I just had lunch at the place that has porch swings hanging from the ceiling at the tables.  They had just played the Kenny G version of my heart will go on from titanic on the house speakers when I heard something that gave me the horrors even worse still.  Someone had taken Kenny G’s elevator version of the song ‘what a wonderful world’ and glued in the voice of the great great Luis Armstrong singing the words on top.  So the lord of teased out hair and phoney easy listening fake jazz was playing a nice duet with Satchmo himself, as though to say his AM radio elevator saxophone could be any match for the devastatingly swinging brassy attack of the Louis Armstrongs trumpet solo.  The very idea made me want to cry.  The layers of insult went too deep.  The best part was the two parts were slightly off beat from each other creating an almost call and response.  As if Louis Armstrong would have ever been caught dead calling or responding to a total lame dick like Kenny G.  I didn’t even try to explain this to my Chinese friend Alice.  The very sacralidge of this would be lost in translation like most things I try to express these days. 

Alice and I were busy a talking about the news at my school, very drama filled week around here.  The head master of our school, (a man who has taken me out for hot pot and got me drunk on chinese wine) got shit canned and replaced just yesterday.  He is currently meeting with the new head master, a woman by the way, to shift power.  Apperantly it got out that he is completly corrupt. In order for a man to be accused of coruption in China I can only guess that he must have worked very hard at it, standing head and shoulders above the coruption of every other office of import. The man had to have been dirty as hell.

The story I heard (from everyone at the school who speaks English and is not afraid of me, not very many people) was that our school was in financial dire straights.  The headmaster had sold space in the front of the building to small shops which sell stuff like pencils and pens and paste and jim clips and such to school kids.  The small shops had paid the school for the space and the school had somehow forgotten to pay the Chinese government the taxes or maybe just straight kick back or bribe or all of the above.  What ever the reason the Chinese government fined the hell out of our school, hence the financial dire straights.

A couple of months ago when I came home from my vacation (more blogs soon I suppose) I was broke and counting on my salery as well as the refund for the airplane ticket I paid for by selling my car (the old buick Amy Jackson sold to me) to Rosemary Parks mom.  All this money had been promised to me for the week of my return.  So I guess you can all understand that I was frusterated when I had gotten no money to speak off two weeks later.  I was finding myself in China as broke as I had been in America living off the same Raymen noodles, only now they came with red hot crab and egg flavor and plastic chop sticks and a picture of a grown Chinese man screaming on the package.  May started insisting on taking me out to lunch everyday and sending me with the leftovers because she knew I was in a bad way. Once she took me out with her husband and all his work friends during the lunch break from their job, I can’t remember what it was they do or where exactly they work, I guess it wasn’t exciting.

Any situation involving more than, say two adult males at a table means that they have to break out the Chinese wine. This is a clear liquid thunder water which they take in shot glasses and goes down about as smooth as swallowing a glass full of cheap gin or vodka or paint. It burns and it burns bad.
So you sit and eat, letting your mind wander as they all speak Chinese. I usually pass the time by trying to decide what dish is good and what dish makes me ill and what dish is so scary looking that I won’t even pretend to eat, most big meals have a healthy smattering of all of the above, and I do give everything at least a try. Sometimes the wierdest looking thing on the table is the best and the thing that looks great may have been boiled in horrific Chinese yucky sauce or something. There is a certain spicey flavor that I first encountered as part of the hot pot fiasco my first night here (see blog tittled day four W.) that initially made me gag but which I now look for greedily.

The meal with Mays husband and work buddies was mutton on large cow spine bones. They give you a plastic glove to put on and you pick up this section of spinal column and gnaw on the mutton around the bone, trying to get the meat out from between the vertibae.  It was so good, you wouldn’t think so by looking, I certainly had reservations at first but damn if it wasn’t tasty.
So you sit and you eat and you listen to everyone else speak chinese and every five minutes or less one of the men stands up raising a shot glass. “gambay” seems to mean cheers or whatever they mean to say before chugging Chinese thunder wine. Everyone tries not to make the ‘holy shit my esophagus is melting’ face, although many are betrayed by the sudden hurrendus pain. And then you go right on eating. 

I was once at a wedding reception for two people I didn’t even know with Alice, and they had the table stand up and recruited me to do the honerary ceremonial shot drinking for the whole table.  I was chosen because I tend to stick out of a crowd for some reason.  Each table had a representative delegate for the drinking and they brought a platter with a shot which I did, they said some words, then came another shot which I did, more words then a third shot, which I did, then I went back to my table and all the men stood and greeted me with yet another shot, which I did, this time with every man at my table.  That diner lasted a couple of hours and I was sitting there not talking to anyone drunker than Cooter Brown, as they say. 

Toward the end of the meal a really pretty english teacher from another school sat next to me.  I remember I talked to her for a long time, I gave her my number.  If she did ever call me I was either out or it was the wrong number period when May kept insisting that my mother and Carson couldn’t work a phone (see blog the really real phone number of one William H Sanders W.) of coarse chances are that she didn’t call because when she met me I was crazy drunk at a wedding.  Everyone else was too, but they all had people to talk to.  I had all of my drunk focus on this poor girl next to me, although I am sure at the time I considered myself “charming”.

If she called me the next day, a saturday I was busy being stuck at the Yellow river with the Hainan family.  They had called me and wanted to take me to the Yellow river, they asked Xiao Yin too, but at the last minute he skillfully ducked out.  We went fishing in the river, which involved renting a boat piloted by two men with long poles and a few boxes of submersable bombs, the same size as the ones I set off in Yunnan on New Years.  These were coated in plastic I guess to stay water proof and came in a box depicting a hump back whale jumping out of the water nose up like a dolphin surrounded by explosions.  One of the kids would light the fuse, drop that puppy in and a low thud would erupt and I could see the muck from the bottom float to the top and small ripples went outward.  This was no doubt superb for the fragile underwater ecosystem, I reasoned, and lit of a couple myself.  They were so powerful.  We didn’t get any fish though, which is the nature of the sport I suppose.  Another boat had a man a woman a baby and a generator.  From the generator came a hot electric wire that went along a pole to a net which glides through the water. 

“It make the fish feel silly.”  Said Hainan older brother as he tapped his temple.

When it became late in the day and obvious that we weren’t getting any fish, Hainan father paid the man with the electric fish stupifying pole for all his fish, which came to around 3 shopping bags.  We then went ashore and threw the remaining bombs in a shallow pond area in a small cove on the rivers side.  I could actually see a fully formed mushroom cloud of mud form underwater.  Once the muddy water cleared I could see the craters left behind by the blast.  They were deep and wide.  One went off in a very shallow area and a full ten to fifteen seconds later the displaced water rained down from the sky.  They then paid street merchants to cook our fish. 

Here is the secret recipe used by the merchants who sat along the Yellow.

