Back to earth

In the morning Mr. He had me put some of my things in his backpack. He strapped one backpack to each side of the horse, and we were off. It took half a day to walk to Shuhe village, and I was confused when we arrived because it looked just like Lijiang's Old Town.

We met Mr. Cun at the edge of town, and I said goodbye to Mr. He and the horse. I loved the mountains, even though the ecolodge was downright spooky, and the return to civilization in Mr. Cun's Jeep made me grouchy. I was muddy, my mouth hurt (more of a generalized burn now than a thousand pin-pricks), I was homesick, and deciding what to do suddenly seemed like a burden.

So I didn't do much: I put in a load of laundry at the hostel, checked my email, got a little lunch, and bought a ticket to see the Naxi orchestra that evening. Before the performance, I took a little nap and watched TV.

The performance was terrific, except that the introduction-to-music ratio was, to my mind, much too high. Most of the talking was in Mandarin. The orchestra was quite large and contained several octogenarians. I wondered how the musicians put up with all of this yakking every night.

After the performance I wandered a bit and ended up at Lamu's House of Tibet. Almost all of the customers were Westerners, but the food was fantastic. However, I made the mistake of ordering yak butter-infused green tea (very salty) and mumu dumplings (even saltier). Eating even bland food still made my eyes water. Having literally rubbed salt in my wounds, I ordered some apple fritters and ice cream. I'd been avoiding dairy products since arriving in China because of melamine, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

There was one computer in the place, and I went over to use it once it freed up. A Chinese guy came over and asked whether I'd like to join him and his friends for some beer. I said that I didn't like beer and spoke only a little bit of Chinese, but he said I could drink something else.

There were three of them, 30-something guys from China's southernmost tip. The other two understood some English, but didn't try to speak it; the one who'd asked me over spoke a bit. We talked about where else I was going in China, and they told me I should go to their province, Guangdong. I pulled out my Lonely Planet so we could look at its map, and the one on my right found it very interesting. I'm always interested to find out what travel books say about places I live. Then he noticed that Taiwan is delineated on the map as a separate country. Shock and horror! I tried to joke that leaving Taiwan off enabled the company to sell more books: You have to buy one for China and a separate one for Taiwan.

They were also interested in my Chinese dictionary. I was happy to provide some sort of entertainment to compensate for my nearly non-existent conversational skills.

We were drinking a bottle of Great Wall wine. They only drank when we toasted--very social--and I tried to avoid sipping solo, but it was easy to forget. I asked what they liked to do in Lijiang, hoping for ideas, and they said they drank and played poker. It was their second time there.

Toward the evening I asked what they did for work. They're judges.

Lamu's closed at 12:00, and the judges paid for my dinner tab as well as my drinks. It felt strange to accept such generosity from strangers, but I didn't seem to have much choice in the matter. The one who spoke a little English walked me back to my hostel, even though I wasn't exactly sure where it was. I was chronically disoriented in Lijiang. Fortunately I found it fairly quickly. We parted ways without so much as a handshake or a kiss on the cheek. I hadn't learned the judges' names. It seemed that early introductions weren't a big thing in China.

Lijiang

On my first full day in Lijiang I tried to go have a look at Tiger Leaping Gorge using public buses. This turned out not to be as easy as Lonely Planet made it sound, so instead I went to Black Dragon Pool, between Lijiang's old and new towns. I wandered into some sort of Dongba Culture Center, and some enthusiastic young English-speaking Naxi gave me a little tour of their classroom, where their teacher demonstrated calligraphy. Apparently Naxi is the only system of hieroglyphics still in use, or maybe it's the oldest still in use.

After giving the park a good wander I booked a one-day tour to the gorge for the next day with a "tourist reception center" in the Old Town. The agent plied me with pu'er tea, which apparently is native to northwest Yunnan. He served it lukewarm, and it had a subtle, earthy taste. He asked whether I'd had it before, and I answered truthfully that I didn't know. He said that if I was a first-timer I shouldn't have more than three of the tiny cups-full, as it would give me the runs. I was skeptical, but didn't try proving him wrong.

I booked a ticket to Hangzhou that afternoon, too.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

All of the other people in my minibus to the gorge were Chinese. A middle-aged couple from Hong Kong translated a few things for me and we chatted. They introduced themselves as Eric and Pansy. Three other lone travelers invited me to join them on the lunch break, which saved me from having to order in Chinese, and from sitting alone at one of the 8-person tables. The "menu" at the restaurant was a cluster of plastic bins laid out on the floor in front of the kitchen containing various vegetables, meats, and other ingredients. One had live grasshoppers, which made the other two women cringe and brush at their arms. In another swam small, snake-like fish. When the food came I tried to imitate the Chinese way of eating: rice bowl in left hand, chopsticks in right, pulling morsels one at a time from the communal dishes and coating them with rice before popping them into my mouth.

The drive through the gorge was unbelievably bumpy, with no guard rails. The views were beautiful if you happened to be on the right side of the minibus, which I was. At the middle rapids site we gathered around our guide with groups from numerous other minibuses. The guide was a Naxi with a mullet that was bleached from the neck down. He wore a sleeveless Nike shirt and had an even row of round scars down his arm that looked like cigarette burns.

I was the only foreigner in this group, too, and a guy about my age asked whether I was alone, and whether I'd like some company. His English name was Andy, and he'd gone to university in Dublin before returning to China in 2004. He said this was probably the first English conversation he'd had since then. He ran a sort of environmental consulting company in Shaanxi province, and he and his wife were on their honeymoon. As our group walked down the gorge we chatted a little about the US election. My impression from watching CCTV International was that the Chinese didn't much care who won, and Andy said that was probably the case. No one in China ever asked me which candidate I favored. They asked, instead, who I would win, which might have been a polite version way of asking my preference. With just weeks before the election, Obama had a double-digit lead, and it didn't seem like special American insight was needed to predict the race's outcome. But it's also possible that people simply weren't paying much attention to election news.

At the bottom of the steep path the group took pictures of the gorge and the rapids, and of each other with the gorge and the rapids, and took a break in the tiny hut that sold drinks and snacks such as cucumbers. Then it was time to go back up.

I think the most impressive wildlife I saw in Yunnan were large, green, striped spiders that build massive webs. They seem to live in colonies of parallel webs. I stopped to admire a few on the way up.

Andy asked whether I liked movies. His English had an occasional Irish inflection. He said he liked Braveheart and Mel Gibson. I had nothing good to say about Braveheart or Mel Gibson, so I said nothing at all, except "freedom!" Andy had been an extra in a film called America, in a New York scene that was filmed in Dublin.

At the top we rested and exchanged email addresses. Andy and his wife were on a Shangri-la-bound tour, while I was headed back to Lijiang.

That evening I wandered around the town some more. It's hard to avoid wandering around in the Old Town, since even with a map it's a confusing maze. On the main streets things look familiar even when they're not: a clothes shop, a cheap trinkets shop, a shoe shop, a clothes shop, a tourist reception center. Away from the main streets it's hotel, Naxi guesthouse, hotel.

But I found Lijiang fascinating, in part because of its tourist mobs. The clothes shops mostly had a hippie aesthetic that I hadn't seen in either the local culture or in other Chinese cities. Many of the shops sold cowboy hats, and I saw some of the Han tourists wearing them. I even saw a few turquoise-and-silver earrings.

