Filed under: touristing
Daily Advice:
In order to attract and keep readers for your blog, update more than once a year.
I just spent a weekend in a working elephant camp. Domesticated elephants are controlled using entirely verbal commands. We saw a tethered young bull elephant who was getting quite agitated - a dog was teasing it from just out of reach. One of the mahouts (trainers – one mahout works with one elephant) UNCHAINED the agitated young bull elephant and climbed up – he told the bull to leave and HE DID. He turned back once to look at the dog – clearly wanting to go stomp on him – but the mahout said no so he didn’t. The mahout didn’t even break a sweat – he was smoking a cigarette on top of this angry elephant, TELLING HIM NOT TO DO SOMETHING. It was amazing.
We unbuckled before the plane hit the ground. By the time it finished taxiing, we had all our stuff on our laps and were nervously tapping our feet.
“Ok, as soon as it stops, get up and run. Seriously. Be pushing old ladies out of the way…..”
“….I really want to be the first ones through immigration…..”
“….Really, I mean it….book it…”
“…Do you think immigration will take very long?…”
“..Good thing we didn’t check any baggage!…”
“….How wide do you think the hallways are, could we pass people easily, do you think?”
We were very, very excited, talking over each other and probably being a little louder than was necessary. We were about to spend our long weekend in motherfucking China, and we only had three days. We did not want to waste any time in the airport. We were ready to go.
“Oh man guys, you better be very fa- “
“Excuse me, girls,” said the woman sitting in front of us, one of the only foreigners on the plane. She was leaning over her seat, smirking just a tiny bit. “We’re not in Beijing.”
“…Pardon?”
“We’re not in Beijing. We’re in a different city. You can put your bags down.”
“She’s lying,” whispered the girl on my left side.
“Are you joking?” asked the girl on my right side. “You’re joking.”
“Nope. There’s a storm in Beijing. We’ll be a few hours.” She settled back down, said something to her boyfriend, laughed.
We looked at each other. “Naaaaahhhh,” we said. “No way we missed the announcement. No way ALL THREE of us missed that announcement. We’re definitely in Beijing. She’s fucking with us.”
We sat, tapping our feet, checking and re-checking our passports, for a few more minutes.
“Uh guys,” said the girl on my left. “Why isn’t anyone getting up?”
“Excuse me,” I said to the woman in front of us. “Did they make the announcement in English?”
“Sure did,” she smiled.
“Ah.” I sat heavily back down. “They made the announcement in English.” I said.
“Naaaahhhhh” 10 minutes passed. 20. Half an hour. “Guess we’re really not in Beijing” said the girl on my right. “When’s dinner?”
Filed under: touristing
I went to China for the weekend. That’s how I’ll be starting all my stories for the next…month, or so. Hope it doesn’t get old!
While I was there, I:
- got up at 5 once, 8 once, and 5:30 twice. I have an ordinary wake-up time of noon.
- sat on an airplane on a runway in some random Chinese city for 8 hours.
- got lost in random tiny little alleys in the dark
- took a taxi ride of death on the beijing freeway!
- went to the wrong hostel
- wandered around Tian’anmen Square
- was disappointed by Tian’anmen Square
- didn’t see Chairman Mao’s mummified corpse
- wandered around the Forbidden City with six million other people
- went to Jonghan Garden on a whim (“see that temple? let’s go THERE!”)
- had a costume party in a temple at the top of a mountain in Jonghan Garden
- took pictures of travel buddies peeing in a public toilet with squat pots, but no stalls
- ate Peking Duck (IN PEKING)
- had to buy a new battery for my camera (more money than all three nights at the hostel)
- found the BC Canada Olympic Pavilion – it opened on the day that we left. (bastards!)
