the funniest day in china!

i forgot to write about this with the china stuff, but it was sooo terrible and funny. here is what foo wrote about it:
from guilin, we went to the longji rice terraces which was pretty amazing. we decided against a tour and took a series of buses there ourselves which wasn’t as complicated as we thought it was going to be. we had left most of our stuff in guilin and only taken enough to stay the night at the terraces. our goal was to hike to a village 4-5 hours away and stay the night. on our way to da zai, we met a group of minority hill tribe women who talked us into staying at their village which was halfway to da zai. after hiking in the heat for several hours and feeling drained from that, we decided to give it a shot, thinking that they seemed nice and cute enough. wrong. the room we slept in belonged to one of the women. nice enough. but for the same price, we had stayed in real rooms with attached bathrooms and such. then came dinner which was simple but delicious. it was rice accompanied by 5 dishes of various stir-fried vegetables that they had cooked using vegetables harvested from their garden. i felt good about that. while we were eating dinner, all the women were crafting and were excited about showing us their wares after dinner so we could see what we would like to buy. great. sure enough, after dinner, they brought out EVERYTHING they had. coasters, wall hangings, wallets, jewelry, table clothes, etc. i’m not sure if they made everything. the jewelry definitely looked too refined but i also don’t know anything about hill tribe women goods. short story is that we told them we had a specific amount of money – we didn’t budget for buying a whole bunch of stuff. there was a discussion about how much we needed to pay for dinner which we weren’t expecting because we thought that the price we were paying included dinner. wrong again. they wanted us to pay what we thought was fair. and what we thought was fair was much lower than what they wanted because they wanted us to pay restaurant prices. not fair. in the end, we only had enough money to pay for sleeping there and for dinner. they didn’t believe that we didn’t have any money and kept asking if we had a hundred yuan because they would provide change. it was an intense situation. but it ended with us not buying any crafts from them, going to bed early and sneaking away at 5.45 the next morning.

actually seeing vietnam

so we hopped on our sleeper bus to go south to hue. and got here the next morning. found a hotel for $10 per night, which i think we could have found cheaper, but i'm really relaxing about money. like i'm willing to spend a bit more for a decent place. we saw the citadel, which housed the emperors and many other people when hue was the capitol of vietnam. it was fine. then yesterday we went on a city tour. the itinerary was like this: visit 3 tombs of dead emperors, the village where incense and cone-shaped hats are made, have vietnamese lunch, visit the citadel, a garden house with mandarins, and then a pagoda and take a sunset boatride back.
what actually happened is that we went to the incense and conical hat making 'village' which was actually just a shop on the road to the first tomb. no village. we watched a lady make incense for about a minute then they just tried to sell everyone a bunch of crap that was probably made in a factory anyway. i'm sure they don't actually make that stuff there. they probably import it from china. haha. then we went to the first tomb for 45 mins (not enough time really) which was really just like a park with lakes and statues. no one knows where the emperor is actually buried. we went to another tomb but foo and i didn't go inside because it's like $3 per person to get into all these and we don't like tourism very much anyway. then we skipped the third tomb because no one wanted to see it.
then we went to our 'vietnamese lunch' which was at a traveler cafe called stop and go cafe. the food was, well, not vietnamese, that's for sure. then we went to the citadel, which foo and i already saw, so we got ice cream instead. then we went to the garden house, i can't say much about it except i'm not sure why we went there. then to the pagoda. seems nice. there's lots of chinese architecture in vietnam. then the boat ride back, where the tour guide passed around an envelope that said 'tip for guide'. classy. yeah tourism!
so today we are headed to hoi an, another city a few hours south of here. the good news is that people are friendlier here in hue than they were in hanoi. i hope this trend continues.

out of hanoi

so when we got to hanoi neither of us was really excited about vietnam. everyone we had met was really unfriendly. and even if we were buying something from someone, they still acted like we were just a pain in the ass. so when the bus rolled back into hanoi, we were like 'let's just check bus tickets to hue' (a city farther south of hanoi). so we got in a cab on the main road because the ones at the bus station seem extra creepy. and we told him we wanted to go to this other bus station farther south. and this guy starts driving, but really really slow. like ridiculously slow. and i was watching the meter, and i'm not really good at estimating kilometers, but it seemed like we hadn't gone as far as the meter said. so i asked foo if she thought the meter was going fast. she wasn't really sure either, but it seemed like it. eventually i looked at his odometer. and indeed the taxi meter was ticking at at least twice the rate of the car odometer. so we told the taxi man to stop and we got out and he looked all confused, but it cost 50,000 dong (almost $3). and we had no idea where we were. but if we stayed in the cheating man's taxi, it would be like condoning his behavior. so we waited for another taxi. this one didn't have a fast meter, but started his meter at 1km. so we lost about 50 cents there. uhhh. vietnam.
so after finally getting there we discover that buses no longer go to hue from that station. awesome. so we were really far from where we needed to be, were cheated twice, and couldn't get a bus out. so we sat down for a while and touts were swarming around us like mosquitoes trying to sell us tickets or cab rides. we sat and decided to just stay in hanoi for the night to regroup.
we walked outside the bus station, and magically, foo said, 'this bus goes where we need to go.' i don't know how she knew that. she doesn't know any vietnamese. anyway, we got on the public bus for 3000 dong each. that's like 15 cents or something. way better than our 87000 dong cab ride. we found a hotel. and decided to be nice to ourselves for enduring vietnam thus far. we got a 3 star hotel for $20 per night for two nights. so we sat down and decided to figure out what to do. the options were: fly from hanoi to cambodia, to thailand, or to singapore. this means skipping vietnam which seemed like an ok plan. another option was buying an 'open tour' bus ticket. so going through vietnam.
after two night and two rooms in our hotel (the first one had an a/c unit that made a really loud noise and vibrated the wall and bed. terrible) we decided to go through vietnam. foo had one good meal and i felt like it would be a shame to miss it. so after much research we found that actual sinh cafe, which sells bus tickets. but you can buy all your tickets at once for wayyyy cheaper. like $34 per person for buses through the whole country. after passing several copycat sinh cafes along the two block route to the actual one, we got there, bought tickets. and that was that.

an intro to vietnam

so the next day in hanoi we went to see ho chi minh. he's in a mausoleum. so we walked there and went through all the security and fortunately were told by security to cut in line because the line was really really long. when we finally got up to the mausoleum, we had to be silent and in two lines. we were ushered through and there was ho chi minh. lying there in middle of the room, embalmed in a glass box. i guess that's what he looked like when he was sleeping. we walked through and saw him for less than one minute. it was a thing that i felt like i should do because he is really really important to vietnam and vietnamese people. but also it seemed a little messed up because his will said he wanted to be cremated. but they embalmed him anyway. it feels sort of disrespectful to the person to stare at his embalmed body that he wanted cremated and in an urn somewhere.
we also saw 'the proposal' which was surprisingly not terrible. it was pretty funny. and betty white is in it, and who doesn't love betty white? mostly we go to movies in other countries to eat the popcorn. this popcorn was ok. not as good as the movie. also it was set partly in alaska, around mountains and forest and a lake. it made me want to move to a more rural place. and have a garden.
from hanoi we went to cat ba island. three bus rides and one boat ride later we were there. we found a hotel pretty quickly for $15, which we later found out was pretty expensive for around there. we ate some terrible food on that island. terrible. fried rice which was not cooked over a big fire, covered in tomato sauce. fried noodles cooked in a similar way. we did get gin and tonic. more than once. that was good. well, more like a diy g&t. we ordered the gin and tonic water separately and i ran across the street to buy a lime from some vendor lady. but we made it happen.
the next day we went on a boat tour. we never do organized tours but couldn't figure out a way to see the things we wanted to see on our own. so we did the tour. so we got on the boat and went out to ha long bay. we went kayaking, which was pretty fun. but also not really safe. without making sure any of us actually knew how to do it, we just got put in 2 person kayaks and were given paddles. and told to go look at the caves. where? over there...with a vague hand motion. there are tons of giant rock islands. so pretty much we were able to explore far away and out of sight of the boat for like 2 hours. in the ocean.
then we ate our 'seafood lunch'. foo said the seafood wasn't very good. they made me tofu. it was, well, it was tofu. we went to see a natural cave with lots of stalagmites and shiny things. i'm pretty sure it was harmful to the cave for us to be in there touching stuff.
we went kayaking/swimming again. and we went to this island with monkeys. we didn't do the hike to go look at monkeys. because we were tired from the whole day. but the monkeys came to us! (i don't like monkeys too much because one attacked me in nicaragua in college. they are mean beastly little creatures.) but like 10 monkeys came to the beach. and two mothers with little baby monkeys holding on to the mom's belly while she ran around. and some trying to drink beer out of the empty beer cans. we were all up to our knees in the water to avoid too close an encounter with them.
but we got back at 5pm or so. and we accomplished a whole day of tourism. foo wanted good seafood, and we were surrounded by the sea so it didn't seem like it would be too hard. we found a restaurant with grilled calamari on the menu. so she got it. and guess what. seriously, this is how they made it: they cut up squid into pieces and threw it on a grill. no sauce, no nothing. charred it a bit and put it on a plate. foo was really disappointed. it only cost like $3. but it was sure a waste of that money. so we got french fries to go from another restaurant and went back to the hotel to feel sorry for ourselves. the next day we went back to hanoi to decide where our adventure should go from there.