And yet... old Naxi women still walk around in their traditional blue clothes with T-shaped capes, and young Naxi women do laundry at the edges of the canals. One evening I walked to the edge of the Old Town to find a field where a woman was irrigating with a long-handled ladle. It's a strange place.

Baisha

I rented a bike for the trip to Baisha, a village known for its frescoes and its Taoist doctor. Before I even found my way out of Lijiang I managed to crash the bike; a car had pulled out in front of me in the bike lane and I thought I could make it up on to the curb, but didn't. I did a decent roll, and came away with a small cut on my elbow, one on my shin, and a few impressive bruises.

I passed through the new town, as well as a few nice Naxi villages, on the way to Baisha. The weather was great for biking, but some of the cobblestone streets rattled my teeth. Between the villages were fields of tall, yellowed corn stalks; some of the villagers were harvesting them. I could see the corn piled in the second stories of some of their homes.

The houses themselves were built of red brick or cinder blocks, topped by grey tile roofs with turned-up eaves. Most were fronted with nice archways leading into courtyards.

I found the tour bus parking lot for Baisha first, and gratefully abandoned the bike in the designated area. I paid the entrance fee and saw the home of a long-gone important person, complete with a small Taoist temple and frescoes that seemed to have been imported from someplace else. I think they were from the Tang dynasty, and they looked their age. As at one other Taoist temple I'd visited, I was mainly struck by the similarities between these and medieval Christian art: the halos, the faded, orangey tinge, and the formal seated poses of the subjects.

Leaving out the back way, I followed the trail of souvenir stalls to the center of the village. There were plenty of framed newspaper clips from all over the world outside the office of the Taoist doctor, but the man himself did not seem to be in. I reflected that tour-group hordes and free-thinking wielders of Lonely Planet like myself didn't seem to have done Baisha much good.

I kept walking. The touristy and non-touristy parts of the village were conveniently separated by an archway. In front of the archway an old, tiny woman approached me and showed me a guestbook with pages filled with testimonials from all over the world, as well as a few pictures of herself with Western women dressed as Naxi. I wasn't sure exactly what she wanted, but from the testimonials it seemed that she intended to have me for tea in her garden and dress me up for photos. Given the fact that we couldn't communicate, this promised to be an awkward experience. Also, I didn't know whether she'd expect money.

Fortunately a young Han couple wearing yellow Northface jackets had stopped to watch the proceedings, and the woman asked in English if she could help. We three tourists ended up following the old woman to her courtyard, where indeed she gave us tea and nuts and dressed the women up like Naxi, after which we took numerous pictures in various parts of the courtyard.

The young woman was from Shanghai and spoke English as well as any Chinese I'd met in the country. her significant other was from Xi'an and didn't talk much, though he seemed to understand English perfectly. The young woman called our hostess nainai--grandmother--and told me that her "local Chinese" was difficult to understand.

After the photo session we signed the guestbook and took down the old woman's address so that we could send her postcards, and left. On the way out the woman from Shanghai asked the old woman about money, and gave her 20 yuan. I started to get out my money, but the young woman shook her head. She had translated for me that the old woman's husband was dead, and that her children lived elsewhere. Perhaps playing host for tourists was for her some combination of a hobby and a way to get by.

At the main road the young couple headed south on their bikes, and I went back into the touristy part of the village to explore a little more and get lunch. I bought a large batik rectangle of cloth, a wedding gift for some friends, and a couple of tiny oval boxes that the saleswoman said were made of yak bone. Then it was back to the bike.

I'd picked up a better map in the cafe where I'd lunched, and decided to head south to Shuhe village. The woman from Shanghai had told me that she was staying there, and that in her opinion it was better than Lijiang. It was, as I suspected, the same village that Mr. He had delivered me to, but this time I had time to explore. The tourist takeover of the village seemed even more complete than in Lijiang, and I didn't stay long. I bought another batik cloth, this one for my own futon, and paid less than half what the first one had cost, even without haggling. Ah well.

It was hard to stuff everything in my bicycle basket, but I managed it. I turned in the bike in Lijiang, had a snack at a cafe on the grass-selling square, checked email, collected my bag, and got to the airport hours before my 10:45 flight.

The receptionist at the hostel had booked me a complicated arrangement that involved flying to Chengdu, using a voucher for a hotel, and flying to Hangzhou first thing in the morning. This sort of thing seemed to be common, and there are companies that pick you up at the airport and take you to the hotel. In theory, anyway.

In reality, I collected my bag and went over to a man who was holding a sign; people were collecting around him. He was with an airport-hotel company, but not my airport-hotel company. In an amazing stroke of luck, another man reached the sign-man just before me and asked the same question. he turned out to be a fluent English-speaker (originally from Hong Kong), and explained that our company wasn't there, but that we could walk to the hotel in five minutes. Which we did.

We arrived after midnight, but the entrance area was full of people, and all of them seemed to be hoping to check in. Most were clutching vouchers. The man from Hong Kong finally made his way up to the counter. All I could catch was some discussion of whether he was one person or two people (because of me, presumably), and the word "foreigner." An argument broke out between the receptionist and the line of men at the counter, with one of them using that word I'd learned a few days before, "judge." Was he threatening legal action? Finally the man from Hong Kong explained to me, somewhat unnecessarily, that there weren't enough rooms.

Soon afterward, a woman procured a key card and asked me whether I'd like to share. This seemed like my best chance of getting to sleep anytime soon, so I followed her up to the room. She explained that she was studying English and had asked to share a room with me. But we didn't talk much, apart from a brief discussion of how to conjugate "to choose."

Hangzhou

At 8:00 in the morning I flew to Hangzhou. On the bus in from the airport I saw a cluster of skyscrapers on the outskirts of the city; as we drew closer I saw that two-thirds of them were under construction.

As directed by the woman at the hostel, I took the shuttle to the final stop and then got a taxi. The first taxi driver I tried wouldn't take me to the address I showed him, and I couldn't quite understand why. What I caught was "hen duo che"--lots of cars--but "che" is a part of the words for both "taxi" and "bus"--and, for that matter, "bicycle" and "train." I don't know whether he was telling me that lots of buses run up that road, so I shouldn't take a taxi, or that there was too much traffic, or that lots of taxis would take me there, but he wouldn't. Anyway, he wouldn't take me. The next taxi did.

Paying for two nights at the hostel, plus deposit, left me with less than 10 yuan in cash, so I set off to find an ATM. Despite getting breakfast on the plane, I was pretty famished by that time--about 2:00. Three ATMs and a rather long walk later, it seemed that I had "insufficient funds." I went back to the hostel and checked my balance online: plenty of funds. I felt a little panicked. Almost no place in China takes credit cards. Finally I changed $160 of my $200 emergency stash at the Bank of China and decided to call my credit union at midnight (9:00 am California time) to harangue them.

