Hong Kong - Hong Kong

I've had two simultaneous overnight flights, multiple delays, and previous and prior moving engagements, so I haven't slept much in the past 48 hours. In another 48 I start class. The day after will mark one year from the date I first stepped foot in Asia at HKIA before connecting to Kunming last fall. I've made some unexpected circles since. Weird concentricities and tangents.

The next four months will be intense. On top of a bunch of last-semester requisites, I'll be writing my thesis on research I did in Guatemala this spring (and will keep up the travel theme here with ex post facto posts). I'm presenting a redacted version of this at the AAA's annual meeting this November. Also working on fellowships and trying to find a job.



Good summer. I have to sleep now.

josh

Transit

Kunming scene still good. The other day I ate some gut shredding hot pot near Green Lake Park (above) with Xiong Hui and another MinDa head, the sniper. Then we all went back to my dorm to watch "Laborn" and gang secure a semifinals victory. We were joined by the always flossing Xiao Hei ("little black," he is of the Wa ethnic minority), one of last year's bball kings. Good reconnect.

The next day the MinDa dudes all headed out to a new campus/dorm, 45 minutes away, as the old campus is being dedicated to graduate studies. Kind of bummed as I said goodbye to Xiong Hui in the basketball court, which was flooded with a sea of undergraduates preparing to load their possessions onto a fleet buses. I had my own journey ahead of me though, constant motion.

After meeting Tang Lei, manager of the Linden Centre, I killed a few hours then headed to catch an 8 pm flight to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province. The trip there entailed more adventure than I bargained for (and I did bargain copiously, for my plane ticket, taxi ride to airport, etc). The flight was initially delayed due to rain. We boarded about an hour late, then taxi'd around the tarmac for another 45 minutes before being told the weather was too bad to take off. In my experience Chinese aren't particularly courteous in crowded transportation situations, and there was palpable fury mounting as we all deplaned, got back on the boarding shuttle, funneled back into the gate and waited for the thunder gods to take it down a notch. I've mastered the art of airport calm so I just sat back and watched bemusedly. Another 45 minutes or so later we got the go ahead to get back on the shuttle bus that would take us from gate to plane. I got my ticket rescanned and stepped on the bus. And waited. For a long, long time. I'm not sure what exactly happened. Men were screaming. Women were crying. Babies were laughing. A couple of 8-year-old urchins kept creeping up on me, yelling "Hallo!" then running off in hysterics. At one point armed guards boarded the bus and curiously accosted an old man who had been patiently sitting at the front the entire time. We all had to get off the shuttle again. Wait another thirty minutes, then re-rescan tickets and rebus. I half-jokingly tell friends I like to play the dumb foreigner card at times to forego argument or embarrassment. In this case I had no other card to play. I just let myself be corralled from one place to another and hoped that I would arrive in Sichuan that day, in one piece. In the midst of the debacle was one good-natured Tibetan man, with whom I spent the majority of the time talking about the Olympics and Tibetan Buddhism. Eventually we were on the plane, in the air. When we landed in Chengdu everyone cheered and immediately ran for the exit.



I finally arrived at Sichuan University a little past midnight, where I was awaited by Yang Qingfan (above), a professor of Tibetan archaeology. Exhausted from the day's delays, I promptly crashed at the foreign students' dorm.



The next day was heavy rain, so I did minimal exploring. Sichuan is known for being a major player in Ye Olde Tea Game, so I started off the morning giving this place some business just for the cool sign.



Sichuan is perhaps less known for its Tex-Mex, but this wifi spot proved the ideal place from which to phone San Antonio and wish my dad a good bday. The Migas was actually better than any Mexican I've had in Boston, and this is the only place in Asia where I've seen Diet Dr Pepper (shoot out to DFJ). Backed!

The rest of the day was chill. Yang laoshi showed me around the archaeology library and pulled a ton of articles on Shaxi and Yunnan's Buddhist grottoes (almost none of which I can read). We went for a lunch of jiaozi and I retired to watch the US bballers win a gold and nap. That night I went out for Sichuan-style hotpot with Yang and her husband, an Inner Mongolian design teacher. Again got slayed by the pot, which in Sichuan entails dipping skewered foodstuffs into a boiling vat of chili oil. Into it though.