hanoi, posted while i'm actually here!

we're in hanoi! and i can actually update the blog on time because vietnam lets me us blogger! so hopefully there won't be too much posting of 10 entries on one day anymore.
we got to hanoi by bus, and were dropped off not at a bus stop, but at some random location which we would never have found on a map. we got some cash and found a taxi, which amazingly didn't cheat us on our way to a hotel! and he even dropped us off where we asked, not some hotel he gets a commission from. we went to the old city hotel, which is secretly also called the queen star hotel. we read reviews online of lots of hanoi hotels, and all of them are either expensive or have really mixed reviews. but this one seemed ok. we got there and they showed us a room. it seemed ok, then the guy told us it was $20 per night. and online we could book it for $16, so i asked if we should just book online and suddenly the price became $16. we got our room and it was right next to the breakfast nook and lobby so it was kind of noisy. and the air didn't work very well and the bathroom drains smelled sometimes. not awesome. we decided to ask for a new room the next day.
we got dinner from a noodle place. it was just soup noodles, not too exciting. but then on our way back we found a cute little lady selling baguettes. so we each got a baguette sandwich for way cheaper than our noodles. mine had soft cheese, egg, and cucumbers. soooo good. then today our hotel didn't have any other rooms, but they showed us another hotel called the phoenix 2 and gave it to us for the same rate ($16). i'm not sure how that all happened but i'm sure commission was paid. and we also had our walk over supervised. i guess to make sure we didn't change our minds.
today we tried tourism. i got to pick our day's activities: we saw a temple with a giant embalmed tortoise, then went to the hua lo prison museum where US POWs were held during the vietnam war, and to the temple of literature. the tortoise was huge and neat but the temple was just any other temple. the prison museum was interesting mostly because it was not exactly objective. there were two whole rooms dedicated to how well US pilot POWs were treated in the prison camps. seriously. like there were tons of pictures of smiling pilots playing cards and guitar and stuff. and it talked all about how the vietnamese treated the pows humanely and through this convinced them that the war was wrong. two whole rooms of this. and there were all these pictures of john mccain and one saying how he was treated for injuries there. but i'm pretty sure that he's still jacked up from torture in this prison. and he tried to kill himself there. it also talked a lot about how terrible the french were while they were in viet nam. i'm sure some of what the museum said was true, but it was definitely a somewhat biased museum.
the literature thing was ok. not all that exciting.
we're going to see ho chi minh's mausoleum tomorrow. and plan some tourism.
viet nam is pretty intimidating. it feels like we have to be super on guard all the time. and that everyone is out to cheat us. everything is so sketchy. like both hotels we've stayed in operate under two names. and if any business here is successful, several other businesses open up and steal the name. there are like 10 fakes of every successful business. and it's hard to tell which is real and which isn't. and the ticket seller at the turtle temple shorted us 50000 dong in change. she gave us lots of small change so we counted it and realized it was short and went back to her, she didn't say anything, just took the money and gave us the correct change in bigger bills. she totally knew she shorted us. on guard all the time. oh my. i think viet nam might be a bit hard to do.

nanning

we got to nanning and found a hotel really quickly! it was pretty nice and was 80 yuan per night. it was kind of funny though because the bathroom, which was ensuite, had a frosted glass wall. so the person outside the bathroom could see all the goings-on with the person inside the bathroom. who needs privacy?
we found a street with lots of noise and people and food. we found a noodle joint and had pulled noodles, which are made with a chunk of dough that the man stretches, folds, stretches, folds again...til he's holding a bunch of noodles between his hands. then it is boiled and cooked with some veggies and sauce. it's really good. the noodles are all chewy and wonderful. we also got hand-cut noodles from the same guy. these noodles are even better! the guy uses a refrigerated chunk of dough and smashes it around a rolling pin. then he uses sort of a knife and just cuts off small slices of it into the boiling water. these are chewy but also a little thicker than the pulled ones. oh man i could eat these again. sooooo good.
we didn't do much in nanning. we mostly just rested, ate good food, watched old men play chinese checkers in the park.
i got my hair cut there. haircuts are super cheap in china. i got my hair washed, cut and dried for about $3 US. the wash was magical. it was the greatest hairwashing of my life. it was a wash slash massage and lasted for like 15 minutes. the cut was ok. my hair looks cleaner, but it wasn't exciting or anything. then on the walk back towards the hotel, we came across a jian bing place. we had jian bing in beijing and it was good, so we thought we'd try it here. it's basically like a huge crepe with egg, green onions, miso, and chili sauce, then they add this layer of delicious fried crispy and some lettuce and wrap it together. it's basically my favorite food ever. we got a huge jian bing from the nicest people ever for 4 yuan. sooo good. and they wanted to be BFFs with foo, so she talked to them for a while. that made my day. so good. we got more from them the next day because it was so good. and they helped us find the bus to the medicinal botanical gardens, which were really far away and also no longer exist. that was a failed attempt at tourism.
overall nanning was a nice place to hang out and rest for a while. i enjoyed it.
we left on a 7:30am train to hanoi, viet nam the next day...

guangzhou

we got to guangzhou and these hotel touts super harassed us til we finally gave in and they found us a room for 120 yuan per night. not an awesome value. but good enough. there were some shady characters staying in the hotel. the kind of guys that own pawn shops and sell jewelry. and lots of them. i'm not sure what they were doing there. but they didn't bother us at all. the highlight of this town was the food we found around our hotel. we got fried noodles and fried rice from a street stall for 5 yuan each. so good. the next day we went to shamian island, where white people adopt chinese babies. they have to stay there a month to adopt. i was pretty disappointed to only see one white lady with her brand new chinese baby. but we did see a man doing tai chi, so that was exciting. we found a man selling bao 2 for 1 yuan. that's like the best deal ever. bao is a steamed bun that can have different fillings inside. sooo good. we had more noodles again that night!
we left there for guilin, which is supposed to have 'stunning limestone karst topography'. i didn't know what karst was til i read the lonely planet. i think it just means tall skinny mountains coming out of the ground. we stayed at a hostel and ate some delicious street food (my goodness i love street food. so much cheaper and better). we went to see the reed flute cave, which is really touristy. and foo translated the chinese tour going on. part of it was 'it's cold and damp in here so if you stay too long you get rheumatism.' she then added 'chinese people believe stuff like that'. this is how nance explains chinese culture to me. later on a bus ride she explained more about culture like this: 'when we were coming to china there were stores on the road selling bear ball (meaning testicle) powder.' me: 'what would you do with bear ball powder?' foo: 'probably people take it because they think it makes you fuck like a large animal. chinese people would think that.' so are the cultural lessons i am given...
back to the cave. it was pretty neat and had lots of stalactites and stalagmites. i guess that's about all. we went to another town called yangshuo and failed to do anything touristy at all. we had planned to, but just didn't feel like it. we walked around, lazed in bed, ate some noodles. lots of noodles.
we headed back to guangzhou on the 6:45am bus. we had a train to catch at 8:22am, and the bus ride was supposed to be about an hour and 20 mins. so we get there and run to the street, jump in a cab get out and run to the station. go through security (and no one likes lines, which made it rough) and i pushed a small child out of the way (this is what china does to me). we ran up to the waiting area and right as we got to the door the woman locked it. we missed the train. and so did about 10 other people. fortunately we were able to change to a later train at no charge. so we waited in the station for about 5 hours. got on a 1:22 train. and we met the nicest girl ever on this train! her name is zou peng, and she chatted up foo the whole ride. 5 or 6 hours. and she gave us delicious snacks and is now foo's email buddy. she confirmed what we had been told by the crazy man on the last train that we had been getting way overcharged for our you tiao and soymilk. haha. i'm not totally sure what else they talked about but the girl seemed very nice. and we got to nanning! our last stop before heading into viet nam!

into hong kong

we got on our train the next morning and foo got some attitude with this guy who ended up sitting directly across from us. and he talked to foo A LOT. for hours. so funny. and poor foo was hurting pretty badly from the night before. normally she just sleeps for train rides but she had to ride backwards and listen to some crazy man for like 5 hours.
i just sat around. we each got our own 3 person bench for the night, so we actually got some sleep! we made it to hong kong the next afternoon! we got there and took the most expensive subway ride of my life. we got to kowloon and walked around for a bit looking for accommodation. we were probably both being jerks to each other, as we usually are when looking for accommodation. and we found a place called star guest house. it was 260 hong kong dollars per night. that's like 33 US dollars. really expensive compared to china. and it had a shared bathroom. but it seemed fine. we ate some expensive mediocre dinner that night. we went to hong kong island to try to do some touristing. we were both pretty devastated to find that the longest escalator in the world was, like the great wall of china, not continuous. it was a bunch of smaller escalators in a line. it was disappointing.
that morning we went to dim sum at a place that is supposed to be pretty famous/popular. it was really crowded, so we thought it would be good. we had to stand around stalking people for seats and finally got some. and we picked out some dishes, none of which was all that good. my favorite dish was cake. haha.
so we left there a bit disappointed.
hong kong has double-decker trolleys on hk island, which is pretty cool, and also cheap. it is 2 hk dollars for a ride. that was fun.
we tried dim sum again the next day at a vegetarian restaurant called lok cha tea house. it was pretty terrible. we had read good reviews about it though. it was expensive and had dishes like curry. and they made us buy tea. and it was a big place with lots of empty seats but when two other diners entered, they seated them at our same table. so that was terrible and awkward. burned twice by the dim sum capital of the world.
really i didn't enjoy hong kong as much as i was expecting. it was really expensive and we just kept eating mediocre food. maybe the food was good but i was just expecting too much from hong kong. but it seemed fairly unimpressive. we stayed for three nights and finally on the morning we were leaving we had a wonderful breakfast which totally redeemed hong kong for me. we had you tiao and soymilk and this other dish that uses the you tiao dough, but wraps like a giant rice noodle around it. it also has delicious sauce. it's called za leong. that's how foo spells it anyway. she had dumplings. sooo good. and way cheaper than our other less stellar meals in hk. so we left on the expensive subway and were not sad to leave. but i am glad that i was able to visit the city. i would go back but i think it would be more fun if i knew someone who lived there. we headed from there to guangzhou...