Near Hangzhou's West Lake is a cluster of upscale restaurants, including a Starbucks and a Haagen-Dazs, and that was where I headed next. I stopped in at a Western-style place with a 5-course fixed menu fr lunch, and made short work of the 5 courses. Then I walked along the lake for a bit before catching the last boat of the day for some islands in the lake. The lake and the islands are an interesting example of wholly artificial "natural" beauty: The lake used to be a swamp before it was dredged hundreds of years ago, and some of what was dredged up went toward making the islands. One of the two I visited has been shaped, with bridges and causeways, into a Chinese character. The amazing thing is that the effect is beautiful and serene. Gently rolling hills rise up behind the glassy lake; on the islands, bamboo-lined paths and traditional-style bridges and pagodas complete the picture.

That evening I decided to walk to the supermarket. There was a Carrefour nearby, part of a French chain, and I was curious as to what it would look like in China. Also, I was completely out of contact solution and needed a few other things.

Carrefour was set at the back of a dimly-lit mall in which most of the stores were vacant. There was an HSBC ATM near the entrance, and I tried my ATM card there. Miracle of miracles, it worked. I wouldn't have to call California at midnight after all; perhaps an email would do.

In Carrefour I picked up a yellow corduroy Ralph Lauren Polo-knockoff jacket for about $4, along with a new umbrella, Q-tips, and batteries for my power-slurping camera. I asked about contact solution; there was none. I checked two other pharmacies with no luck.

Feeling brave on the way back, I stopped into one of the basic open-fronted restaurants along the sidewalk for dinner. Its menu consisted of pictures on the wall with prices, which was encouraging, and I got the waiter to tell me which dishes were meat-less. I pointed to one at random and ended up with scrambled eggs and tomatoes over noodles--not bad.

At the end of my meal I was the only customer. I asked for tea, and got a thin disposable plastic cup full of hot water. That made me a little sad. I chatted with the restaurant staff a bit, since they had nothing else to do but watch TV. On hearing that I was American, the waitress who'd delivered my hot water asked to see what American money looked like. Unfortunately, I'd left my remaining stash back at the hostel.

Wuzhen

On the outskirts of Hangzhou, the bus to Wuzhen pulled into a large, new, gleaming bus station. We were there for 10 minutes or so. No one got on or off. There was no one inside on the long rows of waiting-room chairs, and just a few people who seemed to work there. The place was surrounded by empty fields, but a short distance away was a cluster of what looked like high-rise apartment buildings, most of them under construction. It was eerie, a sort of mirror image of science fiction movie scenes of long-abandoned, crumbling cities. This was the yet-uninhabited ghost of a town waiting to be born, and for some reason, it had bus service.

I'd wanted to see a water town, the kind with canals and perhaps people in conical hats, but Wuzhen had just one canal and hordes of tour groups. It wasn't without its charms, though--the wooden buildings that lined the canal were both pretty and lived-in, and the residents hung their laundry out to dry with little concern for how many boatloads of tourists saw their underwear. There was an exhibit of money from around the world, which perhaps the waitress my last dinner would have enjoyed, but which I found rather random. I liked the exhibit on wood carvings, though, and the separate collection of elaborately carved beds.

On coming to Hangzhou I'd switched from my muddy hiking shoes to my other pair, a comfortable but pretty pair of purple ballet flats. I say "comfortable," but after two days of much walking my heels were feeling tender. So I took a bicycle rickshaw back from the old part of the village to the bus station, a distance probably a bit under a mile. It was the first time I'd taken anunmetered taxi, so I tried out my bargaining skills again. The man told me 10 yuan, I offered him 5, and he took it. I felt a little guilty about that--it's less than a dollar, a pretty paltry sum for being pulled across the village through someone else's physical effort.

I had to wait awhile for the next bus to Hangzhou. Some people in the terminal stared at me, and one teenage boy came and looked over my shoulder curiously as I wrote in my journal. I wasn't very far from either cosmopolitan Hangzhou orWuzhen's touristy old town, but they felt very distant.

If my trip to Wuzhen had been so-so, my evening back in Hangzhou made up for it. I ate at a vegetarian restaurant on Yanning Road that had, I think, the longest menu I'd ever seen. They apparently didn't actually have many of the things on the menu, but no matter. I ordered fake pork and corn juice on the waitress's suggestion, and fake shark's fin soup. The food was excellent. Along with the dishes atLamu's House of Tibet, it was the best I had in China. The bill came to 96 Yuan, more than 10 times what the previous night's dinner had cost, but still only $14.

After dinner I strolled through the lively night market in the square nearby. It was a little like Beijing's snack street, but with fewer snacks and more of other things, from furniture to fingernail clippers. From there I went down to the lake, where the paths are illuminated at night in a way that's downright romantic. There were fountains in the lake a short distance south of me, and I went to admire them.

Huangshan, Day 1

On the morning of the 21st I went to the bus station and bought a ticket to Huangshan, which Lonely Planet described as "China's most beautiful mountain." It would be my last stop before Shanghai, and the guidebook made getting there sound somewhat complicated: Change from a bus to another bus to another bus, and find a place to stash luggage in between. I wasn't looking forward to dealing with the logistics, but the mountain sounded worth it.

There were two other foreigners on the bus from Hangzhou. When the bus dropped us off a small, 30-something man introduced himself to the three foreigners as "Mr. Cheng, from Lonely Planet." I remembered a mention of his dispensing travel advice with an "impressive accent," which turned out to be pretty flawlessly British. He asked us what our plans were and whether he could help with booking rooms, etc. The other two foreigners (who turned out to be Dutch) just wanted to play things by ear, going up the mountain that afternoon, then going to Nanjing the next day. Mr. Cheng told them that just going up that afternoon wouldn't be worth it; admission to the mountain was about $30 and they'd need more time to see the place.

A young woman standing nearby chimed in. "You will need more time--it's so beautiful up there. We thought we'd just come down this morning but we ended up spending 8 hours walking around."

I think I must have looked at her as though I'd never seen an Asian American before. I don't think I'd talked to one of my fellow countrymen since Josh, more than a week before. I wanted to be her friend. But a minibus had pulled up to the curb and a man I took to be her father was loading suitcases into it, so instead I asked some innocuous question about Huangshan. She answered it, and then they were gone.

Meantime, Mr. Cheng and one of the Dutch guys were getting into an argument over whether Mr. Cheng was too pushy. I myself was happy to have someone to tell me what to do by this time in my trip, but now I had to wait out the argument first.

Finally Mr. Cheng (a.k.a. Simon) said he could help me realize my ambition to spend the night at the summit that night and go to Shanghai the next day. He had me climb onto the back of his motorbike for the short ride to his cafe. I asked whether he'd lived in the UK. He said no, he'd spent a lot of time with his British friend.

At the restaurant Simon booked me a dorm bed--private rooms on the summit were way out of my price range--and a ticket for the 5:00 pm bus to Shanghai, which was apparently the only one of the day. I also had what he said was a traditional Anhui dish of mushrooms and bamboo shoots. Then I went to the bus station to catch a shuttle to the cable car station. This was turning out to be easier than I'd expected.

In the cable car I listened to my fellow passengers chatting in sing-songy Cantonese and admired the scenery. The woman across from me asked me one question in English: Was I traveling alone? That was the extent of our conversation.

One of my goals in coming to China had been to see the kind of scenery that gets painted on scrolls, and I'd come to the right place. The conical peaks, the elegantly scraggly trees that clung to them, and the muted greyish hue of the landscape made the scenery seem at once familiar and unreal.