The next day was misty, not soaked, so I took advantage of the opportunity for some quick and dirty tourism. Caught a morning bus to Leshan, about a two-hour drive from Chengdu, and quickly negotiated transport to Sichuan's premier heritage attraction, Leshan Da Fo (Leshan Big Buddha). I've become a deft bargainer, in Leshan I literally quartered the tuk-tuk price with a reserved shake of my head, no Mandarin needed. On the ride there I checked out a croc surfer and gnarled guard. But for the most part I was strictly business.







Leshan DaFo is the world's largest Buddha since the world's largest Buddha retired. Another "biggest Buddhist _______" to cross off the list. I was impressed by the statue itself but also somehow unmoved by the serene environment. Just in manic sightsee mode I guess. Still I lingered for a while at the feet of this massive dude, couldn't touch him but I managed to sneak in a secret handshake before bouncing.



After exiting the park I wasted no time jumping onto a Chengdu-bound bus, getting back around 4 pm. I had grand plans to hit up another site in the city but it was closed by the time I got there. So I just wandered. Wound up at this riverside park with a chill taiji dude. If you squint in the background you can see a man getting a nice riverside shave. I was tempted...



It sucks to eat Chinese food alone so I got this cantaloupe milk tea in the place of lunch. Good pickup. Drank it sitting by this weird sculpture.





Spent a good few hours wandering around the Sichuan University campus, half-lost. It's massive. It takes a full thirty minutes to walk from the West Gate to the East Gate, and in my city meandering I never seemed to escape its periphery. I especially liked the the old-school school buildings and a nice artificial lake park/pagoda.

After returning home and getting bored I headed back into late night Chengdu. There were a lot of active clubs outside my dorm but I was just hunting down some midnight xiao chi and they seemed out of my price bracket anyway. I wish I had more time to explore the city, I know there's a lot there but in my short stay it left me cold compared to the familiarity of Kunming.







This morning Yang Qingfan showed me around the Sichuan University Museum, arguably housing western China's best ethnological art collection. Of course Yang laoshi was especially knowledgeable about the Tibetan collection, which was extensive (with political implications I won't discuss here), and the coolest thing I saw was this Tibetan skullheaded-out skull head. I was also feeling this ill thangka and this lil thangka. Honorable mention reserved for bronze drum culture. Apparently Tibetans are also into making horns from human bone. Wild.



Was this post boring to read? It felt too long in writing, my hand is starting to cramp. In any case, I don't know how much tourisming I have left in me. I'm back in Kunming now and it's pouring rain. Tomorrow is my last full day in China and it is dedicated to prosaic last-minutes and slow lingering. You can expect at least one more post from Asia, waxing nostalgic about the end of my days as a nomadic undergrad. Then we'll see if my life is still interesting when I'm rooted in one spot for more than 5 weeks...


Josh

On the Cheap with No Sleep

I love Yunnan. I've been here for almost a week and the buzz of being back hasn't worn off. I'm glad to have arrived with the person who was my best friend during my Fall semester here, but perhaps more glad to have been on my own for the majority of the time, exploring old haunts with new eyes, new perspective.



After arriving in Kunming on the 15, we set about meeting up with some laopengyou. Stopped by the Minzu Daxue dorm and called Zhang laoshi (above), doorman, volunteer Chinese teacher and pro bono TCM doctor. Zhang came promptly and invited us back to his house for tea (he is quite the aesthete in this respect), dinner, and an Olympics hang sesh.

We also looked up our MinDa friend Xiong Hui. I always get the sense that he is dropping whatever he's doing to meet us, but he seemed to enjoy our company, and we ended up hanging out with him every day for the next few days. Xiong Hui is a certified religion head, making for interesting conversation: in the space of the three months I spent in Yunnan last year, he was successively obsessed with Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. His newest phase is missionary Christianity.



And I ate it Cause I'm so at it, pt II: shared a couple of weird/great meals with Marianna's and my host families, respectively. Pictured: feast of bees and some kind of worm thing. The bees actually weren't bad.





On Monday the 18 Marianna and I met Xiong Hui at Minzu Daxue, the university where we lived and studied. It was nice revisiting the campus, which surprisingly hasn't changed much. I'm way into the colorful chalkboard drawings.





MEMORY LANE FOOD. Breakfast was some old school favorites: this weird peanut sauce/churro/burrito thing and a street crepe. My daily jam last year, I missed it, my stomach didn't.



Street food-->street dude. I swear I left this bleach blonde homeless musician (and his dog) in EXACTLY the same spot last December. Glad to see they're still holding it down.

