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.

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.

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.

Editrix

A big congratulations to M.M., who informs me he's been accepted to the University of Maryland's M.B.A. program. He was nice enough to give me some credit for editing his essays (but do admissions people really read these things? I have my doubts). It's great to know his work paid off, including my making him re-write two of his three essays. I find editing other peoples' stuff to be oddly fun, but sometimes I think I get a little carried away...

I've been busy this past month, and also uninspired, blog-wise. Let's have a moment of silence for some of the topics I thought about writing about, but just never got around to:

• How hard (and unpleasant) it is to adjust to a style of tae kwon do where you can hit people in the face, when you're used to a style where you can't
• How lightening struck so close to my building on Friday night that it set off the fire alarm, which turns out to emit an adorably quaint clanging sound
• How G.R. and I threw a surprisingly kick-ass dinner party on Saturday

Also, congratulations to TOWWAS, who finally has Internet access in her lovely and conveniently-situated IKEA-furnished new apartment, and thus can go back to blogging far, far more regularly than I. (Now there's a sentence in need of editing.)

Soapbox II

What do you do when someone writes a near 4,000-word cover article about you, culminating in this take-down?

And now, like a mighty t-rex that has escaped from Jurassic Park, Crichton stomps across the public policy landscape, finally claiming the influence he has always sought. In this sense, he himself is like an experiment gone wrong--a creation of the publishing industry and Hollywood who has unexpectedly mutated into a menacing figure haunting think tanks, policy forums, hearing rooms, and even the Oval Office. And, ironically, this leaves Crichton in the very role he and the science-fiction genre have always derided: the hubristic man of opinions, the insider, the expert.

Well, if you're Michael Crichton, you respond like this (yes, you need to register to see the full article, but it's free and very worthwhile).

Is the pen, in fact, mightier than the sword? Discuss.

Soapbox

I know that one of the virtues of blogs is supposed to be that they're ultra-current, but I'm going to buck the trend by writing about something I did on Tuesday.

Tuesday being the day Michael Crichton's new book came out. He gave a talk at the National Press Club in honor of the occasion, and I went because of a certain professional interest in the subject of said book, but also--I'll admit it--because Michael Crichton is famous.

He used the opportunity not to read from his new book, or even talk about his new book per se, but to pontificate. In case you're wondering, he believes that political decisions these days have nothing to do with science, and everything to do with, well, politics. Reporters don't check facts and hence feed the beast of poor scientific knowledge. What we need is a reliable system of managing information. Allowing genes to be patented is a terrible policy. Peer review is useless and only serves as a barrier to truly novel discoveries being publicized. In the future, people and organizations will be held liable for bad information they put out.

I was a little envious, frankly. Not that I'd have the hubris to try to draw out an audience of hundreds on a Tuesday night to listen to me lecture about what I think is wrong with the world, but if I wanted to, could I? No. Let alone get them to plunk down $27.95 plus tax for a pre-signed copy of my book. I have to content myself with regaling my five devoted readers with tales of what I had for lunch. Damn.

Speaking of soapboxes and science, I recommend this slightly-outdated article. I went (according to Fast Food Nation) to one of the first high schools in the nation to make an exclusive deal with Coke and post ads in the hallways, and even I found it disturbing.