Strike

My poor father:

In high school I became agnostic, in university a vegetarian (piscebyterian), and now tomorrow I'm engaging in my first union strike. Its just a small thing, not about walking off the job. Instead I won't be attending a training where we teachers get paid half our usual wage, as a sort of symbolic thing. But this symbol is really making me feel something. Its kind've incredible.

Here is a new videO:



On pure momentum right now, I'll have another one done sometime next week or so, and then I'm going to have a filmmaking crisis, I can already feel it. "Boom and bust", that handsome Tyler says, that broad shouldered poet of weird country sky.

158.5 Hours in Zhong Guo Part 4/4: SIGHTS SEEING

The first sight I really got to experience in any meaningful way was on the THIRD day, the Big Goose Pagoda in Xi'an, Ed and I free and easy on our speedy legs.

Xi'an was the first capital of united China (221 BCE), and the beginning of the Silk Road connecting China to Rome.

It was the capital till about the 10th century, so has a lot of interesting and famous Chinese firsts, like the Big Goose Pagoda, which was built to house Buddhist Sutras brought from India in the 7th century CE, and translated in the photo below


These are some images of statues around the pagoda, and near the temples surrounding it as well:



The next day we went for the Terracotta Warriors, 10 000 individualized soldier statues meant to protect the first Emperor Qin in the afterlife.

This woman was pretty badass, and could probably protect Qin all by herself.

There was an awesome documentary shown before we went to the sight, which was awesome because it was 300 and 60 degrees!

Okay so now I've seen Xi'an, I've climbed a mountain, I've lost the bank card for my Japanese bank account,* and, because of the lovely people I met on the last hard sleeper, I've slept about 3 hours in 24. Its 8am now, and what must I do back in Beijing? Forbidden City, Tianneman Square, AND the Great Wall all in one epic day.** So, first a check in to hostel and facebook to my dear Japanese friends John and Ai who sort out my bank account, a fine shower and an expensive coffee, and then Forbidden City.


Ever since hearing about a forbidden city as a young boy, I've wanted to go. Forbidden City was built in 1406 for the Ming Dynasty's Ruling Class, and was off limits, to varying degrees for 500 years (Anglo-Franco forces occupied it in 1860; the outer section was opened in 1912, and in 1924 finally the whole thing). Although wikipedia says that the Starbucks built in 2000 closed down, it has definitely re-opened. Anyway, the FC, as I affectionately call it, was really great.

Most of the buildings were actually just one huge room, with one or two purposes. Its really puzzling that the emperor would have one building just for revising his announcements, and
then another to make the announcements. Especially since the Forbidden City is quite big to get around.

With our limited time we only made it halfway, to this garden

with pretty modernist looking rock sculptures/statues. It was neat, but we really had to go.

A guard told me not to take this photo, so this one's for Tibet.

Across from the City, is Tianneman Square

which was filled with many many people not really using it as a square but just taking photos

and I was of course going camera frantic too and had to stop myself to actually appreciate what has gone on here


and also to haggle over the price of a little red book by Chairman Mao, and to be asked to have my picture taken by these 2
Okay, so now, rush rush rush, find a taxi, get on the subway, get on a bus for the Great Wall (started in the 6th century BCE with about 2.5 million dead in the end from it) and then fall asleep on the bus for an hour or so, miss the stop, arrive in some town an hour from the Great Wall at 4:15 (and the last bus back from the Great Wall is 6:30pm OMG), rush for a bus, angry and frustrated that we're going to miss it again. Then trying to justify missing it. Getting off the bus at 5:40 and the return bus is actually 6:2o. Seeing ticket gates boarded up. Running past them, running running running in circles and up stairs and down other stairs until there is a ticket agent and its open. And we have 30 minutes for the Great Wall of China, and every justification I had for missing it would have been a total lie because it was the best thing.

We panted up the stairs on mountain tired legs trying to cover as many of its 6 400 kilometres as we could. But it didnt take long for us to break down and just had to stop and look at it all.


*dont worry dad, everything worked out fine
**true fact: I slept a personal best 8 scattered hours out of 57 in the end, those first 24 Xi'an to Beijing, than big Beijing day and then just not wanting to sleep for fear of missing anything and having to leave to the airport by 5:30am. I was running on rapture and necessity.

158.5 Hours in Zhong Guo Part 3: CLIMBING A TALL MOUNTAIN

Quite a popular thing to do in China, Lonely Planet says, is climbing mountains at night to arrive at the peak by sunrise. Based on my experience in China, this is a quite popular thing to do, especially among student couples on vacation.