guiyang

we got to guiyang in the afternoon and walked around for a really long time trying to find a decent place to stay that wasn't too expensive. we finally happened upon the china post hotel. it was 138 yuan, which is the most we've paid in china. but we were hot and tired and probably fighting because we always do when we're looking for accommodation. but we got there! and we ate at street stalls that night, which was good and made up for the really expensive hotel. the room was pretty worn looking and the whole carpet was damp. it was gross. then a huge cockroach walked across the floor and foo saw it and panicked a lot. so funny. so i killed it with my shoe and as we usually do with gross bugs, we covered it up (with the ashtray in the room) and just left it on the floor. it seems like something that the hotel staff should know about. the next morning we woke up and ate you tiao and soybean milk for breakfast. i love this stuff. you tiao (pronounced like 'yo tee ow' is like a fried dough stick. like a long doughnut sort of, only not sweet. and you dip it into soymilk til it gets a little soggy then you eat it. it doesn't sound that great i guess, but it's actually really really good. so we ate delicious you tiao. and on the way back to the china post hotel, we saw a building that had a sign in chinese (thank goodness for nancyfoo!) that said there was a hotel on the sixth floor of this giant building. seriously? yes! we went up to the sixth floor and indeed there was a hotel. we saw the rooms, which were much nicer than the stupid cockroach china post hotel. and cheaper. and it was only a block or two away. so we checked in and went to check out of the china post hotel. that evening we met up with this chinese boy named sijun (but he said to call him andy). i found him on couchsurfing.com. he couldn't host us, but he said he could hang out. he owns a bar, so he took us there first. it is called '80s bar'. he had his waiter get three big bottles of beer. they are only 3% alcohol, so this was very doable. also, china bars don't really have mixed drinks. only beer. sijun said that if there is hard liquor, it is fake. i don't know how that works, but anyway...after his bar, he took us to eat a guiyang specialty, called ........ it involves little circles of bread, but really thin. like a tiny super thin tortilla. and you wrap veggies, pickles, meats, bean sprouts, nuts, all kinds of things in them. and put some delicious sauce on it, and wrap it together like a baby, hence the name. it was a messy meal for me. i need to practice those.
sijun is a gay boy, so after that he took us to the gay man bar. we had soooo much fun! it's called the daily dish i think. and again, you can only order beer. but here you order cans, and you have to order a minimum of 6 cans at a time. chinese gay boys are really shy about dancing. i could tell they wanted to. all bopping in their seats. i could tell these boys secretly wanted to act like gay boys. and i got many of them to dance with me! we had many cans of expensive beer and i think one boy had a crush on foo til he realized she was a girl, at which point he exclaimed this revelation quite loudly in broken english, then acted all disgusted. it was really really funny. we went home pretty late. and woke up soon after to take a 24 hour train ride to go to hong kong!

kunming and xingyi

We headed out on an overnight bus to Kunming, a bigger city. We were on a ‘sleeper bus’ and neither foo nor I knew what to expect. But what we got was funnier that anything I imagined. So in the sleeper bus, instead of seats there are three rows of beds across. And for three beds and two aisles to fit across the width of a bus, the beds have to be pretty small. So foo and I were on the top bunk, she was on the side and I was in the middle. And these beds are built for one child to sleep comfortably, or maybe a small Chinese woman, maximum height 5 feet tall, 90 lbs. they were really short and narrow and we had to use pillows and a blanket that who knows the last time they were washed. And this bus was over-night, but on buses in china they stop every two hours for a bathroom break. So during the whole night, every two hours we stopped and they turned on all the lights in the bus. so even if i could sleep, i'd wake up soon after. We got to Kunming in the morning and bought our next bus tickets to Dali, our actual destination. And in this bus, it turns out seat numbers don’t matter (sometimes they’re a really big deal though. I don’t get it) and foo sat next to this woman and her maybe 2 year old kid. Apparently they had good conversation. The woman told foo all about plants we were passing and about different stuff to see in the area. I sat in the very back row next to two women eating chicken feet out of a vacuum-sealed package. Eating chicken feet with little chicken toenails still attached, chewing with their mouths open. Awesome. But I think foo won the award for funniest bus ride when the woman with the kid next to her pulled the trash can in from the aisle and let her kid poop in it.

We finally got to Dali and saw the zillions of Chinese tourists there. turns out chinese people really like to join tour groups. and really like to vacation in their own country. and Dali is a really touristy town. it is an 'ancient city', and has walls all around it and really old buildings. it's been largely restored and is full of han chinese people pretending to be minority tribe people.
We found a room for cheap, like 45 yuan per night (the exchange rate is 6.8 yuan to 1 us dollar). And the family that runs that guest house was super super nice. We explored Dali for a couple days, didn’t end up actually doing any recommended tourist activites, but we ate lots of good food. The first night we ate at a little restaurant across the street from our hotel. The guy recommended these mushrooms and so we got them. And a couple other dishes. All of it was really good. Then the bill came and it was 56 yuan! Really expensive for what we got (but really only like $8). Turns out he recommended super expensive mushrooms. Oh the lessons we are learning in china. At least the food was good.

We headed to another city called lijang, which was even more touristy than Dali. It has an ‘old city’ which would be really neat if it were actually the way it was 50 or 100 years ago. But it’s full of people selling tacky souvenirs and a LOT of Chinese tourists. again, Chinese people take lots of organized tours to things in china. There’s plenty to see here, so it makes sense I guess that people would stay in their own country. So we stayed outside of the really crowded 'old city' at this hotel run by the nicest woman ever. We ate dinner in a little alley restaurant where everyone stared at us. Everyone always stares at us really, but extra in places like that. Since there’s no English menu, not many white folks go there. Lucky for me, I have a nancy foo who is a Chinese champion. So we get better food at cheaper prices. Usually, anyway. but often people think she's my tour guide. so they think i have tons of cash. oh if they only knew...
There is a park there called black dragon pool, which supposedly is the most photographed place around there. But we tried to go and the entrance fee is 80 yuan! That’s a lot of money to walk around a park. But after the park was officially closed, we happened wander by and people were going in and they weren’t stopping to pay an entrance fee. So we walked in too. And then some guy started yelling something, but we just kept walking at a normal pace and eventually he stopped yelling. So we got to explore the park. It was pretty nice. Not worth 80 yuan per person. We later found out that the park is open after hours for locals, and it’s free for them. Yessss! Way to save some money, Katie and nance. We went to a less touristy other ancient city the next day that was just a bus ride away. Ancient cities are kind of stupid. They were both just full of people in costumes selling junk souvenirs. It’s like six flags kind of.

north to dali and lijang, yunnan, china

We headed out on an overnight bus to Kunming, a bigger city. We were on a ‘sleeper bus’ and neither foo nor I knew what to expect. But what we got was funnier that anything I imagined. So in the sleeper bus, instead of seats there are three rows of beds across. And for three beds and two aisles to fit across the width of a bus, the beds have to be pretty small. So foo and I were on the top bunk, she was on the side and I was in the middle. And these beds are built for one child to sleep comfortably, or maybe a small Chinese woman, maximum height 5 feet tall, 90 lbs. they were really short and narrow and we had to use pillows and a blanket that who knows the last time they were washed. And this bus was over-night, but on buses in china they stop every two hours for a bathroom break. So during the whole night, every two hours we stopped and they turned on all the lights in the bus. so even if i could sleep, i'd wake up soon after. We got to Kunming in the morning and bought our next bus tickets to Dali, our actual destination. And in this bus, it turns out seat numbers don’t matter (sometimes they’re a really big deal though. I don’t get it) and foo sat next to this woman and her maybe 2 year old kid. Apparently they had good conversation. The woman told foo all about plants we were passing and about different stuff to see in the area. I sat in the very back row next to two women eating chicken feet out of a vacuum-sealed package. Eating chicken feet with little chicken toenails still attached, chewing with their mouths open. Awesome. But I think foo won the award for funniest bus ride when the woman with the kid next to her pulled the trash can in from the aisle and let her kid poop in it.