Step 1: Take the fish

Step 2: impale fish with shish kabob stick

Step 3: hold over flame for maybe five munutes

Step 4: eat by holding stick and bitting into fish like predatory animal with fresh kill, and watch out for bones!

I was really full after two but Hainan mother insised I have a third. 

After seven and a half hours of wandering around bored unable to talk to these people and unable to leave they took me home.  When I got home they announced that their kids would come and play in my appartment.  I didn’t like the idea.  When we entered a student Wang Gwang Penn entered my apartment so now I had a room full of people in my own home excluding me from the conversation.  I had enough and I kicked everybody out, I tried not to be rude about it but I really wanted them to go fast.  A few days later I recieved a pen pal letter from Hainan brother.  He wants me to write him back and I keep meaning to but I havn’t yet.  I am spoiled with email.

So if the girl from the wedding tried to call me the next day I was stuck elsewhere.  Maybe she tried to call, maybe she never did, I don’t know.  Either way, her loss.

So another thing about eating in China, you don’t really always get a plate, if you do it is an after thought. You get your own rice bowl, or noddles if you prefer, and you just put food that you arn’t eating on top. Really they don’t do that all that much. It seems like the polite custom is to reach and dig your chopsticks into the serving dish. Everyone does this, reaching over one another like pigs at trough, standing and reaching all the way across the table to get to other dishes. This is why you see lazy susans (the revolving wheel in the middle of the table) at some Chinese resturants. They table is always rotating.
On the occasion in question we were sitting around eating mutton off a spinal column and sucking the marrow out of the middle of the bone (the best part according to May, strange at first but not bad according to me) and drinking shot after shot of clear wine. This was lunch and I had no more classes that day. Mays husband and friends all went back to work after dusting off the better part of two bottles with yours truely. I went home and slept until about 7 or 8 when I woke up with a hang over. May didn’t drink, she is too much of a classy lady.

I seem to have lost my train of thought.

I talked to a Chinese english teacher who wasn’t afraid of me about my not being paid on time and she said that she had not yet been paid for the previous 2 months.  This was very common she explained with a smiling glow and the only thing for it was to remain patient and we will all be paid in time.  So I told May that if I didn’t have my salery by that coming Thursday I would stop teaching and ride my bike to the park and stay all day everyday until I got my money.  This is an example of Chinese vs American buisness negociation tactics.  I had my salery a few days later.  Still no airplane refund money though.

Weeks went by and I taught the kids by getting them to take turns reading newspaper articles.  They only understood sometimes and I wrote words on the board and started miming and acting things out to help them.  I did a class on Martin Luther King and the bus boycott.  I taught them all about april fools day and have been messing with them all week.  This week I have been doing a quiz bowl where I read a selection from their English text book out loud.  I then divide the class room into teams and pit kids from different parts of the room against each other asking questions about what I read.  I allow them to use their books and sometimes I throw in something like ‘what is your favorite color’.  They look at their book frantically as I slowly repeat the question over and over thoughtfully.  Finally one of the kids will wise up and say “my favorite color is green.” and I holler “Yes, green is correct!”  Just now I taught class 8, one of my 3 favorite classes.  Class 8 has a goldfish bowl with 3 fish and I always try to find ways to include them in the class, either calling on the fish to answer a question and praising the fish for their smarts or one time I had the class give the goldfish English names in case they ever go to America.*  The kids think this is the funniest thing ever so I keep doing it.  Today I decided to give the fish their own quiz bowl team.  Each round I would pit 2 students really against each other but pretend the fish were playing too.  One girl stood up and asked if she could represent the goldfish team.  I took a vote in the class and they agreed, I went to pretend to confer seriously with the fish on the matter.  I informed the class that the fish have agreed so the girl was in every round against the whole class for playing for the gold fish.  Gold fish team lost but it was so cute and funny, and the kids were really into trying to read English to win for their team.

Last week I passed out the lyrics to blackbird and hey jude.  They really don’t know about the beatles!  Not only does the Beatles seem to be a good starter kit for welcome to western pop culture the lyrics are easy for them to understand and pronounce and for me to write on a black board and explain.  It would all end in the entire class singing the refrain from hey jude, (nah nah nah nanananah, nanananah, hey jude) slowly, I made them sing a little louder each time until I had myself 60 chinese kids screaming at the top of their lungs and laughing and clapping.  Once or twice their version of blackbird was really really beautiful.  This isn’t my usuall method, I try to maintain some semblance of order, but every few weeks I like to make it fun, at least more fun than usuall I hope.

I started buying lunches for my friend Alice, another english teacher who was now into month three of not being paid.  She is a new teacher just out of college and works for the school instead of for the government (as many teachers here) and is therefor a likely canidate for getting screwed out of her salery. Being a special circumstance, I can easily make all kinds of demands about my money.  Alice, on the other hand, could be fired for complaining to the wrong people.  I had slowly become increasingly furious at the head master and the schools ‘financial difficulties’.  May kept arguing that this was very common in China, people having to go long stretches without pay for the good of the company.  I am from America and I think that sucks. 

From what Alice told me, it seemed that the head master of the school is a rich fat cat and a bourgeois swindler.  While Alice had to apply for her job, many of our collegues paid to get in or were related to the head master or one of the other school leaders.  So in addition to the small fortune this guy is claiming for his salery, the money from the kids, (the schools are all government owned but still cost a tuition) he is also getting a steady and sizable income from wanna be teachers bribing their way into the position.  What really tore me up about it is the head master is rich by Chinese standards and still making piles of money yet the poor first year teachers are having to live off their savings.  Even if the school is having financial difficulties I promise he is finding ways to balance the sheets so he gets his beak plenty wet as the teachers go through money they had carefully put aside just to get by.  I began to forget that he had taken me out for hot pot.

The more people I talked to about this the more I started to see a bigger picture.  The other side of the coin is that yes, the head master is currupt, no doubt.  But I am finding more and more that so are most if not all systems in china.  Alice told me that she came from a very poor family, her mother was a poor factory worker and her father was a very poor docter.  If you want to get rich in China you work in the Government, and if you want to do that you better know someone or be somebody importants nephew.  The whole thing in China from top to bottom is dirty and corruption is a gear in the machine that is far too huge to wash away.  This is the birthplace of Beurocracy and sometimes it seems that the ineffieciantcy is regarded as highly as the great wall or Yao Ming of the Houston rockets.  It is a known and irrefutable fact, and it seems to me without a free press to report on it, or any outside tool to battle it the cancer has spread too deep within the system. 