I didn't have a map, but I managed to find the hotel fairly quickly. It was a 4-star establishment with dorms in the back, near the foot massage parlor. The lobby was crowded with tourists, which detracted a bit from the 4-star vibe. The room wasn't bad--12 beds, clean, with one bathroom. A Chinese couple was eating instant noodles and watching TV. I left my bag and went out to enjoy the last hour or so of daylight.

All of the mountain's paths were paved, with gradients shaped into regular steps. I walked around the paths until dusk, taking copious pictures. Simon had told me that the following day was supposed to be overcast and a little rainy, so I knew this might be my only chance to enjoy the view.

It got dark at around 5:30, leaving me wondering what to do. Hanging out in the dorm room seemed depressing, and the few couches in the hotel lobby were filled with people who also had nowhere else to be. I had an overpriced tea in the empty bar and wrote in my journal for awhile, then went to the hotel next door to compare dinner buffet prices. It turned out my hotel was the better deal at about $14; I read my book and lingered until closing time. Then I wandered upstairs to see the karaoke room. Music blared and colored lights swept the room, but the place was empty. It was time for bed.

Huangshan, Day 2

***Warning: Extreme complaining follows***

I woke up at about 3:00 because people in the room were moving around and having quiet conversations. I went back to sleep, and woke up a little later to similar noises. At around 5:00 my fellow tourists apparently decided it was time to get up. Seemingly the etiquette of shared rooms is different in China, or perhaps only on the top of Huangshan. I couldn't fathom what they were actually going to do at this hour. There were no planes to catch, nothing was open, and the sunrise was more than an hour off. As I'd ascertained the night before, there was absolutely nothing to do on the top of the mountain in the dark. Was a little bit more sleep on my hard, narrow, creaky bunk bed really too much to ask for?

Yes, yes it was. After 20 or 30 minutes of chatting at full volume and packing, most of the inhabitants were gone--leaving the light on behind them, and me in a truly rotten mood. I tried to get back to sleep, failed, and finally put on my shoes and coat and went out.

It was dark when I left the hotel, but trees and rocks soon began to take shape behind the fog. It looked as though Simon had been right that there would be no sunrise, but I staked out an eastward-looking vantage point anyway. It was already host to plenty of overly optimistic early risers. We watched as the blackness turned to grey and then lighter grey, and as ghostly hints of scenery appeared. Around the official sunrise time of 6:13, some people applauded and cheered, and we all laughed. It was a collective disappointment.

While standing and waiting for the sun to rise, I noticed that my right ankle felt swollen. This was strange, since my right leg had been unscathed in the bike accident, and I'd noticed nothing wrong while putting on my shoes. I walked around a bit and took some pictures, then went back to the room to inspect my foot.

The Band-Aid, inadequate and applied too late, hung uselessly from the skinned patch on my heel. I didn't have another one. My ankle was visibly swollen, and tender to the touch. I pondered my situation: There was no obvious place to get medical care on the summit, and even if I descended to Tangkou, I was certain that getting fixed up would not be easy. Probably I was going to lose my foot. Or die. Or lose my foot, and then die anyway. I struggled to break through my pessimism and come up with a plan. What I came up with was: I would buy more Band-Aids, disinfect and bandage my ankle, and then go see a doctor if things hadn't improved by the time I got to Shanghai. I guessed that Shanghai would be a great place for a foreigner in search of a doctor.

American English is, in my opinion, somewhat deficient in that we lack a generic term for "Band-Aid." Sure, there's "bandage," but that connotes the type of serious bandages that involve gauze and tape. Fortunately I was toting a mini Oxford Chinese-English dictionary, so I looked up the British word "plaster," and went to the convenience store to ask for a "gaoyao."

I was pleasantly surprised when the clerk understood me and went to get the gaoyao. He ruffled around in some shoeboxes behind the counter and came out with a flat rectangular box that did not look like it would contain Band-Aids. He asked me whether it was for my knee, and I said no, pointing to my heel. "Can," he said. It's really a boon to beginners that sentences like "can" are perfectly legitimate in Chinese.

The gaoyao were expensive, about $7. I found a relatively private place off the already-crowded paths and took off my shoe and sock, then opened the box. It contained five bandages, each about 4 by 3 inches. These were serious bandages. After I'd rubbed hand sanitizer on my heel and slapped one on, I felt that I might not die or lose my foot after all.

I wandered around the foggy mountain, heading in the general direction of a summit I saw on the map signs that dotted the paths. There seemed to be no escaping the tour groups; they were so thick that traffic jams formed at narrow or steep parts of the paths, while in other places one merely had to walk slowly. The groups paused at overlooks and took turns snapping pictures of each other in front of blankets of fog. My favorite such overlook was ironically named "Cloud-Dispelling Pavillion." There were few other Westerners.

When I got to Bright Summit Peak, I decided to take a different route back to the area my hotel was in. I had an idea that since there was nothing to see, I'd have a coffee in one of the hotels and write in my journal rather than following the tourist herds along the paths all day. I glanced at one of the maps (none of which showed the entire summit, but only what was within a few kilometers' vicinity), and headed off confidently.

I walked and walked. Occaisionally the fog cleared a little and I caught some spectacular views, all the more precious because they were rare. Once I came on what appeared to be a giant soccer ball erected on a summit. But mainly I just walked: uphill, downhill, uphill again. None of the maps I came across now showed the area where my hotel was. Time crawled by. It became harder and harder to convince myself that I was having a good time. I realized that my personal version of hell might be much like this: surrounded at all times by people I didn't know and couldn't talk to, sleep-deprived and tired from walking, my knees aching and my ankle infected, and lost. Why, oh why, hadn't I brought a map? Because I'd had no idea how big and confusing the top of a mountain could be, that's why.

Eventually I started to ask the porters and concession stand workers for directions. The directions sounded somewhat involved, but I could only really understand the pointing part. So I'd ask for directions, walk awhile, ask for directions again. Then the pointers began to contradict each other, and I found myself going in circles. At that point I gave up. It was only about 1:00, and the bus to Shanghai wouldn't leave for another 4 hours, but I went back to a cable car station I'd seen (not the same one I'd come up on) and rode to the bottom of the mountain. I took the bus to Tangkou and went back to Mr. Cheng's Restaurant.

"How did you sleep?" Simon asked. I told him about my roommates from hell. He nodded. "It's normal. They were excited about the sunrise." This didn't really clear things up for me, perhaps because I've never been so excited about a sunrise that I couldn't sleep. And if I did accidentally wake up hours early for a sunrise, my reaction would be not to wake up all my friends and anyone else in the vicinity, but to try to go back to sleep. I guess that's what they call a cultural difference.

At the restaurant I had some tofu and rice and wrote in my journal. I also conscripted Simon to help me make a hostel reservation in Shanghai, and took a trip to the Internet cafe. I tried to get cash, but the ATM claimed it couldn't communicate with my bank. Ugh.

The minibus picked me up at the cafe at 4:45, and I was finally on my way to Shanghai. Simon had explained that the minibus would take me to meet up with a bigger bus. By the time we pulled out of Tangkou there were three other foreigners on the bus, two twenty-something women travelling together and a tall bespectacled guy.