We finally got to Dali and saw the zillions of Chinese tourists there. turns out chinese people really like to join tour groups. and really like to vacation in their own country. and Dali is a really touristy town. it is an 'ancient city', and has walls all around it and really old buildings. it's been largely restored and is full of han chinese people pretending to be minority tribe people.
We found a room for cheap, like 45 yuan per night (the exchange rate is 6.8 yuan to 1 us dollar). And the family that runs that guest house was super super nice. We explored Dali for a couple days, didn’t end up actually doing any recommended tourist activites, but we ate lots of good food. The first night we ate at a little restaurant across the street from our hotel. The guy recommended these mushrooms and so we got them. And a couple other dishes. All of it was really good. Then the bill came and it was 56 yuan! Really expensive for what we got (but really only like $8). Turns out he recommended super expensive mushrooms. Oh the lessons we are learning in china. At least the food was good.

We headed to another city called lijang, which was even more touristy than Dali. It has an ‘old city’ which would be really neat if it were actually the way it was 50 or 100 years ago. But it’s full of people selling tacky souvenirs and a LOT of Chinese tourists. again, Chinese people take lots of organized tours to things in china. There’s plenty to see here, so it makes sense I guess that people would stay in their own country. So we stayed outside of the really crowded 'old city' at this hotel run by the nicest woman ever. We ate dinner in a little alley restaurant where everyone stared at us. Everyone always stares at us really, but extra in places like that. Since there’s no English menu, not many white folks go there. Lucky for me, I have a nancy foo who is a Chinese champion. So we get better food at cheaper prices. Usually, anyway. but often people think she's my tour guide. so they think i have tons of cash. oh if they only knew...
There is a park there called black dragon pool, which supposedly is the most photographed place around there. But we tried to go and the entrance fee is 80 yuan! That’s a lot of money to walk around a park. But after the park was officially closed, we happened wander by and people were going in and they weren’t stopping to pay an entrance fee. So we walked in too. And then some guy started yelling something, but we just kept walking at a normal pace and eventually he stopped yelling. So we got to explore the park. It was pretty nice. Not worth 80 yuan per person. We later found out that the park is open after hours for locals, and it’s free for them. Yessss! Way to save some money, Katie and nance. We went to a less touristy other ancient city the next day that was just a bus ride away. Ancient cities are kind of stupid. They were both just full of people in costumes selling junk souvenirs. It’s like six flags kind of.

into china, early august

Anyway, next day we board the bus to china. And for being such rule-breaking line-cutting people, some Chinese folks really really want their seat number in the bus. Even if it doesn’t matter. Go figure. So I sat a row ahead of foo the whole time. And at customs I got stopped because the signature in my passport is different than the signature on my immigration card. The man told me that and I said yes, my signature was different then. I sign my name differently now. And he said ‘the signature is different in the passport than you signed here’ and again I said ‘yes, it is different because I signed my name differently then’ and he said ‘the signature is different…’ you get the idea. So then another man had to look at my passport and immigration card for about 5 minutes, and eventually was able to expertly determine that my signature was mine, both times.
Anyway, we got back on the bus to find that someone, not sure who, had gone through foo’s bag. And didn’t put everything back. She said she thought it was customs. I guess they can go through your stuff without you there. They didn’t take anything though. So we got to the city of mengla, where we had no Chinese money, so we walked really far for an atm, and we found one. and it wouldn't give us money. And we were so hot and tired and stranded. And then this man that had followed us from the bus station came up to us and wanted to change money. After trying to cheat us for a while, he gave us an exchange rate that was only a little unfair. but being as desperate as we were, we took it. We walked back to the bus station and foo looked at the schedule and said ‘you’re kidding me’ and I was like oh no, we just missed it, we’re going to sit here for like 5 more hours or something. But turns out, the bus was leaving in 5 minutes. So far we were feeling pretty punched in the face by china. So we rush to the bus where a lady and her kids were carrying their bags to the back to load them in. and then magically, foo pushes ahead and throws her bag in the back and then mine too before the Chinese lady could get her stuff there. Yessss! As we got into the bus foo says ‘take that, china.’ That was a good moment for me. It sounds rude to throw your bags in ahead of someone else but that’s how china works. Basically I can be as rude as I want and no one notices because they’re all doing the same thing. It takes a minute to get used to.

We arrived in jing hong, and were all sweaty and gross and soooo hot and found our way to the banna youth hostel. It was 60 yuan per night, which isn’t too bad. And we were able to steal wifi, so that was extra good. That night we went looking for dinner and where there apparently once was a night market was now a neon-lit strip of bars. So we started walking back. And we were so desperate for real food after traveling the whole day from the pits of hell in udomxai. We walked past a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant and then another. We picked the one with more people in it. And when I say more people, I am referring to shirtless men, throwing their trash all over the floor and being loud. And one of them had the most glorious mullet I’ve ever seen. Chinese man with a flowing golden mullet. Hi-five, sir. You have just made my night.
We ordered four dishes and a beer. We actually ate all the food. Four dishes. The beer was kind strange though. Wheat beer maybe. It wasn’t very good. And the total bill was 30 yuan. That’s a bit more than $4. Amazing. What a good ending to a crappy hot long day.
We stayed three nights in jinghong, which were all amazing. I loved this town. The food was good and cheap. The first night we were walking back after dinner and came across a square. Like a concrete park covering a city block. And there were not only one, but two large groups of aerobics happening. Each had their own sound system and music playing. And there were tons of people-all kinds of people: old people young people, kids, ladies and gentlemen. all doing synchronized aerobics. like line dances. all together. awesome. And lots of kids on these funny skateboards that only have two wheels. Foo and I sat in between the aerobics groups and watched. It was a pretty magical night.
The next day was a failed attempt at tourism. We rented bikes to see some minority villages and rode there and turns out there are no villages, but rather lots of construction. And we were both tired and foo’s bike seat was doing some terrible things to her, so we stopped for lunch at a little noodle shop where construction workers eat. It was ok, super cheap though. foo said something like 'people like us DO NOT eat at places like this.' And based upon the cleanliness, the kind of place that you expect will make you poop all over the place.
I can’t remember what we did the rest of the day, we found another square that night where they played music and lots of people danced, not like synchronized aerobics style, but like grab a partner and show off your best moves. And everyone was all dressed up in their fancy dancing clothes. There were really old people and kids and young people and these two people that seemed to be quite good ballroom dancers. We got noodles and roti and sat and watched for an hour or so. This was also quite amazing. The next night we watched aerobics again, and also little-kid roller blading lessons. Three year olds on rollerblades might be the cutest thing ever.
Jing hong was my favorite town in china. It was so charming. I would go back there for sure. it seems like there's really a strong community there. you know, with all the aerobics...

f00: what else happened in laos

in laos, we hardly got internet connection at all. so here's the rest of what happened in laos....

we got to vientiane, it rained a whole bunch the first night and the ceiling in our guest house started leaking in the parts that looked mouldy. i guess that's why there's a mould problem. it was still raining a lot when we woke up so that was a little discouraging. we woke up early to make our first video chat date ever and that was pretty exciting though our connection there was pretty slow so there were a lot of dropped calls and delayed reactions. then we ventured next door for soup noodles that were delicious.

finally at noon, the rain stopped! we took a walk around town and bought some pretty expensive stamps then checked out the french cultural center - we heard that they screened french movies (with english subtitles) occasionally. we watched le ventre de juliette at 6.30pm.

vientiane was great for food. we had some delicious baguette sandwiches (thanks france!) with pickled vegetables and lots of fruit shakes. iced lao coffee was just delightful. i didn't know i had been missing good coffee till then.

by chance, as we were walking around town near the sketchy fountain, a boy handed us a brochure for COPE that seemed interesting so we decided to give it a shot. it's a rehabilitation center that provides prosthetic services to people that need them; with an emphasis on those injured by unexploded ordinances (UXOs). the UXOs exhibition was intense, to say the least. COPE was well worth the 30 minute walk from town.

we also ate at makphet which is a restaurant run by former street youth and their teachers. their families are given the option to make small crafts for sale at their store located in the restaurant. food was awesome (one of the best meals we had in laos), crafts were way cute and the students were way adorable.

from vientiane, we went to phonsavan in the north. it was supposed to be a long ride anyway but then our bus broke down and all of us had to wait on the side of the road. fortunately, the bus behind us stopped to help and after about 10 mins of trying to fix our broken bus, the crew on our bus decided that it was best for us to hop onto the other bus. so we did and because katherine and i were one of the last ones on the bus (china didn't train us well to be line cutting douche bags), we got plastic stools to sit on in the aisle. not stable. but 2 hours later, we arrived, mostly on time. crisis averted.

we went to phonsavan to see the plain of jars - fields of large stone jars that no one knows the origins of. this area of laos is also infamously known to have a large number of UXOs. the one site we visited had designated walk areas indicating whether an area had been cleared of UXOs or 'visually cleared' of UXOs. i was pretty excited about phonsavan not because of the UXOs or the stone jars but because we had decided that it was probably a good place to learn how to ride motorcycles as it was less populated than vientiane. we had the guesthouse boss loan us a motorcycle for the day and even though he knew that we had no experience and no bike license, he still agreed to let us take the bike. what faith. two foreign kids had just crashed their bike the day before. and the funny thing was that we met them while having breakfast the day of renting the motorcycle. i practiced riding up a little lane and got a few curious looks from the neighbours. then more curious looks when i picked up katherine to practice with a passenger. then we were off! half a day of riding around on a little scooter and no injuries.