Ed and I weren't originally planning to do this 7 hour trek to Hua Shan's eastern peak (a town some 3 hours from Xi'an by train and bumpy as all hell minibus


), at night but luckily some unfortunate circumstances forced it so. You see on the train I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to call our airline and re-confirm our flight, before 72 hours of our flight back to Tokyo. Remembering this on a shoddy crowded train to a mountain village some 90 hours before the flight in a region with almost impenetrable dialect is a scary proposition. After some long distance calling in the best restaurant in the world


which was paid by mass tip, we met Yens, possibly the nicest person in the world, who found us at her hotel trying to explain that we needed to use their phone and internet for drastic, urgent reasons. She helped us for 2.5 hours!, and we drank beer together for .5 hours (which she refused us paying for because she was a host (I can only hope she comes to Canada so I can pay off the psychic debt)).


So by this time it was 9pm, dark as all hades, and we struck off for the mountain, surrounded by a countless students and other cats, dressed for a rave in dayglo cat ears or bracelets or devil horn hair bands. We all bottlenecked at the ticket booth, where a man screamed and shouted through a megaphone at the budders and violent and surly, throwing them to the back of the line. Ed stood back while I dove in amongst all the clamorers at the booth, 15 minutes pressed against glass which I consider in the top 3 or 4 worst experiences of my life. (Advice for anyone going to China: bring old/current student cards. I forgot mine but everything would have been half price). So now the mountain. Despite all the people, this was far from safety precautioned walk, but incredibly dangerous and harrowing. First it was eerie, then it was bottlenecked and slow and why did I go on this climb,


then it was completely emptying because it was so dangerous, no time to think of anything but the next step. We'd move up these near verticle sets of narrow stairs in a big line...in the dark. All I could do was focus on every step and the sound of anyone falling, which would have severely injured/killed myself and about 20 others.

Then it was something else. On the first panoramic plateau by the north peak (about an hour from the east peak) I saw the stars that had been getting closer with every step. I saw the town lights below. I saw the dayglo and flashlights moving ever up from the sheer drop just left of my feet. I don't want to do anything but just skip on this for fear of ruining it.

Then it was a rest at the base camp of the North Peak, trying to find a spot amongst the sleepers and the weary.

It was 5am, and sunrise was 6.


We ate expensive apples and drank expensive water we bought at a rest spot just below the north peak, and hiked our way to the east and the sunrise.





After a lot of rest and eating and no talking, the day sun shone bright and we worked our way down, seeing all our fellow hikers as they were. Students,

some people in business coats and shoes (!), all dead tired. Also, coming up the path from the gondola to the north peak were the new hikers of the day, families and ice cream eaters and people wanting photos of Ed because of his Mao shirt. We took the gondola down,

stuck in a huge line with gates and all these strange tourist trappings that were a far cry from the mountain we climbed. It was a weird ending.

But at this point, thank God it was over. At the base, we had troubles getting to town, bought Hua Shan mountain gold medals (which impressed customs at the Tokyo airport) took a mini bus to Mengyuan,


ran like exhausted manaics for a terrible train ride to Xi'an (I had to lean on baggage for 3 hours with a man who hiked Hua Shan for 19 hours), hailed the motor-rickshaw that took many lives from us, arrived at the best hostel in the world, drank beer, showered, and then slept, about 2pm now till 10:30pm.

Next Post is the Conclusion.

158.5 Hours in Zhong Guo Part 2: IN SEARCH OF SUSTENANCE

Every travel blog is so cliche. Tales of infectious excitement that attempt to inspire readers to also strike out into the world...c'mon. I'm happy so far to focus on transit and eating. Inspire this!


First to mind is what I've come to refer as the Great Fiasco of China, the first full day there where we missed everything. After Lonely Planet was simply wrong about how long it would take to get to Simatai, a beautiful, crumbling, and more isolated area of the Great Wall, 2 hours from Beijing and 2 hours from the Wall, we had to backtrack to return in time for our train to Luoyang. We were in a pretty desolate area,

which this photo does not much capture the spirit of. It was an area of 4 lane highways and hotels that all seemed closed. Pretty quiet and it was only 3:30pm. Some people were hungry, and we went into the only thing that seemed open, a hotel restaurant. The staff were sitting around killing time, and it was obvious (confirmed after many hand actions and guide book flipping) that they were closed till 5.