It was quite dark by the time the minibus pulled into a bus station with no signs of life. We sat for a few minutes, and then a man got on and made an announcement that seemed to cause some consternation. All I'd understood was "twenty-five." I was about to ask the other foreigners when they thought was going on when one of the women tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether I spoke Chinese. Fortunately the tall guy volunteered that the big bus wasn't here, but was supposed to maybe arrive in 25 minutes.

For some reason I was having a hard time placing accents. The women turned out to be English teachers living in Shanghai; one was American, the other English. The tall guy was from Saskatchewan or one of those other Midwestern provinces. He was travelling with his Chinese-Canadian wife and his mother-in-law, which was how he knew what was going on.

Eventually a bus appeared, and we got on it. During a rest stop the Canadian helped me figure out that my hostel wasn't terribly far from the bus station we'd be arriving at, which was good news since the subway wouldn't be running in the middle of the night. His wife had been talking to a passenger who lived in Shanghai, a pretty young woman with an extraordinary, Marilyn Monroe-like voice. She came back to relay what she'd learned, the names of the three taxi companies I should use. I could only half-remember one because I knew the first character in its name, "da," or "big."

The swelling had gotten worse; my ankle bones were now mere dimples. I checked my leg periodically for red streaks. There were none. Well, that was something.

Shanghai

I'd had a lot of ideas, earlier in my trip, about what I might do in Shanghai: Shop (since I wouldn't have to worry too much about packing light at that point); get a massage, a haircut, a manicure and a pedicure; ride the world's tallest elevator. But by the time my bus actually approached Shanghai my ambitions had been pared down considerably: go to the doctor, and see the Bund.

We pulled into the bus station at about 1:30 am. The Canadians and the woman from Shanghai with the Marilyn Monroe voice firmly led me away from the unlicensed taxi drivers (as if I hadn't figured out by now not to take an unlicensed taxi!), and the English teachers disappeared. The woman from Shanghai ushered the Canadians into what she considered a reputable taxi, and then set to work finding the right cab for me among the cluster of licensed cabs. Spotting a Da (something) taxi at the edge of the bunch, she took my hand and led me to it. I had an idea that she probably understood English, but all I remember hearing her say in either language was "very good" (in English). I got in the taxi, thanked her, and gave the driver the piece of paper with the address of my hostel.

I recognized the broad, nearly-empty road out to the hostel: it was the one the bus had come in on. There was a raised highway overhead, and as on the way in, I noticed welding sparks falling off it. I was tired enough to find them wonderfully fascinating and atmospheric.

At an intersection the driver pulled over and asked someone at the corner where the hostel was. Then he came back to the car and told me (with liberal use of sign language) to get out and walk a short distance. I looked at him skeptically. It was the middle of the night, I was tired, I didn't know Shanghai, and I walked with a limp. I knew better by now than to cling to my American idea that taxis take you exactly where you're supposed to go, but cling I did. The driver reacted to my skeptical look by gesturing even more enthusiastically, as though I were a wayward airplane. Alright, then. I paid him and went off in the direction indicated. On the corner an ATM from a Chinese bank I'd had success with before. I tried it, and lo and behold, it worked! I had money, and I was finally in Shanghai, steps from a place to sleep. I might have had a spring in my step as I limped toward my hostel, which was in fact quite close.

Things only got better: The Shanghai City Central hostel was probably the best I'd stayed in in China. It was huge and new, and the staff was professional and spoke English well. For some reason I got a free upgrade to a suite (two twin beds and a couch downstairs, a double bed upstairs). It was just what I needed.

The next morning I enjoyed a free breakfast buffet (a first in China) in the hostel restaurant while watching CNN (yet another first). Then I asked one of the women at the front desk about an English-speaking doctor. She gave me a card for a local hospital and told me to take a taxi. This sounded simple, but catching a taxi from the hostel was, strangely, not. It was on a major street, so I tried stepping out to the raised strip between the bike lane and the car lanes and doing my Chinese hand-wave. All the empty taxis that drove by seemed to be in the middle lane, which didn't seem efficient, especially in rush-hour traffic. None showed any interest in picking me up. After a while I wandered down to the big intersection where I'd been dropped off the night before and tried from a corner. Then I tried from the median, which admittedly didn't seem to be a good place to get a cab, but in this lawless traffic, who knew? Finally an older man waiting to cross the street pointed out the spot where taxis were allowed to stop, and did. I got a Da (something) taxi almost instantly.

I couldn't understand a word the driver said, and guessed whether the right response to a particular question was to hand him the hospital's card, or say "I don't understand," or "I don't know." There was quite a bit of traffic, and it felt like a long trip, and I amused myself by trying to read Chinese. I realized I was headed to "Flower Mountain" hospital, which seemed almost inappropriately whimsical until I realized that Hua Shan (flower mountain) is actually a neighborhood. Then I read the ad on the back window of another Da (something) taxi: Wo chi, wo chi, wo chi chi chi (I eat, I eat, I eat, eat, eat). Was this an ad for a restaurant? Odd. Then I noticed the characters were above a phone number, 57 57 5777 (pronounced wu qi, wu qi, wu qi qi qi). I'd decoded a Chinese mnemonic!

I met another 20-something American woman in the hospital elevator (floor 8 for English speakers). She'd been living in Shanghai for a month, teaching English, and hadn't had much time out too explore outside the city so far. The story seemed familiar.

I didn't have to wait long to see the doctor, a small 50-ish man with a friendly face whose English was not quite fluent. I sat across from him at his desk while he carefully copied the information from the forms I'd filled out. He commented that my country had an election coming up, and asked who I thought would win. Then he asked how he could help me today.

My issue was a little strange to explain even to native English-speakers: "My shoe rubbed a hole in my heel, and now my ankle is huge." I tried, and then just showed him. He ushered me over to the hospital bench in the corner and even drew the curtain, which I thought was funny: Wouldn't want anyone walking in and seeing my bare foot! As soon as he saw it, all his sentences seemed to end in exclamation marks: "Oh, it is infected! It is very severe! You will need intravenous antibiotics!" The exclamation marks made him sound strangely cheerful, and I felt cheered. Clearly, I'd done the right thing in coming to the hospital, but now that I was here the doctor knew what to do. There'd been no talk of death or amputation. I put my sock and shoe back on and sat down in the chair at the desk.

The doctor decided which antibiotic I should take and went to make sure they had it in stock. I told him I'd be leaving the next day and was allergic to some antibiotics. He asked me which ones. I told him. I repeated it once or twice, enunciating as well as I could. Finally he had me write them down.

"amoxicillan" I began.

"More clear!" he ordered. Very well.

AMOXICILLAN
ERITHROMYCIN
SEPTRA

My mom had me memorize the list at a very young age, and it's burned on my memory like a Sesame Street ditty (thanks, mom!). The doctor disappeared again, and then returned to tell me that I should be fine with what he was prescribing. As for my impending trip, I'd get an IV now and one in the morning, and then I should get to a hospital as soon as I got back to the States to continue my once-daily infusions.

I had to wait near the nurses station for my IV, and saw the American again. We talked about our diagnoses, and about learning Chinese and why she'd come to Shanghai.