after phonsavan, we took a pretty long bus ride to sam neua, near the lao-vietnam border. the drive was beautiful - winding through yet more mountains but also lots of rice fields and villages with houses on stilts and local women weaving textiles on their looms in the space under their houses. and lots of cute children looking on as the bus crawled past their village. some of the passengers also brought with them some fowl, and about 15 frogs. fowl went on the roof, frogs got to ride with us.

sam neua is near the pathet lao caves which was used by the pathet lao leaders and their followers when the americans bombed the shit out of that area. almost everyday for 9 nine years, the area around the caves were targeted. large bomb craters exist (one of the leaders converted a bomb crater into a swimming pool which i thought was pretty genius) alongside more UXOs. while on tour of one of the caves, we heard a low rumbling noise resembling thunder. when asked, the guide said it was just a bombie. just?! it was quite the adventure trying to get to tour the caves. the day before, we had failed because of a serious of unfortunate events. then when we finally got to the cave office, we were told that the 9am tour had to be cancelled because of a lack of tour guides. we were given a handdrawn map of the village and a mini tour we could do on our motorbikes before the 1pm tour. we grabbed breakfast then set off. katherine drove, i passenged and the frenchboy, julien, we were traveling with had his own bike. on the ride to the caves, i noticed that the brakes on the bike weren't all that responsive but they would do. plus we were in a rush and didn't really have time to turn back to get it dealt with. we should have. anyways, katheirne was driving and we all went down this pretty steep dirt path. and we started going faster and faster and she was down shifting but we weren't really slowing down. we zoomed past julien and by this time i was feeling some fear. eventually, we came to flat-ish ground and (with her feet) she managed to stop the bike. which is when i found out that the brakes had failed to operate. awesome. + panic! we spent some minutes trying to get our wits back. and some villagers came around to see what the commotion was - they probably noticed us bombing down the hill too. after some inspection, they didn't think there was much of a problem with the bike. anyways, so julien kindly offered to switch bikes with us thinking that perhaps the brakes wouldn't be as stressed if it only had to stop itself plus one person as opposed to two. so we continued the tour which was scenic. then it started to rain and we stopped under a giant rock for shelter. we continued after the rain had died down a little but not all the way and not 10 minutes later, the rain picked up again but we were convinced that town was not that far away so we trucked on. as we were going up another hill, our bike stuttered to a stop. we ran out of gas. so julien had to go get us a litre of gas from a provision store that was not too far away. after all that 'adventure', we finally made it back in time for the tour, did the tour and made it back to our guesthouse safe and sound.

from sam neua, we went to nong khiaw which was a little overrun with tourists then to oudomxay where we caught a bus to mengla, china. back to china!

sam neua, vieng xai july 27-29

this one's a bit long. written end of july:

this recent bit of the adventure really emitomizes laos:
the next day we went to sam neua. again, many hours on a bus. but no one vomited! there was a basket of chickens on the roof and a little basket of live frogs inside the bus. and a crazy man in the back of the bus smoking and coughing like he had emphezema. looking ahead at the two no-smoking signs on the bus. we got to sam neua (where i am while writing this). we met a french boy named julien and we've been hanging out with him. near this town there is a place called vieng xai, which was really heavily hit by the US bombing in the vietnam war. government officials and soldiers and many more people lived in caves there for the 9 years that bombing happened. they're called the pathet lao caves. so yesterday we woke up and met the french boy at 7am to go rent motorbikes to go to the caves. there are english tours of the caves at 9am and 1pm. we got to the motorbike place but it was raining a little so we thought we'd take the bus instead. we started walking to the bus station we came in at, but then we asked someone and he said that the bus to vieng xai left from another station three kilometers away. and he pointed us in a direction. so we walk that way, and get to an intersection. to the left, the paved road we are on continues, and forward and to the right it is dirt road. so we go left thinking that's the way a bus would go. after 10 minutes or so the road ends at a creek. and people are crossing to go work on fields on the other side. the bridge across? there is a rusting i-beam lying across the creek that people walk across. amazing. so we turned back and wandered around the dirt roads for a while, and we went to see two monuments of the town which were supposed to have good views. so the first one we walked and walked the wrong way (but we followed the sign) and eventually got there. to a locked gate. we saw another monument and walked there, only to find another locked gate. and then we went to the tourist office which opened at 8. they gave us a map! thank goodness! so it turns out that the bus station we want is indeed 3km away, but in a different direction. we set out at 9 or 9:15. at about 10:15 we get there, because it's actually 4km away. vieng xai is about an hour away in the bus and the buses leave every hour. and the tour was at 1pm. the next bus (which is actually like a small pickup truck with two rows of seats in the bed) is supposed to leave at 10:30. no problem, we waited. at 10:30 a man who works there told us there weren't enough people to go at 10:30, so the next one would leave at 11:30. which was fine, we'd still make the 1pm tour. so we waited. and we were sooo hungry, and there were no restaurants, only bus station food. so foo and i bought these cheese flavored crackers, which actually were sweet and only vaguely cheese-flavored, and also a pack of dry instant noodles. there was no hot water so we ate the dry noodles and crackers and the french boy bought a mystery food wrapped in a banana leaf. we sat down to eat and he opened it and it was fish. a whole fish. the head, the tail, the bones. cooked in some spicy sauce. he ate some parts but i think gave up after a minute because it was really spicy and many parts seemed to be unidentifiable. and eventually 11:30 came around. we sat in the bus with two lao women and no one around spoke english. at 11:45, the lao women were leaning over a giant box and looked like they were taking a nap. so at 11:50 i found someone who spoke english and asked when it was leaving and he said 12:30, still not enough people. if there were actually enough people by 12:30, which was no guarantee, we would miss the tour anyway. so after an hour walk and almost two hours of waiting, we walked the hour back to the center of town and ate lunch. where foo and i both found worms in our food. not the best day ever.

we decided to give it another go today. so we met the french boy at 7am again and walked to the motorbike rental shop. the guy from yesterday wasn't there, and the guy in the shop just looked at us and continued working on a bike. after about 10 minutes a woman came out and we asked about renting a bike and she sort of told us/indicated in limited english that the guy wasn't there. then walked away. so we were just left standing there. and after 40 minutes of waiting, finally the guy came back. he rented us two motor bikes and three helmets. but one was out of gas so the woman left and came back a minute later with gasoline in a soda bottle. they poured it in the gas tank and we were off. we stopped at a gas station on the way and foo and i got gas but the seat wouldn't open for the french boy to get gas in his bike. so foo and i went on and he went back to get it fixed and said he would catch up. so foo and i left, with her driving and me on the back. the french boy caught up with us and said that they just hammered a screw driver around in the lock on the seat for a while and 'fixed' it. the road to vieng xai is like other roads in laos, windy and full of hills. they're mountain roads but not very safe ones. you have to be in a super low gear going up hills and really downshift/brake going down hills. we got there in a bit less than an hour and found the cave tour office. we walked in at 8:50. victory!! a whole day of trying and we finally got there! no one was at the desk so after 5 minutes or so foo yelled 'sabaidee!' down the hall and someone came out. we signed in and then he told us that the one guide had to take someone to the hospital and the other one is busy, could we come back at 1pm? well, if that's the only option, i suppose so. what to do til 1pm? it was 9am. he was really nice and drew us a map of a bike tour we could do on our own to take around there seeing rice paddies and villages and rivers and caves and mountains until the 1pm cave tour. two hours on a bicycle, but less with motor bikes. then he said 'are you happy to do that? does this bike tour make you happy?' oh, cutest nicest man ever, no i was not happy but with no other choice, i was going to do the bike tour. we had breakfast at a restaurant in the market. we wandered around the market and oh my goodness there is some crazy food eaten here. huge bugs and worms, cockroaches, flattened rodents (with hair still on) skinned whole baby cow, giant bull head, sort of a jello made of blood from some animal. i opted for the more familiar fried noodles dish.
we started the tour and i took a turn driving the motorbike and foo was behind. first we were going up a really steep hill and the bike was really struggling so i shifted from 2nd to 1st and almost threw foo off the bike. oops. then we went down this seemingly endless really steep hill. it was a gravel road and there weren't too many other people/vehicles around. and the back brake of the bike didn't work so i was using the front brake. and the hill just kept going and going, so i shifted from 4th to 3rd. the brake seemed to not be working as well after a while, so i downshifted to 2nd, and i felt the brake working less well still, then it just gave out. and foo and i were on this motorbike going downhill with no flat ground in sight and no brakes. and it was going faster and faster and i couldn't slow down. we passed the french boy going really really fast and i didn't know what to do but going that fast was not a good option so i shifted into first gear to try to slow down which almost threw us both off because we were going so fast, and the engine was screaming really loudly and i was panicked and i know foo was wondering what the hell i was doing going so fast down this gravel road super steep hill. but the bike slowed down a little and the hill briefly got a little less steep, and i put my feet on the ground to try to skid to a stop. and finally the bike stopped. my whole body was shaking. and i got off and was all panicked, and foo and the french boy thought i was just trying to drive fast for fun. by the way, that is not a thing i do. speed is not a thing i'm attraced to. so i was shaking and telling them that the brake didn't work, we were just going down this huge hill with no way of stopping. then some people who lived on the side of that road came out and sort of looked at the bike while we tried to show them that the brake didn't work. so foo and i switched bikes with the french boy because we couldn't walk the bike back and the brake seemed to be working a bit more and it's easier to stop one body than two. so after that we continued on the trail and saw lots of this amazing beautiful country. lots of people in their little homes on stilts on the side of the road, with weaving looms underneath. and lots of rice paddies and corn fields. we got to a stream with a woven bamboo bridge and had to walk the bikes over. then got to another bigger creek with no bridge so we walked the bikes through. and this was probably an hour and 15 minutes into it, maybe more. we were thinking it wouldn't take more than an hour. it started raining so we stopped for a bit under an overhanging rock. some kids with giant cows passed us and laughed. probably not a lot of white folks go through there.
it wasn't raining too hard and we had to be back for the 1pm tour, so we continued in the rain (oh yes, foo was driving since i almost killed us going down the hill) we finally got to the fork in the road where to the left was vieng xai and to the right was the road to vietnam. and we were going up and up the hill and the french boy was ahead of us. and then our bike died. i yelled for julien but he couldn't hear. so we walked up the hill a bit and started it again. it went for a minute or so and died again. we started it again. and it died a minute later. we were out of gas. the french boy realized we weren't behind him, thank goodness, so he came back and then went off again to buy some gas and bring it back. about 5 minutes later he returned with a glass bottle of gas. we put it in the tank and drove about two minutes to find this little roadside shop with about 10 glass bottles of gas. i suppose lots of people run out of gas around here. but turns out we were only like 1km from the town. so we got into the town and to the gas station. which, of course, was out of gas. then the woman gave us plastic chairs to sit on. and we were all thinking 'of course, nothing here works. this is the hardest day of tourism ever' and then a pickup came with two barrels in the back. they siphoned out the gas into the big tank, and we got our gas and were on our way to the cave tourist office again! we got there at about 12:55. success! we got a guide and went to see several caves which were people's homes for 9 years! amazing! all hidden in the mountains. they had bedrooms and living rooms and dining rooms and kitchens and emergency rooms with air pumps and offices and meeting rooms. like a home but in a mountain. that was pretty cool. and all over the area (and the rest of the country) there are huge bomb craters in the ground. so the caves were interesting but really not so exciting compared to the adventure getting there. we headed back at about 3:30pm for the 30km ride to sam neua. of course, it started raining on the way, but not too bad, thank goodness. we got back at 4:30 in one piece. and here we are now, going to hop on another bus tomorrow at 8am. 12 hours to the next stop then about 6 more til we get to china!