And sure, there is much corruption in America, but at least when we have someone like (former Atlanta mayer) Bill Campbell he had the good manners to try to hide what he was doing.  There are no concequences here.  The dirt is considered clean and regular and the victims are the people in China who count on basic services to work. This may be why my collegue Alice was so willing to be passive and patient when she didn’t get her money. It was almost as though she was expecting disapointment and I was the only one surprised when I had to wait.
Many Chinese people have told me that amoung the biggest problems in their country, along with the polution and the population is the coruption. It has grown with China, and it seems a factor that hinders and slows this sleeping giants developmental goals.  While any small government in any third world country is bound to suffer from this problem, it is hard to get your mind around a place that has come as far economoically and is as conciously growth minded as China still being mismanaged and misrun on such a massive level.
China is a country in great transition right now, it is transforming into an industrial economy from one of agraculture, you can see it happen. Areas which used to be farm lands being bulldozed to build more factories with smoke stacks that billow more poison into the already unbreathable air.

This was the scenary I was watching from my window on the train last weekend going through Shangdong coming home from Taishan (last weekend me and Xiao Yin climbed a mountain). A man next to me who could speak english told me that because China has only been open to outside influence since 1979 the nation still feels like a new kid in class. Nervous and shy and defensive, afraid and unsure of how to apear to the world.  I get a real sense that this coruption is a source of embarassment for many people here.  It is thought of as a unmovable barrier standing in the way of important modernization of systems which many see as a road to econamic growth as well as increased world wide credability.  Chinas need to be thought of as modern and ’the country of tommarow’ is very much a part of the national phyche.  There is a real division between the need to hold on to tradition for dear life and the desire to strut around in Nike while talking on cell phones and sipping coca cola like the rest of the world. Old isolationist tradition has slowly begun to give way to foriegn thought and trends, but not all the way yet, and I really kind of hope it never does, at least not all the way.
So anyway, Xiao Yin and I went to a mountain last weekend.  Taishan is a four to five hour bus or train ride, we did the bus there and a train back.  The whole time the bus driver was honking his horn, over and over without rest, and it was loud.  My headache grew a little worse with each passing hour.  I started waiting for pauses in the honking and tried to count the seconds it took for him to resume.  His all time record high while I was counting was around 40 seconds.  At one point I noticed we were on a lonely stretch of road with no cars or vehicles in sight.  This did not dampen his spirit, he kept honking like a pro, for absolutly no clear reason and at nothing in particular.   

I recently learned about a Russian Tsar called Fyodor I the bellringer*.  He was thought to be mad because he showed little or no interest in ruling Russia, instead he travelled to monestaries and rang the church bells, inadvertantly forcing peasents to attend endless day long masses.  He really loved bells.  It maybe was something about the sound, or the ringing action, or the fact that they now believe he was born mentally retarded as a result of generations of royal inbreading.  I reasoned that maybe the bus driver had the same thing with car horns instead of church bells.  Maybe not I don’t know.  I can tell you that after five hours of endless nonstop honking I was ready to kill the guy.

Taishan is famously considered one of the five great mountains in China.  This week I ask each class if they know Taishan and they all scream YES in unison, like asking a class of Americans if they had heard of Florida.  It was here that Confusious did much of his teaching, and around 1626 they started cutting steps in the mountain all the way to the top.  This is mind boggeling to think of somebody actually doing, it is so so so huge.  Climbing Taishan was like walking up a five hour stair case which just kept getting steeper and higher and steeper as the steps get smaller and smaller.  Along the way are countless Buddist temples and bridges and water falls.  The last hour and a half is walking up an almost sheer cliff face on these stairs, and it really could be fatal if you fucked up bad enough.  And I must say that at one point in my life I would have quit or taken the cable car or only gone half way or something lame, but I comited to climb the thing and although at the end I hurt bad and was scared of falling and gasped for air in the high altitude, I made the top like a cowboy.  When I got up the next morning my lungs hurt from over use.  This was the hardest work my body has ever endured.  It is wednesday, the first day I can really say that I am capable of walking although stairs are still very very painful from the muscles in my legs being over worked.  I am proud of myself.

We stayed at the freezing cold top at a hotel that charged 40 yuan extra to turn on the heat and got up early the next morning for the suposed famous sun rise that didn’t happen due to the god damn pollution so we walked down.  Sunday morning around 5:30 when we were on our way to check out the famous Taishan sunrise I realized my camera was low on batteries.  I stoped and got some more.  One hour later when I started getting the low battery light again I knew something was rotten in Denmark.  Xiao Yin and I went back to the place I got the batteries to ask for more new ones or to get our money back.  Stop and think how normal a reaction this would be in America.  No dice.  The man started yelling at Han Xiao Yin and me, he refused.  Xiao Yin would not back down, he is a tough mutha shut your mouth when he gets pissed off.  It went back and forth and got worse and worse.  I asked Xiao Yin to translate that there was no need for anyone to get upset, all I wanted was good batteries or my money back.  Seemed reasonable to me.  This either was not translated or fell on deaf ears.  Soon a group of 7 or 8 shop owners had circled us, all taking turns yelling at us and pointing at us all angry like.  Finally he gave Xiao Yin ten yuan, it wasn’t a lot, but for us I suppose it was the principle as well as our wanting to stick up for ourselves and not get pushed around.  As the man gave him the money he mimiced my language by running his finger across his vibrating lips.  As we left they cursed us in Chinese and we cursed them back in english.  I do know a few words that are so severe in Chinese it would have garunteed a fight, but like I said there were 7 or 8 of them and at any rate I wouldn’t fight over as silly a as thing as pride or batteries.  I asked Xiao Yin what they had said to him to get him so hot and upset, he was breathing hard from anger.  They told Xiao Yin he was not real Chinese because he would help a foriegner over a countrymen.  I guess the Chinese thing would be to turn a blind eye as a friend gets cheated just out of national curtesy. 

I think Xiao Yin is a good friend for sticking up for me and a better representative of China than a bunch of crooks and I told him so. I would have his back if an American tried to take advantage of him the same way. 

Two nights ago I had diner with my Canadian friend and Shangqiu neighbor Gina.  She brought along her friends, a married couple of english teachers.  They wanted to met me because they heard I play the drums, he plays the guitar and she a traditional chinese instrament whose name escapes me.  They also love rock n roll, their favorites are Guns n roses, the Eagles, and the Carpenters.  The food was great and he taught me a chinese drinking game which we played with beer.  He only drinks beer, never Chinese wine he told me.  The game is like paper rock scissors but with 2 hands.  You say one, two, then throw fingers as you guess the totall number.  You can throw zero, five or ten, and you can guess zero, five, ten, fifteen, or twenty based on the number of fingers the other guy throws.  So if I say “one, two, FIVE!” and throw five fingers and the other guy throws zero then I win.  But if the other guy throws five too and says ten then he wins.  When one guy wins the other drinks.  We went through a lot of beer.

We arrived at the resturant at 5 and the street outside was packed with people.  Mostly parents trying to get into the school across the street where my new friends work.  I had taken my bike because for some reason it hurts my legs less than walking, and my legs still hurt a lot from Taishan.  So I parked my bike and locked it and went in.  When we came out it was 9 and the street was a ghost town and my bike was gone. 