When I finally limped out of the hospital, I took a taxi to the Bund. It was an overcast day, but I had a good view of the TV tower and the skyscrapers across the river. I chose a restaurant in a nearby shopping district for lunch. The waitress told me to get catfish, and I complied, ordering a few other dishes as well. The dish that had been translated into English as "vegetarian chicken" turned out to be cubes of tofu atop a bed of sliced fermented eggs--not exactly what I'd had in mind. But while I found the fermented eggs just as inedible as the first one I'd tried, the flavor they leant the tofu wasn't bad at all. Overall I was fairly underwhelmed by the food, and decided to do something different for dinner.

At the moment, though, my sleep debt weighed on my heavily. I took the subway back to the hostel, noting that it was just as nice as the one in Beijing.

After my nap, I consulted Lonely Planet and found a recommended Indian restaurant in the old French Concession. I found it easily, a tiny anglophone haven above a quiet bar. At the table to my right, an American man and a Chinese woman alternated between Chinese and English. At the table to my left, two Indian-Malaysian men spoke English with two Chinese women. The owner came around and anointed the women with stick-on dots between our eyebrows. He debated the Malaysians about how long it had been since they'd visited--apparently they came to Shanghai regularly on business. He remembered the American too. The spiciness of my dish forced me to eat at a leisurely pace, and as I read a magazine and eavesdropped I started to form a romantic vision of what life would be like as an expat in Shanghai. After I left the restaurant, I wandered down a street lined with expat bars, which gave way to a more diverse array of businesses. I stopped in a small tea shop and bought a few things, then in a massage parlor. I meant to get just a back rub but ended up with the full treatment, which would have been fine if it hadn't involved pounding on my shins: I still had a huge bruise on one from my bike accident in Lijiang. Later I saw that while no new bruises had been created, color from the original one had diffused as far as my foot.

I caught a cab to the Bund, since it was my last chance to see it at night. I took some pictures, and then headed back to the hostel and bed.

The next morning I woke up early and tried to pack reasonably quickly. I wanted to take advantage of the breakfast buffet before heading to the hospital, and hoped to have a little bit of time in the city between my IV and the airport.

The doctor came by to talk to me while the medicine dripped into me. The swelling and pain had decreased significantly, so he prescribed some oral antibiotics for me and told me I'd only need to see a doctor in the States if my ankle started to get worse again. This was good news--I hadn't been looking forward to navigating the American medical system in California, where I don't have a doctor.

I left the hospital without a limp (though I was still wearing my dirty hiking shoes--the swelling wouldn't allow me to put on my pretty pair). I took the subway to the stop nearest the Bund, but walked the other direction along the pedestrian street. I didn't have much time. I came to a square where a stage had been set up, and a troupe of green-clad women were putting on a free dance performance. The style of dance didn't seem to require much athletic ability, but much smiling, synchronization, and umbrella-twirling. I watched for awhile, then went back to the hostel to pick up my things.

I took the maglev train to the airport, even though it required riding the subway to the other side of town. I alternately watched the digital speedometer climb to 431 km/hour and back down again, and watched the cars on the highway next to us quickly fall behind. The whole ride took five minutes or so.

What I did on my October vacation

I'm back! For those who haven't heard me talk about it ad nauseum already, here's where I've been: China for three weeks on vacation, California for just over a week (at a conference and a wedding), back in DC for a week trying to catch up on things.

I'm going to try blogging my trip backward, Momento-style. It might be more interesting that way, and because of the reverse-chronological nature of blogs, latecomers will be able to read about my trip in order. I've put together a basic map of where I went; if I get more ambitious later on, I'll add pictures, chronology, etc.

Visa

I renewed my passport for my China trip. The good news is that passport renewal has gotten much faster: I got the new one about 10 days after mailing in my application. The bad news is that the new passports are hideous. Where the old passports look dignified and old-fashioned, the new passports bear a chip that allows them to be read through your pocket, quotations from the likes of Lincoln, and pictures of cowboys and cacti. I think my collection of souvenir pigs is less tacky than this passport.

Though the Chinese visa I picked up this week is considerably less ugly than my passport, the application process put a different form of patriotism on display: A video of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony plays on a loop on large-screen TVs in the waiting area of the visa office. Apparently listing my occupation as "science writer" raised a red flag, because I had to write an sign an affidavit stating that I wouldn't do anything work-related while in China.

Peachy

This belated entry is brought to you by my Comcastic internet service.

For Labor Day weekend I went to Colorado for Niffer-bur's wedding reception. It was the first time in four years that I'd found a good excuse to visit Colorado in the summer, and it wasn't just summer: It was peach season. Colorado's peaches seem to be a well-kept secret, but believe you me, they are delicious. It could just be because I experience them closer to the tree there, but I generally don't even bother buying peaches anywhere else, to spare myself the disappointment.

Delicious peaches don't grow just anywhere in Colorado, but fortunately they do grow close to my grandparents' place on the Western Slope (i.e. the third of the state that's west of the mountains). Of course, peaches weren't the only or even the best reason to visit my grandparents for a couple of days, but they were a significant side benefit.

By the way, Mr. and Mrs. Niffer-bur's reception was lovely, even though no peaches were involved. In addition to the groom's family and a few people I'd met in college but since forgotten, I was introduced to a style of swing dancing Mr. Niffer-bur and his friends invented as undergraduates. Good times.

Olympics

The Olympics always make me cry. I know, weird. The first time I remember crying over them was in 1996 when Kerri Strug twisted her ankle but won the gold anyway. But I cry over much more mundane stuff than that, too, like when Ireland got its first swimming medal. I cry sometimes when people mess up and cry themselves, and I cry when they win and look really happy. At least I've never cried over beach volleyball. In fact I try hard not to watch beach volleyball, but NBC doesn't make this easy.

I'm not sure why this happens, since I'm neither a very teary nor a particularly empathetic person normally, and I grow more cynical about the Olympics with each passing four years. I didn't actually watch much of it this year, apart from tae kwon do, partly because most of the time when I turned on NBC they were showing beach volleyball, basketball, or, at one point, the early miles of the women's marathon. If I were to award a gold medal for tearworthiness, it would be to Su Li-Wen of Taiwan, who fought a bronze medal match with a bad knee, and came awfully close to winning before her Croatian opponent kicked her in the bad leg, then later scored during sudden death. She was a real trooper, but she was sobbing when her coach gave her a piggy-back ride out of the gymnasium. It's here, at around 44:00.

Local flavor

I pass this coffee shop every day on my way to the Metro, and it's always got some quirky message for me, usually ending in an exclamation mark. One of my favorites: "We have cupcakes!" Lately they seem to be less about advertising specific Pound offerings, though, and more philosophical. One day it was "A powerful city deserves powerful coffee!", and yesterday, "Waking up and facing Monday beats the alternative" -- would that be considered existentialist?

Sadly, I've never actually gone in to Pound. I'm not much of a coffee drinker, and even if I were, Metro doesn't allow drinks. And the place closes in mid-afternoon, so I can't stop in on my way home. I suspect Pound caters mainly to ATF agents, construction workers, and XM employees. No wonder they're quirky.

Bus rage

I interrupt my long blogging hiatus to bring you this story (with a strong warning that it is NSFM - not suitable for mealtime).

Three thoughts:

1. This story is a week old. How did I just hear about it today? Are my friends too tasteful to post it on their Gmail Talk status lines?
   
