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.