to phonsavan july 25

we got to phonsavan, maybe 10 hours on the bus, more people vomiting. we stayed at this guest house called sabaidee (the lao word for hello). the sight to see here is called the plain of jars. we were thinking of renting a motorbike instead of paying for an expensive tour. but the guest house guy told us some tourists had crashed the day before. and that night we went to eat dinner and at the restaurant, guess who we saw! we met the couple who had crashed and had their arms all bandaged. so i asked about it because fast things without seatbelts make me nervous. and they said it was the first time they had ridden a motorbike. and they hit gravel and the driver got nervous and somehow they crashed. and they had to go to the hospital (which is not a thing you want to do in laos) and get stitches. the boy said it was the worst day of his life. awesome. so guess what we did! we rented a motorbike! we rented one and both rode on it, and drove to the plain of jars. the plain of jars is this mysterious, well, plain of jars. the jars are all huge and made of stone. they're like three feet tall. and very old. like ancient old. and no one really knows what they are there for or who put them there. there's no organic material in them so there's no way of dating them. so just hundreds of large stone jars all over. the jars were sort of interesting, and the land is pock-marked with bomb craters, but the highlight of this city was the motorbike rental. neither of us has ever ridden a motorbike. so foo learned first and drove to the plain of jars. then she taught me to drive and i drove us around for a while. it was really fun! we drove around more to use the gas we bought, because we weren't trying to donate any gas to the guy who was already overcharging us, then we ate chinese food for lunch (delicious). the guy said that since foo speaks chinese, we didn't have to order off the menu, she could order anything she wanted. so we ordered tofu hot plate, and a few minutes later the owner/cook leaves the restaurant on his motorbike. and comes back 5 minutes later with a bag of tofu! he actually went out to buy ingredients for our meal!
as far as motorbiking goes, the only injury occurred when it started raining so we went back to the guesthouse and were trying to put the bike on the covered porch so it wouldn't get wet. and we were lifting it up to the porch and the tailpipe hit my leg. so now i have a red blistered burn on my leg. but it's not too bad. it doesn't hurt anymore. and it's not bad enough to get infected.
then we had chinese food again for dinner, but at a different restaurant. we always get awesome chinese food when we travel because chinese people live everywhere and because foo speaks chinese so the people are always like 'we'll make you whatever you want because you speak chinese'. and i think they make extra good food because they know they're cooking for someone who knows what good chinese food is like. and we don't get overcharged by chinese people, unless we're in china. when we get overcharged almost everyday. so sometimes when we're feeling really tired or like that day kicked our asses, we eat chinese food. it's almost guaranteed to be good.

vientiane, around july 23

so we headed down to vientiane, the capital. it has about half a million people. we got there and found that accommodation is crazy expensive, and mostly full. we wandered for a while (having learned that we can't trust the lonely planet recommendations anyway) and we finally found a room which cost double what the other rooms in laos up until then cost. but...the city was kind of a relief. the second there evening foo got a beer and we went to this fountain to sit and drink it. we sat, and then a lady walked by. and watching her walk, i could tell she was a working girl. only working girls walk like that. then she went and flirted with some lao boys sitting on some benches. then we heard her talk and realized that she was indeed a boy. then some creepy looking kids came and sat near us. something about it just seemed strange. they were all probably between the ages of 11 and 18. then this fat, middle aged white man who looks like he could be somebody's dad walks up and sort of looks around, looks at his watch, looks around again, then is joined by a young lao boy who is maybe like 20 years old. they go sit on a bench and we can see them talking. then we realize a business transaction is taking place. then something happens with the creepy kids sitting next to us and one of them starts wailing. crying and screaming. and we can't figure out why. but something tells me we should not be there. and we shouldn't help this boy, even though he might be hurt. so we get up and walk away, and see the old white man with the boy walking. we walk out of that area, and stop to look at a restaurant menu. then the old white man comes up behind us with a different boy (i guess he changed his mind) and we decide to follow them. we followed them for a while, but then got distracted. so funny. to see a 60 year old white guy with gray hair and a beer belly picking up this small 18 year old lao boy. and the white guy is probably a responsible husband and father, and probably a businessman or something. it made me think about how many people that i know that might have secret other lives.
i got my vietnamese visa in vientiane. $45. again, foo has to pay nothing. i'm so expensive to travel with.
ooohh also, we went to see a place called COPE. it's an amazing program. but first a little history on the country: in the 1960s and early 70s, during the vietnam war, the US bombed the shit out of laos because they were trying to kill vietnamese people staying in laos. they dropped something like 260 million bombs. enough so that something like 1 was dropped every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for several years. and in tests of these bombs (they're carpet bombs) a third of them didn't explode on impact. so all over laos there are these unexploded bombs, called UXOs (unexploded ordinance), or 'bombies'. they're small little bombs, but if you step on it or play with it, it could explode and kill you and anyone else around. so there are potentially 80 million UXOs in laos. since the war ended (which laos wasn't involved in in the first place) 30,000 people have been killed by UXOs. and many more injured. losing limbs or eyes or fingers. often kids are killed because they find the bombies and know that they can make good money buy selling scrap metal, but don't know that what they have is a bomb. and there are tons of these bombs. people all over the country have bomb casings and other parts of bombs around their homes. they reuse the metal to make things like tables and stoves and flower pots. in the more rural parts, we saw all kinds of reused bomb parts as decoration and and functional objects. poor people are very creative and use their resources well. anyway, COPE gives prosthetics to people in laos, many of whom lost limbs from these UXOs. they have an amazing exhibit about it. there are videos of people telling their stories, about how they lost limbs or they lost kids or parents. you can see what all the bombs look like. and they have several home-made prosthetic limbs that were donated to the project by people who received new prosthetic limbs. some people even made their homemade limbs using bomb parts. very creative, i have to say. it was pretty amazing to see. but COPE gives people real, good-quality prosthetic limbs and teaches them how to use them. they even pay for transportation to vientiane and back to their homes.
we also rented bikes there and saw some historic things and such. rode down the river. had dinner on the river and at the markets and some little restaurants. saw a french film. (the french occupied laos for a while, so there are baguettes and words in french everywhere). foo discovered a baguette sandwich, containing pickled veggies, eggs, cheese, mystery sauce. very good. and i had quite a few fruit shakes. i think we used the time in vientiane to chill out and recover from super tourism. then we headed up to phonsavan.

south to luang prabang around july 18

so anyway, we left muang sing the next day and went back to luang namtha, stayed the night, then headed south to luang prabang, which was supposed to be really nice, according the the lonely planet.