2. Whoever dreamed up this ad campaign had clearly never ridden a Greyhound bus, or been anywhere near a terminal.
3. Wow.
   

Vacation

I bought my ticket to China today. I'm leaving on October 2 and staying for three weeks. Flying into Beijing and out of Shanghai. Beyond that, I don't know yet where I'm going or what I'm doing. I don't even know whether I'll be able to meet up with Deme, or whether she'll be long gone by then. But I do know that it's going to be awesome.

The time, they are a-gentrifying

The very week KFC closed, what should appear in our neighborhood but a cherry picker full of dudes with flower baskets, decorating the light poles. I also noticed that the abandoned houses on our street now have plywood covering their window-holes; not only that, but the plywood is painted the same color as the house it decorates.

This is going to be a classy neighborhood, I tell you. Makes me wish K and I owned our place.

Bulletproof KFC

To this Eckington optimist's post about the closing of a neighborhood restaurant, I would add step zero: remove the bulletproof glass encasing the employees. And perhaps a step 0.5: install tables.

Belted

Yesterday I finally got my black belt. It's hard to take myself too seriously as a result when the test group consisted of me and one other 20-something woman and about a dozen elementary schoolers. Perhaps the hardest part of the test was sparring, in which teenagers kicked my ass in front of an audience of proud, photo-happy parents. But as someone who's been pretty terrible at every sport I've ever tried (with the possible exception of cross-country, at which I was merely mediocre), it's nice to have affirmation that four years of physical training has yielded measurable results.

Afterward I celebrated by hosting a dinner-and-a-movie get-together at Agent V's. Despite my fromagophilia I've lately become a devotee of a cookbook called the Veganomicon, and used its advice to make chickpea cutlets with mustard sauce and roasted asparagus. Then we watched The Long Kiss Goodnight. In my evite I'd described this movie as "a delicious morsel of so-bad-it's-good-ness," but I'd forgotten just how bad--and how good--it really is. Here's a sample.

SufferJets vs. Psycho Dolls

The Ithaca SufferJets took on the Syracuse Psycho Dolls on Friday night at Cass Park, and I was there. This was the second roller derby bout I'd witnessed, so for the uninitiated, here's my one-word summary of the sport: awesome. It's even more awesome when you know some of the competitors, and (spoiler alert) they win.

Several hundred people showed up, which was a pretty impressive turnout considering that few of the audience members could have been familiar with the sport. I wasn't surprised, though, having witnessed Nell's organizational and marketing abilities before. The crowd got into it, too, quickly figuring out when to cheer and chanting "Suff-er-Jets!" during the final timeout.

There was a decidedly un-awesome part of this bout, however: just a few minutes in, one of the Psycho Dolls fell and snapped her femur. Without going into gory detail, I do mean snapped. She was screaming in pain before the ambulance arrived. The crowd clapped for her as she was being wheeled out, and she saluted us with both middle fingers. I thought that was heartening--you wouldn't expect a roller girl to smile wanly and wave, would you?

Terminus Est does an excellent job of documenting the bout here.

Ithaca

Nell loads Franklin the horse into the Blue Goose for his
trip to the bout

I arrived in Ithaca two hours behind the scheduled time. Nell picked me up in the Blue Goose, her '84 Volvo station wagon, and calmly explained that she was in "panic mode." The debut home bout of her roller derby team, the SufferJets, was mere hours away, she'd barely slept, and she should probably be at the rink by now, but she had so much to do, and people kept calling her. Did I mind if we went to Shortstop? Shortstop sounded perfect to me.

I got a small poor man's pizza (PMP) to tide me over until dinner--Ithaca claims to have originated the French bread pizza, contrary to what the French might tell you. We ate our sandwiches in Nell's living room, in what would turn out to be my only indoor meal all weekend. The weather was perfect, and people in Ithaca get excited about nice weather.

It was really nice to be back. I love DC, but I must say, it makes me appreciate how pretty and quiet and unpolluted and cozy Ithaca is. It's so cute how people don't drive like maniacal misanthropes there. Sure, you have to dodge potholes that could swallow a Smartcar, but that's just part of the charm, right?

Bus odyssey part 2

The bus from New York City to Ithaca was also over an hour late, for no apparent reason. I lined up for it at around 7:30 am. Half an hour later a security woman came by and scolded us for not lining up single-file. "This line is in disarray!" she said. Once we finally started boarding a woman near me in line, wearing fashionable glasses and a green trucker hat, kept yelling suggestions at the Greyhound workers. "You're causing chaos here!" she said, and, "hey, security, how about bringing some order here?" I was torn between the vicarious satisfaction of hearing someone protest against the unapologetic crappiness of the bus experience, and an introvert's annoyance at the added tension she was bringing to the situation. What was this woman, some kind of Greyhound virgin? Did she actually expect anything different?

After we'd finally gotten on the bus a woman walked up to the Greyhound virgin with the kind of smile one doesn't often see at Port Authority at 8:30 am. She shyly asked trucker-hat woman whether she was Josie from Top Chef, and lo and behold, she was! A celebrity spotting on Greyhound! This made me feel marginally better about riding the bus, even though Josie had only appeared on a reality TV show I'd never watched, and seemed to feel that the hour was too early for recognition. Here she is wielding a knife.

Bus odyssey part 1

I took the bus to Ithaca. Many people pointed out to me that this was a bad idea, but Ithaca isn't an easy place to get to, especially sans car. Several friends in DC suggested that I take the train, which I thought was cute--apparently people in DC assume that you can take the train anywhere. Agent V recently told me he's contemplating taking the train to the Florida Keys, since it's "only" $120 and 24 hours each way.

But there's no passenger train service to Ithaca, and flying to its tiny airport would have cost upwards of $650, since it was Cornell's commencement weekend. I usually rent a car, but last time I rented a car for a holiday weekend there was a very long line involved, and paying $4/gallon for gas was unappealing. Plus, the Greyhound station is within walking distance of my house, and my neighborhood has so few amenities that I was tempted to take advantage of this one.

My bus was an hour late leaving DC, but I didn't mind too much since I expected a long layover in New York City anyway. On arriving at Port Authority bus terminal I spotted this sign. Two thoughts:

1. "Motor stairs"? Is this an expression only New Yorkers know, like standing "on line"? Or is Port Authority trying to accommodate its many patrons who speak English as a second language, and might not know a word like "escalator"?
2. I heard a standup comedian recently say that he likes escalators because an escalator can never really be out of order; it just becomes stairs. Apparently not this escalator.

What I accomplished this week

1.) Doing the splits (front and back--I'm still working on middle) for the first time since I was about 17 and taking ballet.

2.) Keeping my downstairs neighbor's cats alive until his return today. This may not sound like a big deal, but I seem to be kryptonite for cats. One of the neighbor's cats got sick a few days into his three-week absence, I took him to the animal hospital in the middle of the night and then gave him his medicine and canned food as directed, and you know what? He seems to be doing ok. Although the episode has made me even less inclined to acquire a new feline anytime soon.

Ubiquitous

There's someone out there with the same first and last names as me, who has the same email address as me except with a middle initial in it. Some time ago she apparently began putting the wrong email address (mine) on forms left and right. Long story short, I ended up finding out her real email address and now I forward her anything that comes to my inbox that isn't spam but is clearly not for me. (Yes, I can be a nice person sometimes.)