On Monday afternoon Marianna took off for the greener pastures of Hong Kong, leaving me and Xiong Hui to mull over my future. After a conversation with Kyla Raetz, another SIT alum who's spent the last two months in Yunnan, my appetite was whetted to wander around the province. So I made a snap decision to eat my already-bought plane ticket to Chengdu, check out of my hotel, and head north to Dali. My eternally hospitable companion literally walked me to my bus.











Six hours later I was at the Linden Centre, a renovated Bai courtyard complex in the town of Xizhou, about 30 minutes outside Dali. I visited this place last year, when its proprietors, Brian and Jeanee Linden, showed me around the still very unfinished lot. Invited back as their guest, I was blown away to find it open, fully furnished, and breathtakingly beautiful. One of the nicest places I've ever stayed (see shower above), I am really starting to see their vision take form. The Centre is intended as a sort of cultural retreat, offering classes in traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting, meditation, and sweeping views of Xizhou's Bai-maintained rice fields. It is also an art space in its own right: the Lindens deal Asian antiquities and contemporary Chinese art at their gallery in Wisconsin, and have an impressive selection of their collection on display at the Centre. I only spent one night here but it was enough to become excited about watching this place develop and expand: the Lindens are already renovating a second complex elsewhere in Xizhou, which I visited, and plan to branch out to other locations in SW China. Definitely something to keep an eye on.





Shaxi. I missed this place so much. I've been upset about the prospect of not returning ever since my planned LE pilot crashed in March, and I can't believe I almost passed through Yunnan without making the trek out here. Another brief stopover (only one night!), but so worth it.

Upon arriving, I called up Afeng, the Taiwanese owner of the local guesthouse with whom I ate Thanksgiving dinner last year, and friend of friend Li Min Mo. Afeng not only agreed to let me change some USDs at her guesthouse (I was in a bit of a cash crisis upon arriving), but also gave me a room at a discounted friend's rate. I'm always astounded at the hospitality I receive in Yunnan.

After dropping my bags I immediately headed out to see my old friend Laozhang, patron of Shaxi's premier kafeiguan, and spent the rest of the evening chatting with him, his wife, and Zhang Xi, a Guangzhou newcomer to Shaxi's foreign-Zhang-owned cafe scene. I'm surprised at how much Chinese I've retained from last Fall with practically no practice in between, and how much I can express with such limited means. We stayed up for hours drinking tieguanyin and talking about Olympics, Chinese myth, religion, human origins, writing systems, and Shaxi news. Definitely one of the highlights of the summer.





The next morning I took a spin around Xingjiao temple, which is undergoing mural renovations. As this was the topic of my research paper last year, and something I'd like to continue studying in the future, I was interested to keep tabs on the progress. I also visited Lu Yuan and Sam Mitchell's Shaxi Cultural Center, a guesthouse-cum-educational resource on Shaxi's history and culture that was also under construction when I visited last year. It is looking good, if still a bit unfinished. I especially liked the bulletin board crammed with Shaxiren.





Also hung with some Shaxi bebs, my main crew last year. Word of my return must have spread quickly because in the space of the 12 waking hours I actually spent in Shaxi I saw loads of familiar faces, all greeting me with Ni hui lai le! and Ni meiyou huzi! So happy I came back. I already want to return.

Unfortunately that afternoon I was on the move again: another contemplative 12-hour travel day (my raison d'etre recently) by mini-bus, public bus, taxi, shuttle, plane, taxi, back to Minzu Daxue in Kunming, where Xiong Hui had been waiting for me through an hour-and-a-half flight delay. He'd booked me a room at my old dormitory, arranged for my bedding to be delivered, and accompanied me to cop a dinner of street fried potatoes (not pictured). What a dude.



The immense affinity I've felt with Yunnan these past few days has put me back in the mindset to pursue a Fulbright grant to continue my Shaxi research. So today I went to Cache Electron to meet with Shen Haimei, my host aunt and an anthropology professor at Yunnan University. I was beginning to drop the idea of applying for a Fulbright due to lack of Chinese skills and solid affiliation with a Chinese university, but today's meeting changed that entirely. Shen laoshi is currently researching gender, ethnicity, and identity in Bai villages around Dali, and has recently written several articles about pilgrimage trails uniting SW China with Tibet and India--precisely my research interests. She was extremely excited to hear about the report I did last year and my plans to continue with it, and was more than amenable to giving me a letter of affiliation with her department at YunDa. Funny how things fall in to place sometimes.