I sighed loudly.  Me and my bike have a very Roy Rodgers and Trigger thing going, I was reletivly cool though.  I am getting really good at not getting upset about things beyond my control.  Gina noticed a shop front with a metal garage door that slides from the top that wasn’t all the way to the ground, and we could see in.  The place was filled with bikes and she called me over.  This door was literally next to where I had left my bike, I stooped to the ground and sure as thunder, that was my fucking bike.

“That’s my fucking bike!”  I told Gina.  Without thinking I slide inside under the door into the strange dark shop front.  Now back in the good ole US of A we have a name for what I was doing and its initials are B and E.  I was trying to be as Indiana Jones as posible about the whole thing but the truth is that I was quite drunk from the fives game.  On my hands and knees I snatched my bike, laid it on the ground and began sliding it under the door.  Suddenly I became aware that a rather large man was now standing in a doorway across the room.  He said something in Chinese and I frowned.  I pointed an angry finger at the bike and then at my face, he knodded slowly and walked back into the other room.  He knew that was my fucking bike as well as I did.  I got my fucking bike outside, unlocked it and left.

May and I had lunch yesterday and I told her about what happeded with the bike.  She said I should be more careful, nagging like the mother hen she is but I could see her heart wasn’t in it.  She was forlorn about the headmaster getting fired.  She prides herself on loyalty and she thinks that It is unfair that he be fired.  Aparently the head masters daughter and wife work at the school which I didn’t know, and they had their fancy teaching award cirtificates revoked.  This means the old head master saw fit to bestow high honer on his family so they would get more money.  May was upset about this, she argued that they must have earned the honer on their own merit.  She argued that all the things the head master did happen all the time everywhere in China, and as I have stated I think that is largely true.  She said that the other teachers and leaders just want the head masters power and they are all jealous of him and they are hateful.  She also told me that his new job will be training teachers to use computers in the classroom.  I suggested that maybe he will like his new job but she said no, everyone at the school thinks it is a very bad job. 

And so today we were sitting in a resturant owned by Xiao Yins uncle, Alice and I.  Kenny G was proving why if there is a hell he deserves to burn in it where in an ironic twist his eternal damnation will invlolve being made to listen to his own crappy records forever.  I’ve been getting Alice lunch lately because she still hadn’t been payed, the same way May did for me when I was down and out.  Today is different though because the new head master (that nobody has seen) has made it her first official act to pay all the new teachers one month worth of the owed three months of their saleries.  I also got my airplane money last night. 

YES!

This past month I have stopped asking about the airplane ticket refund they had promised me because I wanted for all my co workers to get paid first.  These people have families and houses and I live free and alone.  So last night when I got my money I first made sure that everyone else got theirs first, which they had.

So today lunch was on Alice for the lunches I got her over the last week or so.  By the way, Alice is foxy yes, but has a boyfriend as every girl here over 20 does, or they are already married and squirting out kids.  This is a big drag but I am optimistic, out of 8 million people there are bound to be chicks that dig white guys, and as far as I can tell I am the only white guy in town. 

This was a special western theme resturant we were at and we had sizzling steaks, Australian style and she asked me to show her how to hold her fork and knife.  As Kenny G murdered Louis Armstrong we sipped beer and discussed coruption in her government and getting paid and the head master situation and our students and classes and our steaks and she told me gossip about the other english teachers.

Nah nah nah nananana, nanananah heeeeeeey jude.

 

*Assigning English names to Chinese people is something that they want to do, they don’t think that westerners are capable of pronouncing thier names.  When I say Jakie Chan over here nobody knows what I’m talking about even though his face is on every other billboard.

*For more information about Fyodor I of Russia go to Joans mad monarchs, my new favorite website at http://www.xs4all.nl/~kvenjb/madmon.htm, or just visit your local library.

My old band, atlanta’s own The Long Shadows are playing at the Echo lounge this Thursday.  Monty has told me that he feels it will be a great show even though he is scheduled to work at the echo lounge that night, they have been good enough to let him take a break for a few minutes to sing a few songs.  That is so rock and roll. 

If you find yourself with nothing to do on Thursday go see The Long Shadows at the Echo lounge in East atlanta, it is good high quality rock n roll and much better than sitting around watching tv or lighting your farts or poping packing bubbles or whatever you have planned.  Tell them I sent you. 

W

Sorry this one took me a while.  We are still in the Yunnan and we will set the way-back machine to last month mode.  It is now the 22nd of March and I started writting this 12 days ago.  Big lazy.

  2/17/07

Han Xiao Yin and I make a break for it

Just now I sat for some time starring at the computer.  I paced around my 2 room flat.  I read an email from Caroline which I will answer later.   It is 11:17 pm on the tenth of March and I just shut off the lights, took off my shoes and ripped the pulltab off a cheap but cold beer.  The beer cans in China still have pulltabs like back in the early 80s by the way.  I am listening to the Ramones, a little while ago I danced like an idiot to Iggy Pops ‘the passenger’ a singin “la la la la lalalalala”

Killing time.  Avoiding writting this blog.

I don’t know if I can really do the 17th of last month any justice.  It was….

I promise to do my best but you have to understand that if you didn’t stand on that mountain you just don’t know how it felt.  That is something that I keep with me, and hopefully always will.

I have put every picture I took that day up on the site, there are I think around 89.  They still won’t do a bit of justice to the place I was that day, a mountain range outside Dali city in the Yunnan.

This was Chinese new years eve.  Dali is a small city surrounded on all sides by snow capped mountains that go up forever and ripple like a toned muscle.  The road we took that morning had a mountain range on the left and an endless lake on the right.  I noticed that the lake shimmered with reflected sunlight all day, no matter what time it was.  First we went to an old town.  It was surrounded by large walls and filled with touristy nick nacks.  Most of the buildings (in the town and the area) were white.  This is because the area is populated by the bi tribe, which means white.  We walked around for a time then back to the busses. 

I had read in lonely planet about the Zhonghe temple which sits on top of a mountain.  The book said that the mountain had several little paths all over the place, all going up to the temple on top of the mountain.  Today was unique in that we would sleep in Dali city that night, so we knew our hotel already, and most importantly, we didn’t need to catch a bus train or boat to the next place that night.  To me entire situation screamed leaving the tour.  Prime opurtunity.

After the old city we went to a nearby tourist trap store which I didn’t go into.  Han Xiao Yin told the tour that we were leaving (he wanted to come with me, partially because he wanted to see the temple on the mountain, partially because he wanted to look after me). 

After the store we went to a place called the Three Pagodas, which I thought looked stupid from the road, I was wrong as it happens.