The strange thing is that, judging by her email, my doppelganger lives in several different places. She's supporting Barack Obama's campaign in Washington state, taking her kid to gymnastics lessons in Houston, and, according to the evite I got today, perhaps attending a barbecue in northern New Jersey. Or, more likely, these are three different people. Maybe I will track down all of their email addresses eventually and end up routing their mail like one of those old-time phone operators. Except that it will also feel like that restaurant scene in Being John Malkovich.

Up and coming

I noticed this week that one of the buildings in my neighborhood will be hosting Artomatic this year. A bit of background: Nothing fun really goes on my in neighborhood, as far as I can tell. I was excited last weekend to find out there's apparently a good Thai restaurant... a mere six block away from my place.

A few days after I spotted the Artomatic building, I saw a poster advertising an outdoor Bond film series just north of my metro stop. That's right, every Thursday night all summer long I'll be able to go see a Bond movie, for free, from a hilly overgrown triangle of land formed by two busy roads and a railroad track.

Ok, astute readers may have perceived that I'm a bit dubious about the Bond thing. The intersection of New York and Florida Avenues does seem like a terrible spot for outdoor films, and apparently this series was dreamed up by the same optimists who've attempted to dub this part of town "Capitol Hill North." But I'm also intrigued.

Blooming 2

Today I saw a tree in bloom for the first time this year, and was excited enough to stop and take a picture (not shown). There is one thing I expect to miss when summer comes, though, which is the kick-ass view from my room and balcony. Here's what dominates the skyline at night now. Between me and the Capitol is a large tree, though, which I expect will dampen the effect in a month or two.

Unlucky 2

This past weekend I had strep throat. If you're thinking, "hmmm, I haven't had strep since I was 12," there's a reason for that: Adults rarely get strep. If, like me, you're an adult with no tonsils, your odds are even better. But there it is: I had strep.

Which wouldn't have been so terrible--ok, I could barely swallow, but I spent a couple of days sleeping a lot and watching DVDs--except that I was supposed to test for my black belt on Saturday afternoon, and I missed it. My next chance to test will be in June.

Not that being a black belt would make a large material difference in my life. It would make a small material difference, though, not only because I'd get to wear an actual black belt to class, embossed with my name, but also because I'd have the privilege of wearing a black uniform. Not that I'm a workout fashionista, but that would be a vast improvement on what I've had to wear for the past four years. These pants don't flatter anyone, but they're particularly unkind to those of us who are well-endowed in the gluteal region.

At least I have the satisfaction of knowing that there is literally a black belt with my name on it, waiting for me in the studio office.

My stats

Here's an email I just got:

subject: [Coloradan], you are more desired than 79% of all people.
mailed-by: facebookmail.com

This email was sent by Social Profile. You can disable emails here.
---
In total, you were reviewed for dating 5 times and 2 people expressed interest in you.
You are more desirable than 79% of 23,337,936 people.

Check your Social Profile

I have to say, I thought the "compare people" application on Facebook sounded potentially dangerous and tactless when I first heard about it, but then TOWWAS made it sound all fun and wholesome. And now look where I am: trying not to think too hard about who those five people might have been. Cousins? Ex-boyfriends? People I just don't think about, you know, that way?

I wish I'd saved the Social Profile email I got a few weeks ago, which offered unsolicited observations about my "strengths" and areas I needed to work on, based on my rankings (fortunately, not the dating rankings that time). Strengths included that people wouldn't mind being stuck in handcuffs, stranded on a desert island, or just hanging out with me for the day. (It feels good to be tolerable.)

Things I'm ranked very low on include being outgoing, being powerful, and (quel horreur!) having a nice laugh.

Cross-cultural

There's an old Chinese man who plays outside various Metro stations with a traditional-sounding instrument (I think it's called an erhu) and a recorded accompaniment. I like it when I catch him--it adds a touch of the exotic to my day.

This morning I was riding up the escalator and heard him playing, so I took out off my headphones to listen. As I got closer it became clear that, yes, he was playing Celine Dion's theme from Titanic. Yikes.

Google analytics

It's a huge day for my blog if it gets 10 visits. So I was fascinated to learn that on January 11, 139 people landed on this page after Googling "died in a knitting accident."

The Internet is weird. People have also gotten here after Googling something along the lines of cats afraid of vacuum cleaners why.

Spam

It's my opinion that spam is a greatly under appreciated pop art form. For example, I have to admire this choice piece of email (from one Dr. Jerry Gutierrez, JerryGutierrez@denisehamilton.com) for its complete lack of subtext:

Your woman shack up with your mate that's why you are alone.

His device is bigger than yours and this is the main reason of leave.

Don't worry fellow. At present you have marvelous chance to Lengthen your jang length.

Enlarge your instrument length and you'll forget about problems for sure.

[Web address]

While I give this ad an "A" for clarity and directness, it gets an "F" for targeting.

Primaries

I was feeling like a bad Washingtonian for choosing my preferred candidate based on his or her charisma, so I decided to take this handy quiz to see who I'd vote for if I were judging based on Issues. And, well, I defy anyone to find meaningful differences between the Democratic candidates' positions on just about anything (I didn't attempt to slog through the Republicans).

Maybe this is news only to me--I've studiously avoided watching the debates so far. Or maybe people in the blue states are right now passionately debating whether there should be a timeline for troop withdrawal from Iraq, or just a commitment to get out of there ASAP. Maybe I'll be a good Washingtonian and do some of my own research on, say, the candidates' health care proposals, but for now I'm going to make this bold pronouncement: All the Democratic candidates are the same. Charisma is all we have to go on.

Back yard

So yes, K and I moved a month ago. The new place is terrific, and the housewarming party is tentatively scheduled for the 19th.

While the house is nice, I think its most interesting feature is the creepy back yard. Let me take you through the experience of coming home through the alleyway. I took these pictures during the day for illustrative purposes, but try to imagine going through this in the dark (which we often do this time of year).

Why would we come in through the alleyway? For one thing the parking space is back there (I'm still car-less, but K has a newly-sideswiped red station wagon), and for another, it's a shortcut to and from the metro--at least if you don't figure in the time spent locking and unlocking.

The first set of doors to lock and unlock are these, the doors to the parking space:
This brings you to a parking space lined with jagged-topped cement walls:


For extra creepiness, one of the more talkative feral cats will sometimes watch me from the top of one of the walls and meow. Next I unlock the deadbolt on the ivy-grown metal gate on the left; it groans as I open and close it. I step onto the first of the narrow cement steps:

To lock the iron gate I have to put my hand into this jagged hole in the cement wall:


I walk up the stairs and into the leaf-strewn back yard:

There's often a feral cat or two crouching in the shadows watching me, but they run away when I get too close. I walk up the rusty metal stairs, opening and closing a second metal gate at the top and, finally, the house door.

In conclusion, if you're looking for a location for shooting your low-budget horror movie, I'm sure we can work something out. I should say, though, that the house's positive features include a big kitchen with shiny new appliances, reasonably spacious living and dining rooms, and a second floor (!) with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a balcony... that overlooks the back yard.