it was maybe an 11 or 12 hour bus ride. lots of people throwing up (this is a theme on the bus rides here) we got there and took a tuk tuk to the center of town. it's a cute little place on a peninsula between the mekong and nam khan rivers. we soon realized that it's also kind of a major tourist destination. so all the accomodation was expensive. we looked at lots of places and finally found one for a decent price. turns out, it was a decent price because it's dark and humid and has no a/c. so it smelled all moldy, and a roach crawled out of the bathroom drain. and there were ants. so foo was panicking (another theme of this adventure). the next morning we went and found another one for only a bit more money, but much cleaner. we even got our laundry done there! also, the electricity was out city-wide for that whole day. we went to lunch at an indian food place. and i was suspicious of the food and picked at it a bit while eating because i get nervous when i can't tell what's in my food. then i saw foo picking at her naan. turns out, there were weevels in it. gross. yet she ate it anyway, and didn't tell me about the weevels til after the meal. awesome. and then the owner of the restaurant came up and was offended that i had been picking at my food. oh. extra awesome. in luang prabang we rented bicycles and rode around outside the major tourist section, which was really nice. we went to the market, found probably the only working atm in the city, road around the peninsula. it was pleasant. we ate one fancy dinner there. it cost maybe $20, which is wayyy fancy for laos. but unfortunately it was only ok food. that was sort of disappointing. our daily budget is $20 per person. we went over that day. the next night we had beer and pizza. much better deal. we also both got lao massages, which weren't very good and both ended 20 or 25 minutes early. i didn't complain because i didn't really want to finish the massage. it seemed like the last 15 minutes of it the girl was just making stuff up. like she was just sort of pounding on my back aimlessly.
there was also a night marked with lots of neat crafts and silk and clothing. but everyone who was shopping was white, which means the price doubles, and nothing is really 'authentic lao culture' anyway. so we didn't buy anything. mostly luang prabang was not that awesome. at least the parts we saw. and up until this point, i was not feeling very impressed with laos.

into laos on july 14

we stayed a night in chiang khong, thailand, before crossing over to laos. we found a cute little hostel run by a thai woman who had a retired american boyfriend named don. the town was small and the restaurant had mediocre food, but there was this cute old lady across the street selling food. she sold us banana wrapped in sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf. it was delicious. she also sold us something we couldn't identify but it had fruit in it i think. also it had a couple bugs on top. i'm becoming quite tough. i picked off the bugs and ate it anyway. it wasn't that good though.

the next morning we went to the border in the bed of the thai woman's pickup, the thai border is on one side of the mekong river, the lao border is on the other side. we got stamped out of thailand and then took a boat across the river into laos. i had to apply for a visa at the laos border. it took 15 minutes or so and cost $35. foo didn't need a visa. so it took her like 5 minutes and cost nothing. i'm always so expensive! so we were with 4 european guys and were going to take a tuktuk (like a taxi) to the bus station and a bus to a city called luang namtha. but we decided to hire a van instead which is a bit more expensive but much faster. so we get in the van, and turns out it's a karaoke van. so there are mirrors on the ceiling and walls with little led lights in them, and a tv playing karaoke music videos really loud, and huge speakers everywhere. it was kind of funny. til we started driving. the roads in laos are really winding. and there's construction in lots of places and potholes and gravel. and the driver was driving really fast (for a road like that) and there was a polish boy named kasper who was a bit loud and obnoxious. he asked if we could stop for food along the way because he was sooo hungry, so we stopped at one place and they brought out instant noodles and he was like 'oh i don't eat noodles. can we go someplace else?' mind you that this is rural laos. next place to eat is in an hour. so we go to the next place and there was no menu, but there were eggs, and of course noodles, and some rice. but the polish guy kept asking for salad. in his polish accent "i want a salad. do they have something like lettuce and some vegetable, like a tomato?" seriously? of course they're not going to have salad. anyway, he was loud and rude to the driver who didn't speak english that well, but kasper kept asking for other things. finally we got to luang namtha, and foo and i quickly departed from the group of boys. we found a guesthouse called khamking and stayed there for a night. we went to the night market to eat and got fried rice, some coconut noodle soup, a little waffle, and some crepes with deliciousness inside. the town has exactly one atm, which wasn't working, so we paid in thai baht for an exchange right slightly in the guesthouse's favor. we looked at trekking options (trekking, it turns out, basically means walk into the jungle/rural area and look at staged sights of local life/culture) , because it's supposed to be good around there, but the 'responsible trekking' was pretty expensive and didn't give much money to the hill tribes that we would visit. so the next day we went to muang sing, a town an hour north. we rode in an 11 passenger van with a vomiting child. i tried to give the mom some wet wipes we had with us, but i think that wet wipes don't exist in laos, because she didn't use them, but also didn't give them back. oh well. we got there and found a guesthouse, went to check out the trekking that was supposed to be the most responsible in southeast asia. it was wayyy more expensive, like 300,000 kip per person per day. that's like $35. and something like only 8% of it went to the tribes, and a huge chunk went to the government. and we read about all the different treks we could do, but decided that trekking is perhaps not a responsible method of tourism at all. no matter what, having all these relatively wealthy foreigners coming to a village to watch people do their normal daily tasks and taking photos and gawking is very strange. imagine if some rich foreigners came everyday to st charles MO to watch anne and mick zerr cutting their grass, going to work, washing the dishes. and they took pictures and talked about you in a language you didn't understand. it just doesn't seem right. so much exposure to tourists will change the culture. the highlight of muang sing was the chinese restaurant we ate at. ha. way to dive right into the lao culture, right?

the deception!

i just looked up the second largest reclining buddha statue in the world, and guess what! thailand lied to me! the first and second largest reclining buddha statues are in myanmar!

malaysia to thailand

so...we arrived in KL and stayed with aunty pat for two nights, then went to her father-in-law's house at a place called fraser's hill. it's huge and magical and two maids live and work there full time, although the family uses it sort of as a vacation/weekend house. one maid is from indonesian and the other is from mainland china. neither speaks english. so foo talked to the chinese lady who then talked to the indonesian lady. one time the chinese lady was asking me if i wanted her to put my wet laundry in the machine to spin out the excess water. she and the indonesian lady were trying to ask me and i was totally lost, so i called foo down to interpret. and she figured it out. and then she told me the chinese lady said that she and i were like a duck and a chicken. both talking but not understanding a word the other said. ha.
so then we went to a little island off the west coast of malaysia called penang. we stayed in a nice hotel that datuk ng booked for us. he really likes to take care of guests. he also sent us off with a bag full of medicine and train tickets to bangkok. it seems like the more foo and i try to resist people doing nice things for us, the more stuff they try to do. and datuk ng and aunty pat are not two people you can say no to. so anyway, we were in penang for two nights and ate delicious food and saw the third-largest reclining buddha in the world.
after two days, we took a ferry across to butterworth, where the train station was.
so the train is a sleeper train for the 22-hour journey to bangkok. the train was really slow. and there was this crazy man sitting across the aisle from us who was traveling alone. and sometimes solo travelers can be a bit strange i think because they don't have anyone to talk to so they get lonely. foo and i had missed lunch and were snacking and he looks over and says to me 'you have to watch the calories.' oh man. also, people always say really rude stuff like that to me. never to foo. like in argentina, the mom at the farm once said 'you don't eat very much for being so big.' every culture has it's own version of what is rude, i suppose.
so anyway, he kept saying really strange stuff and also talking to himself and making stupid jokes to the service people who were too busy to humor him. and for dinner foo and i wanted to make instant noodles we brought with us. we needed hot water, and the crazy man was willing to help, so that was nice. but get this: we used an instand noodle cup and he put train tap water in it. gross. but he boiled it. with his do-it-yourself heating element. it was the tops of two spoons flattened out, nailed on either side of a little piece of wood, attached to a cord that perhaps was once attached to a lamp. so he dropped it in the cup and boiled the water. he gave it to us and there were like brown dirty-looking bits and he said 'oh that's just iron.' so...voila! instant noodles!
we got to bangkok and found a place to stay right by the train station. it's pretty nice for $16/night. bangkok is really really hot. like a sauna all day long, but sunnier. and thai people are soooooo nice. so nice. we saw a buddhist temple with this 9 ft tall golden buddha. the buddha statue was stucco-covered, and then was being moved and was dropped, and the stucco cracked, revealing the solid-gold statue underneath. pretty neat.
also, we went to see the biggest reclining buddha in the world. now i'm only missing the second-largest. i'm not sure where it is, but after seeing the first and third, i have to see the second too.
after that temple, foo and i took a water taxi back to the hotel. pretty fun.
last night we went to this night market in a seedier area of town. and these men were lining the sidewalks holding little papers that said 'dvd sex'. there were other men that said 'ping pong show, see ping pong show' and held out an extensive menu of what other services were available at the ping pong show.
today we went to this mall and walked around but by the time we were leaving it was raining so we didn't want to walk. and around here there is this type of taxi called a tuktuk. mostly they try to scam tourists, but if you can negotiate a fair price, it's fine. the tuktuk is like a cross between a small car and motorcycle. like a rickshaw, but motorized. so we found a guy who would take us. so we're going wayyyy fast throught the pouring rain with water dripping all over us and the tuktuk man driving like a crazy fool. but we made it back to the hostel and it was soooooo much fun. there are cheaper ways of getting around, but i think i'd take the tuktuk again for the fun ride.