As we passed through the turn styles to the three pagodas.  Xiao Yin (who had been on the phone with the tour co.) told me that we would have to eat the cost of the ferry which we would miss in the planned activity later that afternoon.  I was horrified that the tour group would stoop so low as to try to use our own money to force us into their agenda, refusing to reimburce us if we left.  This would kill any hope I had of escaping the endless shops on the rest of our trip.  I told Xiao Yin that I straight up refused to pay for a ferry we didn’t ride.  I threatened to deduct the 100 RMB from the money that I still owed the tour co.  This seemed to work, after about an hour long phone conversation Xiao Yin told me we would get our money back.  He also told me that it was more a matter of the tickets being nonrefundable than the company trying to impose their will, which made me feel like a jerk.  Somewhere the whole thing was lost in translation and I became a seething hot American trying to play hard ball with people who really were not out to hurt me.  It is hard as hell to write this, I hope you can see my face turning red within the words.  I almost left this whole thing out but I want to make this an honest and not sugar coated thing.  So I admit that I am ashamed that I instantly and instinctivly resorted to defensive and ruthless tacktics, this is yet another difference between Americans and Chinese.  Americans want everything fast and convenient, easy peezy, and if somebody dares mess with their money then somebody is fixing to have a major shit storm of a problem.  The Chinese seem patient and understanding when things don’t go their way, which I suppose may at least partially come from living in a beurocracy where any one step process usually takes 5 to 10 steps.  Maybe they are just a more chill people.  Maybe I am just an asshole.  Today I went to pay the tour co. the money I owed them.  I walked in alone and I gave them every last yi jiao.  I showed them pictures on my camera from the trip to try and make nice nice, the guy looked like I had personally hurt his feelings.  As strange as this sounds in American, I promise the whole thing makes sense in Chinese, at least the only Chinese I understand so far.

Good news, the bus driver told us that the tour would spend 30 minutes at the 3 pagodas and according to him it really takes more like 3 hours.  We could take all the time in the world since we were on our own, but it baffled me that we could be here that long.  From this point all I could see were the 3 pagodas themselves.  What I didn’t know was that behind the 3 pagodas lay 6 kilometers (3.73 miles American) of ancient Buddist temples which climb up to the foot of the mountain.  We spent 4 hours there.

This was the most amazing beautiful place.  The air made the soul feel light.  It felt so huge and I felt so small, tiny, and so ok and joyfull about my tinieness.  Look at the pictures!  It is so amazing to stand there. 

And each of these temples have Buddas from floor to ceiling.  Some of them must have been around 20 or 30 feet tall.  I dropped, knee to pillow and I prayed and bowed to Buddas that peered down casually, knowing, and unsurprisable.  The delightful soft sound of little bells tinkling in the wind was ubiquitous and made me think of a babling stream of water.  My heart was jam packed with joy and peace, I felt light and blissful, all sadness forgotten for the moment.

At the highest temple I bought a braclett of prayer beads which I am wearing now.  They were made by monks and are therfore kaigua, which means made by monks I think. You don’t know what it means either so just stop.

I kept thinking not only does this place really exhist but I am really here.  It was like a dream, I found myself gigling softly alot.  If you are ever in Dali city in the Yunnan you really should check it out, its really nice.

So next we took a cab to the mountain entrance.  We took a ski lift to get up which I didn’t want to do.  Xiao Yin thinks it is very funny that I am scared of heights and made no secret of laughing at me about it.  We made it up and I white nuckeled it for 20 long minutes.  Xiao Yin told me that he had heard the ski lift was made in America, which didn’t make the distance below us any closer.  The top was so cool.  It wasn’t actually the tippy top of the mountain, that was still another 2 hour climb, but we were up there.  A few small houses sat in around the mountain compound, the innermost was the temple, an open front pravilian affair.  Snow was at times underfoot in piles here and there amid needles from the pines which seemed to dominate most of the woods around.  The people sitting around all greeted us with huge smiles as they would any guest.  The view from the edge went for miles.  We could see where the mighty mountain became foot hills which sank to the valley bellow.  We could see the lake which was still shimmered all over with sunlight stretch as far as could be seen to the north and south, like looking at a enormous river.  I was glad to be looking at the lake from this mountain instead of taking a 20 minute ferry across to the other side as our tour had.  The 3 pagodas which had towered above us earlier now were tonka toys in the distance.

  Xiao Yin really totally wanted to eat noddles on the mountain.  He was oddly suddenly obsessed with the idea so we ordered noddles and ate looking over the edge.  I don’t know if the noddle thing was a Chinese thing or a Xiao Yin thing.  Here is another funny thing about my Chinese travell friend, he loves getting his picture taken with signs.  Everywhere we went he wanted a picture with the sign.  I guess it was to prove he had been there, but I will post the Xiao Yin sign page soon.

Look at the pictures!  I took like 89!

So we sat and ate noddles and like a sudden wind, in blew a guy from Belgum who sat himself down and told us his phillosophies on life.  “Yesterday is history, tommarow is the future.  History has already happened and the future will never come, there is only today” he said.  He was 70 and had just had his 3rd knee surgery and had come through Thailand to get to Yunnan.  He was travelling alone and his smile was contageuos.  He asked if Xiao Yin was my sherpa and I said “this is my good friend Xiao Yin” smiling but maybe still a little protective of my friend since the Canadian who had been so rude.  He took it back with a smile and wink and we laughed and chatted very enjoyably.  Here is hoping I will find myself still alive and on top of a mountain at 70. 

Next we hiked higher up the trail.  Xiao Yin wanted to go ‘upstairs’.  A little higher we found a hotel, the Highland Inn, not to be confused with the place across from Video Drome.  This is a cool looking place.  There was a courtyard with a cave in the hill, small cave but still, and little cotteges.  I walked into the main little lobby cottage and found a bunch of kids from france, I talked with a girl amoung them for a while.  She was on her way to live in Beijing and I told her I heard they had a music scene there, which she had not heard.  She gave us a map they had up there.  Her accent sounded more Australian than french.

We went off along a paved trail which crept horrizontally along the side of the mountain.  We went for ages when we came to a snowy waterfall next to a pravilian.  I got some pictures of this place up too, I plan on putting up a few more.  About six feet below the pravilian was a still pond on a ledge with a narrow wall separtating the small pond from a tumble which potentially could lead to sheer death fall over the side of the world, the whole thing covered with snow.  Xiao Yin wanted to pose for a picture next to the water fall.  A voice in my head screamed that this was a bad idea, I didn’t say anything.  I watched him slowly climb down the snow hill to the narrow ledge, he balanced and crossed slowly.  He almost made it too.

No he didn’t fall to his death, it looked like he would though.  He slipped and his feet went in to the icy cold, snow surrounded, high altitude mountain spring water pond.  Then his calfs and up to his knees.  The whole thing went in slow motion in my mind but I think was probably done in a few seconds.  He then posed with soaking wet feet next to the pond, he now figured he had reason to be determined that he get the shot.  I took three to make damn sure, this had been an expensive photo op.