However, after a long time trying to figure out where to go next (and quite embarrassingly for us, a waitress busted out a cellphone and called her English speaking friend to help us), a manager came down and forced the restaurant open an hour and a half early, just for us. I was red-faced, but the others refused my suggestion that we don't do this to the staff... "If they didn't wanna be open for us, they wouldn't", an argument that won the day, despite ignoring the simple fact that the staff had no choice. Without much of a moral backbone (just a general quesy feeling near all the time) I ate anyway. Using the guidebook I tried to tell the waitress that the food was delicious, but I think I just insulted her somehow. To assuage my guilt I thought we could leave a massive tip. I gave our 50% tip or so to the helpful waitress who outright refused. Thinking that she wasn't allowed but would appreciate it nonetheless, I slipped it among the dishes. We were halfway across the parking lot when another waitress came running out, money in hand, leading to a communication tug of war until we just walked away, winning the game of who gives away the money.




That was the same day we tried to get to Tianneman Square, but arrived right around its closing time. I didnt really know public squares could close, but there we were. Here's a shot at Tianneman Square, with the flash exposing the huge particles of pollution we were swallowing every second.


On my last day in China, I did get to Tianneman Square, the Forbidden City, and The Great Wall, which I will get into in a later post. But here is a happy faced and filthy man on that very same epic and victorious day, showing all signs of eight days of hard travel. He's about to enjoy some Peking Duck in a damn fancy restaurant (which would prefer not to be called 'damn fancy').

And here is a photo of me, defeated by the heaping quantities of Peking Duck I ate:

Which, as a vegetarian (a piscebyterian really) might show I'm really none at all. However, I feel no vague quesy guilt about it at all. Because I know I'll never eat Peking Duck again or have any plans to eat any other fowl for that matter. It wasn't a gateway drug back into the realm of morally depraved flesh eating, but just a radical choice. I dated a woman once, a vegetarian, who told me one time when no one was around, she ate a whole pepperoni tube (?), and I always considered that one peak of freedom. Anyway, the duck and duck soup was amazing.


After that, we went for a Lonely Planet bar called "C'est What?" that we couldnt find (whether that was our fault or Lonely Planet's I cant say), but found this guard outside the Forbidden City

looking like all the guards I saw. Except this one below, a guard off duty, just steps away from the upright specimen above.


A couple asked him to take photos of them in front of the Forbidden City south gates, and he got right into it, even getting them to pose in goofy ways, she on his back etc etc. If you enlarge the image, you can see a big tooth grin on his face. This little anecdote may not seem like much, but it was really striking around the intimidating Forbidden City/Tianneman Square section at night, with big police vans, cameras and serious and perfectly pressed guards keeping it all empty and controlled.

II. Xi'an

Soon after these coconuts, Ed and I, slowly and surely


found our way to one of Xi'an's Muslim Quarters for a street table dinner that was cooked by these guys

and had some exquisite and painful spice that made me chug down 4 orange sodas until I felt sick (and the beginning of the 4th I knew it was a mistake). Sated, we wandered around, Ed buying some Mao t-shirts that were much loved by some of the people we met climbing Mount Hua Shan.

We left the busier market area for quieter neighbourhood streets, a Jane Jacob dream of shops and residences, many in the same room.


Everything was great, and even felt a lot like Toronto, until, a left from the child pooing at the sidewalk (didnt see any diapers anywhere, just slits in the seat of pants so kids can just go where need be), it became darker, quieter, and thus more scary. So we went back to that best hostel in the world, exhausted but not sleepy, and got some Tiger beers at its Terracotta themed bar, thinking of how to make conversation with the two beautiful women at the table beside us, but some men swooped in and took them away. A Chinese guy played Elliott Smith songs over a beatboxing young whitey with a ponytail...we were in a hostel alright. Soon we were accosted by some friendly Australian English teachers and their dates, Steve and Nick and Cindy and Michael and someone else. The teachers were really fun, but prone to bragging not only of their 'incredible' jobs and their 'incredible' apartments, but also the 'incredible sluts' of Xi'an. This may make them out to be grotesque, but some 20 minutes later Steve got a call from his girlfriend and had to leave pronto. I liked that he was trying to impress us but he actually has a girlfriend he cares enough about to leave straight away from a night out. The beatboxing whitey named Andrew was one of their friends and and came over to chat. I'm now seriously considering going to work in China for a month after I finish in Japan, so I asked Andrew if I could find another job outside of teaching if I wanted to work and live in China.
"You can do anything you want man".
Thanks for the help Andrew.

III. The Best Restaurant in the World

This is in the best restaurant in the world. Its in Mengyuan.

The End...Part 3 Later.