocked, quelle dommage, as is livejournal. No but seriously, it was done so people couldn’t express subversive opinions about the recent 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square Massacre, and by subversive, I mean mention it. All of this censorship makes me wish I had something more meaningful to say, since I’m with the right to say it.

yeah, I remember that I was freaking out 3 years ago because I couldn’t update my livejournal (don’t judge) while in China. all blogs are blocked in China, BUT you can apparently get around it by mit vpn’ing in. see convo with alice below:

Alice: like i could get on earlier today

ooo. it’s virtual private network

it’s like.. remote connecting..

so what happens is you connect to mit.. and mit connects you to the internet

me: huh?

but how do you connect to miT?

Alice: so like.. china blocks ip addresses… which is like.. your internet location.. for instance.. it would block youtube’s ip if i request the page

so if connect to mit directly.. all china sees is mit

but really mit is sending me youtube information

does that make sense?

and you can download vpn software from the is&t website

MIT IS SO COOL! i love that we have our own private network. unfortunately this post will not help connie though, since she would have to read my blog to figure out how to read my blog…

A sweet bar that infuses its rum with all kinds of fruits and spices.  I had ginger rum in Sprite.  Mmmmmmmmmm.  on par with sangria on my list.

This one is in a little hutong (alley) called Sanlitun that’s full of western- and Chinese-style bars.  It’s a pretty rockin place at night.  We met up at the cheapest and thus dubbed “10 kuai bar” with some of Jamie’s friends from the last time he came to China, and a cool Chinese-Korean guy named Mario.

At the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences in Beijing, apparently one of the best environmental institutes in the country.  This place was crazy—I only got to see one of the many research buildings, but in just one building they had SIX floors full of in vitro and in vivo testing, multiple mass spectrometers, and all kinds of cool experiments going on.  Studying how various human-made gases react in the atmosphere, how to more efficiently purify water, bio-remediation, effects of pollutants on the growth of plants and animals, etc.

This was a particularly awesome room full of fish tanks.  These tanks each have water with different concentrations of certain pollutants running through them.  One study in this lab was on the intergenerational male:female ratio of these fish when they are exposed to the pollutants.  Apparently by the third generation, there were no more males in the population (I don’t remember what chemical they were testing.)