I urged him to turn around and we could go back and take the ski lift.  He insisted on hiking down the mountain, which had been my idea in the first place.  I really didn’t want to do the ski lift, it is very high, but wet freezing feet change the whole situation.  He kept insisting on hiking down so on we marched, his shoes going squish squish squish.  We met a man coming the other way who demanded to know where we were going.  We said down and he said it couldnt be done and didn’t we know about the ski lift?

We kept going.  We had been on a trail that went flat along a ridge on the mountain.  The view was amazing but we were begening to wonder where was the trail that would take us downward.  We finally realized that the map was backwards and  we had been going north instead of south for the past hour.  Oooops.

And so we spotted a concrete narrow sidewalk with stairs going straight down the hill into dark deep woods and decided to take it.

But first I stopped my friend and told him to take off his shoes.

For anyone that doesn’t know, I proudly hold the rank of Eagle in the boy scouts of America, a fact I so rarley get to take advantage of or boast about.  I was aware of a few important things, all of which can be ennumerated as follows:

I. It was getting to be around 4:30 or 5, early evening was upon us.  The hours of daylight were Quickly becoming a factor, plus the later it got the more we could count on the temperature dropping. 

II. I didn’t know if this trail goes straight down or meanders in meadows and fields and criss crosses or what.  It could take anywhere from 30 minutes to god knows how many hours.  If we believe the man who we met earlier it couldn’t be done, which meant there was a good chance that the trail stopped and left us lost in the woods, although the guy didn’t look like he knew what he was talking about.

III. We had one bottle of water left, 12 oz and one orange.

IV.  We were counting on finding a taxi when we got to the bottom to take us the 20 minute drive back to Dali city.  I didn’t know what the taxi situation at the bottom was, and this is Chinese New Years eve.  For all we knew the taxi’s all go home when it gets to be late afternoon.  I could only hope to find anyone who could save us the walk all the way back to town.

V.  I had to count on a guy with freezing wet feet to go the distance, what ever the distance would be.

For the record I strongly recomended we hike back to the Temple and take the ski lift back down.  But Xiao Yin was determined to go down, and truth be told deep down thats what I really wanted to do too.  ”Fuck it” I said. 

So I made him take off his shoes and I took off mine.  I told him to lose the wet socks.  We put them in a plastic bag we had full of trash.  I took off my black ski cap you see in the pictures.  I told him to dry his feet as best he could using my hat as a towel.  We then went through the inside of his shoes as best we could to soak up anything, nastifing the hat further.  I gave him my dry socks to wear and put the hat in the trash bag and laced up my boots barefoot.  I explained that it was now his duty to wash my hat and socks.  This seemed fair to me. 

So off we went down the hill.  I was leaping 2 and 3 steps a stride to make time.  He said his feet were now slightly damp but totally not as bad. 

The forrest on the side of that mountain was filled with ancient tombs spread out in all directions across the hills.  The ones right next to the trail were recent and still nice looking with fancy marble inscriptions.  These usually had small fortunes in yuan held under a rock at the foot of the tomb.  The further from the walkway we strayed the more the tombs started looking more decreped like old men.  Here slept the long forgotten I supposed, I didn’t see any money offered to them, the only family they had left were the trees and moss that had grown up around them.

Every other tree presided dutifully over a tomb, and it was so as far as I could see in any direction.  I asked Han Xiao Yin if he thought it would be disrespectful to take pictures of the tombs.  You notice that nowhere on this blog will you see a picture from inside a temple, this is because the monks ask you not to.  So even though these people have been dead for a long long time, (dynasties back in a few cases I think) I didn’t want to just start taking snap shots if it was thought uncool or rude.  I don’t pretend to know the culture here, and according to hong kong martial arts movies, pissed off Chinese ghosts is some bad ju ju.

So I asked Xiao Yin if he thought it was disrespectful and he really paused and pondered my question for a moment, his brow wrinkled in consideration.  Finally and slowly, he told me that no, he thought they would be honered and happy that I care for them enough to take a picture.  After further discussion we both came to the conclusion that the nicest way to do this would be to say “sha de Bayu” (god bless you)  to the tomb stone each time we took a picture.  This way the dead would for sure be ok with posing for us.  Yes, yes, I realize how this sounds.  But it made such sense when standing on that mountain after having spent the day in all those beautiful temples.  It was such a holy and majic place, the spirits of the dead around us were as real and important to me as the breeze that came from the lake below. 

So go to the picture page and look at the tombs.  Before each was taken either I or Xiao Yin said Sha da bayu.  I hope they were pleased.  They didn’t seem to mind anyway.

  We found 3 tombs all next to each other with no inscriptions.  They seemed very old and falling to pot and moss covered.  Xiao Yin said that these made him feel sad as no inscription had to mean they must have been poor travelers who died in the region away from their families.  The monks must have done the best they could by fixing them up with these unmarked graves.  I put the last orange at the foot of one of the stones and we both bowed reverantly three times with hands in pray mode like at the temple.

He asked me about the english names for different kinds of trees or birds on our desent.  Every once and a while Xiao Yin would proclaim proud and loud to the heavens “I am not just a pretty face!” which would usually make me laugh pretty hard. 

When we got to the foothills we came to a large ridge where the trees cleared.  Here, along the ridge, with a picture perfect view of the valley sat a row of tombs.  This was without question the hottest spot for a grave we had seen anywhere in the past hour of walking.  I said to Xiao Yin that these must be very rich and important men in the community to have such a perfect spot with such a great view.  He read the inscription.  No, he said, these were very important people, true, but not men.  They were all the graves of woman who had lived to be at least 85 or in many cases older, a few over 100.  Every single one of them.  Take that, patriarchal society!

We got to the bottom only to find more temples we hadn’t even know about.  They were all closed by now, which really was fine as we had walked the past 11 hours.  My dogs were barking and although Xiao Yin is too tough to complain, I can’t imagine what even damp feet must have been like down that mountain.  It was steps straight down.

We hiked through a small town and after another half hour we came to the main road.  We found a taxi who told directed us to a bus, which was nice because he would have charged 50 RMB for what only costed 2 on the bus. 

We got to the hotel on new years eve and crashed. 

Outside that night sounded like WWII shelling. 

KAAAA       BlAAAAAAAMMO.  

The window was lighting up from explosions.  The fireworks were so loud within minutes every car alarm in Dali city was shrieking in unison.  It was a screaming cacophany of explosions.  And I am not exagerating.  American fireworks fissle and pop, maybe shoot in the air a little.  Oh, fourth of July is sissy compared to what I saw out my window.  I know what I just said, if you know me you know I wouldn’t say that unless I believed it in my heart, but sorry folks.  At one point I was worried about the buildings catching fire. 