Also peeped some cool Kunming street art. Kunming has an active and diverse contemporary art scene, another factor drawing me to this place.



And this guy, Kunming's logo, a tiger untowardly approaching a bull. Shoot outs to Dian culture and Bob Murowchick.

OK so I have about 10 days left in Asia and I still don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of it. And domestic flights can be booked a day in advance so I still don't have to. Later!


Josh

Bangkok slang

Five clouded days in Bangkok, with occasional rays of light. I arrived at my hostel around 3 am and met my old travel friend Marianna. Spent the first day mostly just wandering around, recovering from mini-marathon traveling. Hung out with a few Thai dogs and wily strangers.





The next day was dedicated to exploring the snaking riverine routes connecting my area to Bangkok proper. Crazy fish scene. We wound up at a temple that had some kind of strange New Age Buddhism exhibit. I walked around snapping flicks while my friend chatted it up with an old monk. Chill day otherwise, picked up a c0 and some sketchy street food, these rice balls with surprise octopus filling. Headed to Siam Center (the site of the previous night's failed attempt to meet international pal Jeff Dobereiner, sorry buddy) to end the day with Batman in Imax.







Spent Tuesday dutifully sight-seeing. Actually just went to the Grand Palace, premier Bangkok tourist attraction. This was a crazy place, filled with about a dozen of the most elaborately decorated temples I've ever seen. There seemed to be no aesthetic theme aside from ostentatiousness. Every facet of every building covered with faux-gems, metallic paint and glass. The golden stupa is the most famous, but my favorite was a gaudy pillared green mirror building (above). Others looked like wedding cakes and a few were guarded by bizarre chicken men. Marianna said it best when she described the scene as a giant playground, each building designed by the whims of children. Not to sound insensitive. I think the buildings were all quite beautiful in their unabashed flamboyance, definitely a different feel from the simple stone and wood Buddhism I'm been accustomed to in my Asian forays. We also happened to be here on the Queen's birthday, so there was a total party vibe. Not really, but it makes it seem cooler.







The rest of the time was pretty uneventful, not necessarily in a bad way. I felt a bit uneasy about being in a new place with little previous knowledge and no language skills to speak of (with), and hanging out with a friend equally amenable to sleeping in, lazing around, and only venturing out for a few hours each day led to a very laid back time. No ambitious treks or trips. Mostly wandered around the city, checking out cool sites. Went to a crazy temple near the hostel covered with many-headed Ganeshas (above). Wandered by the riverside and jumped the fence to a dock housing a bunch of fancy boats. Wound up at one of the less-depressing zoos I've visited, scoped a giant anteater and spent some time in meditation with this Hermetic crocodile. "As above, so below."







On the last day we went to the Royal Art Museum, which was really cool, despite the fact that most of the royal objects were made within the last few years. More Thai opulence on display. Photos were prohibited but I snuck a few (no flash). Top: A tapestry woven from iridescent green beetle wings. The weavers have to wait until the beetles die naturally so their wings won't lose their sheen. And because Thailand is over 90% Buddhist, I suppose. Bottom: Silk embroidery. A huge deal here. A lot of the pieces were very "painterly" but they had an absorbing sense of texture. I especially liked the dark, colorless ones. Night creatures.


ODDS AND ENDS:



Street juice: some concoction of grape, dragonfruit, beet, carrot, and other unknown ingredients. Copped on two separate occasions. "where's the purple stuff again?/I can't get enough of it"



MANGOSTEEN: King of Fruits. Too fragile/FDA-unapproved to be sold anywhere outside of SE Asia. Ate a grip of these. "where's that purple stuff again?/I'm on some same color shit"



Streetcakes shaped like anime dudes. Did not cop but I appreciate this man's street food design skills.



Airport sculpture on the way out of town. Marianna, somewhat of a Hindu expert, explained the myth to me but I already forgot it. I'll ask her and edit this before you read it and realize my ignorance. Special shoot outs to Vishnu/Krishna, Gucci and Chanel.


ENDS AND MEANS:



Cool street sign. Street signs point directions. Tell you how to go from one place to another even if they don't tell you why. I am now in China. It seems like home. Kunming is one place where I somehow don't feel like a visitor. I've been reading books and signs to try to plan my next few weeks in China. I have some direction and some space to be aimless. Still a bit cloudy here so I'll keep going north...

-Josh