- took a bicycle rickshaw through some Hutongs
- had a heated argument with the driver of the bicycle rickshaw
- went to Pearl Market
- had a heated argument with almost everyone at Pearl Market
- ate ice cream at the Temple of Heaven
- ate pineapple on a stick upon leaving the Temple of Heaven
- took our first nice (not death-defying) cab ride to the hostel
- met Swedish Raoul
- went to an Acrobat show
- went to the meat market
- considered eating scorpions, centipeds, snakes, and starfish
- walked away with four meat popsicles (bargaining FAIL)
- ate what was called dog meat, but what I suspect was actually chicken
- got sketchy, wonderful full body massage
- went to the Great Motherfucking Wall of China (which was the hardest physical thing I have EVER done)
- didn’t throw up after climbing the Great Motherfucking Wall of China
- fell asleep on a random guy’s shoulder after climbing the Great Motherfucking Wall of China
- met random travellers to get drunk with
- got mobbed, when in a great bloody group of white people, by street vendors
- learned how to write Mandarin
- were fought over by bar owners
- smoked a hookah and tried not to get herpes
- watched a pole dancer (so. hot.)
- played ‘cowboys, bears, and indians’ on the street outside the bar
- demonstrated how to use a squat pot on the dance floor
- contracted a foreign mouth disease
- slept for three hours but made the plane anyway
- went straight to work from the airport
AND ALL THAT IN ONLY THREE DAYS
details to follow….
I went to the DMZ in October. That was trippy. It’s so easy to forget that the war isn’t actually over until you’re there and North Korean soldiers have sniper rifles trained on you. Our tour guide, Sergeant Han, was definitely worth the price of admission. Perhaps will spend more time on military bases. There was one place where we stood at an observation point and were surrounded on three sides by North Korea, and, more importantly, a minefield.
That’s something that’s totally outside my experience. So far outside, in fact, that it was completely unreal to me. You can tell me as many times as you like that there are people with guns pointed at me, it’s not going to register. It didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t understand. Well I did and I didn’t.
You can see the border quite clearly because it’s where the trees end – N. Korea has cut all of theirs down. There are tourist trips that foreigners can take – South Koreans are not allowed – and I’m sort of curious to go on one, but at the same time I’d feel sort of…well, disgusting. For a few reasons. For one, I’d see only the part of North Korea that they’d want me to see, and it wouldn’t be real. And it’s hard to go into a starving country and eat well as a tourist. Not to mention that I’d be turning people’s suffering into a tourist attraction, which is sort of reprehensible, and my money would be going to fund Kim Jong-Il. And I can only go to Pyongyang if I go through China. If I thought I’d see something real and could come back and write about it, I’d do it in a second, but I think all I’d do is go hiking on the sacred mountain that South Koreans are no longer allowed to go to and spend the night in the kind of luxury North Koreans don’t know exists.
South Koreans are also vastly uneducated about North Korea. At least, my students are. According to South Koreans consitution, everybody in North Korea is a citizen of South Korea, and yet South Korea does dick all, to the point where in votes about North Korea in the UN, South Korea actually abstains from voting. The children here are convinced that the people in North Korea are happy, which is probably how they deal with their guilt, or something like it, (though, to be fair, I’ve heard the same argument from Canadians. “No no, they LIKE being hungry and scared! they don’t know anything else!”), and have no idea about the hunger and fear and control.
Kim Jong-Il is a source of joking in my class. I’ve even heard teachers using it towards their kids as a form of discipline: “In this class, I’m Kim Jong-Il and you’re the North Koreans.” To me, that’s as bad as saying “Pretend I’m Adolph Hitler and do whatever I say.”
Even I’m careful about talking about in class. It comes up as a topic of disucussion quite frequently, “would you like Korea to unite?” “what do you think about mandatory military service?”, as I strain for topics to make these kids talk in class. But I’m always aware of the fact that, just as in Eastern Europe you may find yourselves speaking to survivors of or family members of survivors of the Holocaust, in the classrooms here, I may find myself speaking to students whose grandparents are in North Korea. And to me, it’s just as bad.
so, i turns out that i am truly terrible at meditating. when you turn the lights out at 5am and ask me to concentrate on my breathing, i just go to sleep. huh.
i bet the buddhists have us all scammed. i bet ‘enlightenment’ is just fancy code for ‘nap’.
Filed under: touristing
i went to the DMZ between north and south korea today.
i’ve been awake for 22 hours, and will write more about it later, but for now, let me say this:
1. the south is just as good at propaganda as the north.
2. sergeant han was worth the price of admission.