Imagine the fire works you see at lenox mall or stone mountain on the fourth.  The really huge impressive ones that you can see from across town.  Now imagine if those same fire works were available to john Q public but only went up a couple of stories so everyone on the street was in real peril of a jet stream of fire landing on their heads.  Raging comets ending in clusters of sulpheric firey chaos rained down from the heavens onto the streets as jubulant Chinese people below danced the hell out of the way the best they could.  They ducked, they covered, they screamed, they light off more and more.  Todlers running willy nilly amok with roman candles the size of broom handles stumbled around unsupervised.  I have seen it.  It was amazing.  It made their driving look safe.  I guess when you have a population this size, you may as well risk blowing people to smithereens for a good party.  What the hell?  I watched for a little while and went to bed.  In the morning I regreted not going outside and running around amid the explosions, but I was so tired from that day that I just couldn’t make it happen.  I still kick myself about it, but all things considered a good day.

 

2/18/07

 Spring Festival

 

This morning we were back with our tour detail.  After breakfast the bus left Dali, we were Lijiang city bound.  Francis my info man in the Yunnan wanted to tell me all about Chinese history.  I insisted instead on rambling on and on about every miner thing we did yesterday, totally bragging like a kid on a sugar high who had been to the movies or the zoo and you hadn’t.  He tried to counter by showing us the pictures he had taken from the ferry that went around the lake, and I nodded appreiciativly at the photos and I ohhed and awwwed, but in my heart I was thinking “in your face Francis info man, your tour sucks and we rule!  Nanny nanny fucking boo boo”

And guess where they took us on the way to Lijiang city.  Yeah, shops, three I think.  I hung back in the bus, I wandered around the parking lot a few times.  I looked out into the mountains which surrounded us.  I fought the urge to just start running and not stop until I was on top of one and completly hopelessly lost forever in China.  What would ever become of me then?

Liajiang is a base camp for hikers and was teaming with westerners.  I really wanted to try and get to Tiger leaping gorge, a famous hiking spot which will be flooded by the Chinese dam project in a few years, unfortunatly the logistics for leaving the tour and going on my own didn’t pan so I have to get to the gorge on a later trip.  The tour took us to an ancient villiage inside Liajiang.  On the corner across the street from the villiage a little girl was earning tips by spinning in circles upside down on a rotating mouthpiece which she held in her teeth as her back and butt were stretched over her head, both arms extended in airplane.  I was impressed, I couldn’t do that.  I dropped a few yuan in the mostly empty cardboard box which sat on the concrete next to her. 

Inside the villiage the tour guide took us through the narrow winding stone covered streets.  Some of the stones were hungreds of years old, Xiao Yin told me.  The tour guide took us into an alley and in the alley he went into a door and gestured for us to follow.  It was a sales lecture and Xiao Yin and I split off on our own.  It was a nice day and the villiage was a maze in which we kept getting lost.

We wandered around in the villiage for around 5 or 6 hours, it was so huge.  On three occasions during that time we saw our spinning little girl on the corner still spining her little heart out. 

After diner we went to a place in the villiage where bars sat on both sides along the side of a small river within throwing distance.  The girls who worked in the bars would gather along the side of the river and sing songs taunting the people in the bar across the river and asking the patrons to come to them.  After a few minutes the ladies in our bar would form a group and sing a retalatory song.  This went back and forth and was very entertaining.  We sat by the window and paid an obsurd amount of money for budwieser.  A couple of Chinese people ran up to us gleefully shaking our hands.  Xiao Yin told me after they left that they had been on one of the tour busses with us and obviously they remembered the shit out of me.  Niether of us remembered them, much less which bus they were on or how many days we had spent with them.  The road and the days were begening to blur to a haze. 

The plan was to get drunk and then blow some shit up with fire works.  That was my plan anyway, the high price of beer in the villiage chased us back into Liajiang city, a pity, the river bar was a near perfect spot.  On the way out my heart sank.  There she was, our poor little girl still spinning.  It had to be 8 or 9 hours now.  She sat next to her little rotating mouth piece and ran her fingers across her gums.  i am serious I saw this, she didn’t know I was watching.  The cardboard box was now almost overflowing with money.  A man was aproaching.  He looked the money over and she looked at him with hope.  The man I took to be spinning girls father inspected the box and said some thing which made her slump to the ground with sad disapointment.  He left with the box and she started spinning again.  Maybe for just a few short hours this time.  She couldn’t have been 10, if she keeps it up there is no way she’ll have a spine or teeth at 20.  I stood there for a sad moment, then we marched on.

On we marched into the city.  Along the way we picked up beer that was cheap and rotgut, no complants from me there.  We found a guy on a street corner selling fire works and I said I wanted the baddest loudest craziest mutha’s this dude had.  I’m pretty sure that what he gave us was dynamite.  It was about the same shape as a soda can but a little smaller and with a wick coming out one end.  

The street was not near as crazy as last night by a damn sight, but still filled with people running around shooting fireworks.  This called for ever constant careful vigilence, a bottle rocket was liable to come whizzing from any which way

.  Every few steps the head jerked suddenly in the direction of a deafening pop.  Many Chinese fire works sound exactly, not similar, not kind of like, not it reminds me of, but exactly like small caliber gunfire.  I used to live in Kirkwood, I know what guns sound like, they sound exactly like some Chinese fire works.  Everybody you saw on the street were either lighting fire works or looking around to stay clear of the next blast.

So I lit one of the big muthahs.  What I now believe to have been dynamite.  Had to be.

This thing didn’t send multi colored plumes flying, it didn’t fissle or crackel, it just went BANG really really loud.  My ears were ringing and I was standing a good 8 feet away by the time it went.  It made the earth shake and sent a sismic concussion I could feel in the pit of my stomach and deep into my balls.  It left a blast pattern in the concrete that didn’t take a balistics team to tell that something had really totally exploded.  It sent pieces of debris for a radius of 15 feet. 

It was so cool. 

And so we wandered the streets drinking cheap beer.  We could see the stars (which just doesn’t seem to happen at all ever in the polution haze up north in the Henan) and I showed Xiao Yin where orion was in the sky starting with the belt.  Then I showed him every other constellation I could think of, it made me wish I had listened harder to my grandfather (Gaffer for them what knew him) when he was trying to teach me about the stars back when I was a kid and he was alive.  We stumbled back to the hotel late.

2/19/07

 

We got up early even for a Chinese tour, still hung the hell over in the pitch black of still night.  We went to Jade snow dragon mountain, which was very beautiful but a little depressing at the same time.  Jade snow is famous being the southernmost mountain in China to enjoy year round snow cover.  The sad part was that in pictures we saw from ten years ago the mountain looked like the planet hoth from empire strikes back, covered in nothing but snow, white white white, pristeen and spotless.  What we saw was a rockey mountain with large smatterings of snow.  Very inconvienient truth moment.  Actually in that movie Al Gore talks about places around the world with signifiacantly less snow or ice and shows comparison pictures, he may talk about jade snow mountain.  I do seem to remember him mentioning china quite a bit.  I knew about the earth warming but I found it quite hard to look apoclypse in the eye in such absolute indeniable terms.  If you haven’t seen the Al Gore movie I think you really should by the way.  Anyone living on our planet has a vested interest.

That afternoon we took the long winding mountain highway back to Dali.  Much of the trip was along roads that rode right on the side of cliffs over vallies far far below.  The scenary was amazing, what was also amazing was that the guy driving felt the need to wheel that puppy (talking a fullsize tour bus here) at full speed around hairpin turns while passing people on the wrong side of a 2 lane nascar style, horn blasting the whole time.  I was 97% positive that at any moment we would leave the road sailing off over the side and barrel ass over tea kettle in a firey ball to the ground below.   Along the way Xiao Yin turned to me and said we had a very smart driver, to avoid the cars and go so fast. 

Just before arriving in Dali city we stoped at a rode side shop of some kind.  The bus driver was trying to wet his beak with a percentage of total sales from the shop in return for his stopping there.  We left and found ourselves not even ten minutes later pulling up to a shopping complex in Dali.  The tour guide came running out of the building and into the bus to tell us about the great pearl outlet which lay before us.  This was at 6 in the evening after a 4 hour bus ride and we wanted diner, on top of which we had just been to a shop.  I was proud of the rest of the tour, they all started whinning and complaining.  Ok, fine, the tour guide relented.  We will go to eat at a resturant inside the shopping complex.  With relief we all filed off the bus.  When we were all in the parking lot the tour guide announced that first we had to go to a shop.  If he had been able to speak american highschool kid he could have hollered ‘Psyche!’  I admit to being the recipiant of sudden hot rage visited upon my person due to the ruse perpetrated by the tour guide.  This tour guide was a totall dick I decided, and I tried to return to the bus just in time for the driver to lock the door insuring my shop visit.  I sat my ass on the curb and waited outside.  Fifteen minutes later we were all sitting in a resturant, eagerly awaiting the same suckey meal we had had almost everyday before.

Then we got on the train.

More soon, hang in there with me.

So I was finally able to bust May. Last weekend Gina, My new convienient in-town Canadian tried in vein to call me. She had recieved the phone number from May, Who had also given me the number I gave to you, the assembled multitudes of blog believers. The number was a dud. I learned all this when I called her. We will meet for the first time today around 4.

I had been in email communication with my mother and with Alabamama’s own the great Carson Kennedy, both of whom had finally figured out how to call internationally to China but were getting the same lady who just said “Wai? WAi?” and chattered off the phone to someone in Chinese just before hanging up. I am reminded of an old AT&T commercial where the buisness man is trying to make an important phone call and keeps getting a guy in another country saying “Oh lacka pee say” and the operater (with a nasty mousey voice) tells the man “Your not dealing with AT&T” and the so the buisness man says “Well I am now!” Does anyone remember this commercial? If not ask Mike Dunham, he would know. He is rainman with junk like that. I bet a beer when I get back state-side that he remembers, who wants my action? Any takers?

Meanwhile I would love to know who in China they were calling. What if everytime you picked up the phone it was people speaking in Chinese asking for Will Sanders?

So I kept asking May again and again “what is my phone number?” and she kept telling me that it was 2530797. She would insist that this was the number she dailed each time to call me. She was sure. I kept asking her how this majic nimber could only work for her and nobody else in America or in Shangqiu. The answer? All the other people are misdailing. Everytime. They call over and over and over for what was going on three weekends and their little fingers just keep slipping onto other buttons, or their rottary dails are pulled just short of the right number. God bless them. Lord love them. They do try, lord knows how they try. Only May posseses the advanced skill and training to dail this ever illuisive combination of 7 numbers.

I kept telling my mom and Alabama’s own Carson Kennedy to keep trying and I would love to hear from them and please don’t give up. I would like to here and now publically recognize the pluckey percerverance of my mother and of Alabama’s own Carson Kennedy. They kept trying. Finally the other day I got another english teacher who had also gotten my number from May, only a long time ago, to tell me the number she was using.

2530737 not 2530797

See how the pennultimate digit is a 3 and not a 9? See how I use words like pennultimate? God knows I didn’t spell it right, but if you’ve read the blog this far I rekon you have already forgiven me this ineptitude. The American Public school success story marches on. So I was able to bust May. I was very very nice about it. She said she must have meant 3 but said 9. Right now, sitting at your computer count out loud to 10 in Chinese. See what I mean? We should just let it slide, she helps me out with stuff all the time. She really really does. Its cool. I did let her know she was busted though.

The other night I was watching the movie FLag of our Fathers by Clint Eastwood (yeah, I got my dvd player replaced, they were so cool and sweet and Chinese and wonderful about it) when the phone rang. I answered “hello?” and not “wei?” I used to answer my phone “Wei?” because it really confuses the shit out of Chinese people expecting to talk to me. But that night I had stayed in with my fingers crossed. Sure enough it was my mom. She is good by the way, just 46 days from retirement, but it sounds like the days are stretching to years. But she can do it, all together blog Believers, 1,2,3- GO WILL’S MOM! YOU CAN DO IT! OK, now do it again like you mean it, with feeling. It was so cool to hear from her. This was the first voice from home and my mom is really cool.

Last night I had just found a boot of the entire starwars sega from pod race to ewoks and was investigating if Jar Jar Binks sucked worse in Chinese or English. The result? His suckiness is universal and transcends language and nationality. When (you guessed it) the phone rang. It was none other that Alabama’s own Carson Kennedy. He was using skipe, which is super cheap internet phone talking. There was a delay and the sound quality was aweful. I sort of felt like the roving correspondant on the ground near the battle field during an invasion on network news, you know where the feed is all digitized and skippy and they ask the question and its three beats before the response comes. “And just exactly where are all our troops positioned at this very moment Jeraldo?”

It was cool to talk to Carson last night lousy sound aside. Lousy sound is very ok and sort of whatever in comparisson with being able to talk to a good friend after all this time. He told me that he and willsanderschinaadventure.com creator and nice guy Marcus Rosentrater were going to show their documentary about Nixon and George Wallace over in Mobile.

Marcus really was the guy who had the idea for this blog by the way. It was just days before I got on the plane and he presented me with this plan and I was like, “duh, you mean with a com pu tater machine?” So While we are at it, all together now, 1,2,3 -THANKS YOU FOR THE WEBSITE MARCUS! That was sorry. do it again until you get it really loud. If you see him give him a high five for me. I am serious, a high five.

We chatted for a while, I told him about some stuff had seen here, then how is Cat? How is your brother sort of thing. His brother is totally rich by the way, and getting a live in german nanny for their kids. So thanks for calling mom and Alabama’s own Carson Kennedy. I really enjoyed hearing from you guys. the official and last word on my number, Carson tested, Mother approved. 011 86 370 2530737 (not 797)

Thanks for calling and emailing and myspacing you guys. I h