still in singapore

hello! i'm still in singapore til thursday i think. foo and i have been trying to figure out what the next move would be. options were australia, new zealand, southeast asia, home. we just didn't know what order to do it in. our return tickets to the US are for late november, but it is an option to move the ticket dates closer and come home sooner. which isn't a terrible option. i know it seems like it would be ridiculous to end traveling before i have to, but after a full year of not having my own space or a stable routine, it's seeming like an appealing option. but then i thought about it more and decided that i would probably regret it my whole life if i didn't take this opportunity to travel and explore, because chances are it will only get more difficult to do as i get older. and right now it's winter in new zealand. so we're going to explore southeast asia for a month or two, then head to australia and new zealand, then home right before thanksgiving.
so for the past two weeks, we've been hanging out in singapore. it's pretty hot. we went bowling with foo's cousins, which was super fun. we've been having this dessert at a place in chinatown called Traditional Desserts. it's basically my favorite thing ever. it's flavored ice, shaved into a giant mountain with toppings on it. i think we get it like 3 times per week. soooo good.

the family has a maid named grace who is from the Philippines. (lots of families here have maids from other countries) she lives here and works all day, everyday. she's about my age and so i've been chatting with her. she has a five year old son who lives with her mom at home, and she hasn't seen him for a year and a half. she gets off work one sunday per month. i've never had a maid (well, we had theresa, but that's for 3 hours every other week.) and so i have had a bit of a hard time having one. mostly i feel really sad because she doesn't have an opportunity to have any real emotional connection with anyone. she left her whole life a year and a half ago, and while she gets paid here, which she couldn't at home because there was no work, she also gave up a life. she's only a maid here. not a friend or a mom or a daughter or anything. and i have a hard time with a week of no friends. she's going on a year and a half. so anyway, i try to be extra friendly to her. on her last sunday off work, foo and i took her out for the day. super fun. plus i don't think she gets to have fun days ever. so we met her and took her out to dim sum (like chinese tapas) for lunch. then we walked around chinatown and ate some traditional desserts. then we took her to see a movie. we saw ghosts of girlfriends past, which was surprisingly not terrible. i think she had a fun day.

yesterday was my birthday! foo and i didn't tell anyone because for my birthday i really wanted to just hang out with her. it seems like we'd get to hangout all the time, but somehow there is always someone who needs to do something with us. since it was my birthday, i got to be the boss. and we got traditional desserts for breakfast. normally we would get real lunch because foo really needs 'real food', but instead we went to a movie and had popcorn for lunch, because i didn't want to spoil my snack with lunch. then we went computer shopping, i think we're going to buy a cheap laptop for traveling. planning travel things is soooo much easier with a computer, rather than sitting in internet cafes for hours. after that we went to dinner at this cute little place called naive. not sure why they called it that, it seems like a poor choice. but it was a vegetarian restaurant which is so nice. i really prefer not picking meat out of my food. it was delicious. then foo's whole family started sending her text messages like 'why you did not tell me its kittie/kathie/kate's birthday? you goodfornothing!' no one knows my name. well, everyone sort of knows it. i am called several variations of my name. so anyway, we made it home at 10pm or so, and her aunty lai ngan made me a birthday cake! it was so nice! so the family sang me happy birthday and we ate delicious cake. her aunty lai ngan runs a cake baking business out of the home. yessss! then they said that at swensen's (which is like the denny's of singapore) they give out free ice cream on your birthday! so it was 11pm by then, so we hurried and got ready and headed to swensen's. i got my free ice cream! it was called firetruck or fireengine or something. it was three scoops of ice cream (vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry) and a half a banana and three cherries and whipped cream. and a candle! so that was very exciting.

oh yes, travel plans: so we're heading around southeast asia first, doing super last-minute planning. i think we'll head by bus or train to thailand, and we're going to vietnam, cambodia, laos, malaysia, and indonesia. i have to apply for visas in most of these places, so i should probably get on that. foo doesn't because she has a singaporean passport. i'm always more expensive when we travel.
then in early september i think we'll head to australia and new zealand and hike and work on farms and explore. then home for thanksgiving, and i think i'll move to chicago around then.
that's about it for now.
love
katie

china

i'm back in singapore now, but in china the blogspot website is blocked so i couldn't write any of the adventures then. so here are the last two weeks:

we got to shanghai and foo's friend sheep met us at the airport and brought us back to the apartment he shares with his wife, irene. sheep (whose real name is shaw-ming) is called sheep i think because his last name sounds like the word for sheep in chinese. i think. he is taiwanese and irene is from hong kong. and they are living in shanghai for irene's job.

general things about china: just about nothing is vegetarian. everyone always wants to be first in line, no matter what, and they will push you out of the way to get there. beer is cheaper than water. street food is better than restaurant food, and way cheaper. they produce and sell fakes of just about everything. people spit a lot and clean out their ears in public places. also, china is huge and there is so much amazingness to see it would take months. probably longer.

we got there on a wednesday i think, and on friday foo and i flew from shanghai to beijing to see the great wall. we actually flew to a city outside of beijing, and took a train to get there. it went 330km/hr, which seemed pretty fast. then we took a taxi to the hotel we were staying in, which we booked online in advance. so we got into the taxi and told him the name and address of the hotel. he didn't know where it was (which is not a surprise, in retrospect, because it seems like no taxi driver in china actually know where anything is. i don't understand this.) so he called the hotel and got directions. which he was unable to follow. foo got out our map (which was mostly sort of accurate) and tried to help him find it. he stopped and asked someone for directions. and we still didn't find it, so he stopped the car, got out, and asked a woman on the street where it is. we drove some more. and then we found the street, but the wrong way of the one-way, so we had to go around. finally we arrived at the 9 dragons hotel, which is in a narrow alleyway called a hutong. hutongs are sort of like old-china streets, only big enough for one car at a time, but they aren't like alleys really, because front doors of homes and schools and stores and restaurants are there. mostly they're just very small streets.
so we got in the hotel, which turned out to be a hostel. in the lobby the room prices were posted. our room was something like double what we paid online. and there was an hourly rate. so basically it was a classy joint. our room was pretty nice though. a/c, a tv, private bathroom, everything worked. we went to see tiananmen square, which is a huge open paved block in the city with lots of important buildings around it. i think the people's congress is there, and mao's mausoleum, and the place where mao first declared the people's republic of china. then we went to a street called wang fu jing which has lots of people and food especially at night. we went down a 'small eats' road and they had scorpions on sticks, still alive, that you could eat. as well as starfish and i think sea horses. lots of other food involving meat or seafood. but it was exciting.
the next day we went to the summer palace, which was more or less a terrible day. the summer palace is pretty impressive actually, even though it was terrible. i think emperors lived there way back when. and it's like a park. a long trail with a lake in the middle and lots of nice bridges and trees. somehow i managed to not see a map at the entrance, so we walked the long way around the lake. we bought the expensive tickets so we could tour all the buildings, but by the time we got to the buildings we were both so tired from walking and getting pushed and shoved by chinese people who always would like to be in front of you, or where you are, that we left. after that i wanted to go see a temple with a 46.5 ton bell, so we got in van/fake taxi and the driver totally ripped us off, so i was really mad and unable to enjoy the bell temple. mostly we walked in, past all the other smaller bell exhibits, and looked at the giant bell, again, very impressive, like most everything there, and then headed back to the hostel. in the hutong, we went to the little shop next door to the hostel and i got ice cream and foo got a giant bottle of beer. my little cup of ice cream cost more than the liter of beer. both were very sorely needed though. we then decided to do less touristy things because we both always end up hating them.

the next day we went to the great wall. also, get ready for this, i'm about to blow your mind: the great wall is not actually one giant continuous wall. i had no idea. it's little segments of a wall, but not even in a straight line. who knew? it sort of makes the thought of it a little less exciting. we decided to go the the section called simitai, which is farther away but less touristy and crowded than badaling, the closer section. so we drove for about two hours with 8 tourists and a crazy chinese man who drove like a bat out of hell (more on driving in china later). we got there and took a cable car up the mountain (there is also the option to walk. not a smart option if you want to a) be home before dark b) walk for the next week) and then a sort of train up a little more. it wasn't really like a train. it reminded me of the mine train at six flags. only it just went up the mountain. and then we climbed up to the actual wall. which was so steep and with so many stairs and really high up. finally, on the great wall, being followed by a small man with brown teeth who was trying to give us a tour of the wall, and then at the end would try to sell us a book on the great wall. i told him right away that i didn't have enough money to buy his book so he stopped following us. thank goodness. the great wall is impressive. the section seemed like it was probably many miles long. the wall is built on a mountain, so anyone trying to invade china would have to be pretty much a mountain goat to even get to the wall, then they would be shot with arrows by the chinese guards in the towers on the wall. the towers are built two arrow-shots apart so anywhere anyone tried to cross the wall they could be stopped. the wall itself is built of stones and the outer layer is made with lime and glutinous rice. pretty interesting, huh? and the view is amazing. mountains and mountains and wall as far as you can see. and not too many tourists, which was a plus. so we made it back down into the cable car, which i will try to post a photo of, because this thing looks like it was recycled from some other faraway place that used it when it was new in 1945 or something. basically the car is like a small metal booth which holds two people, facing each other. the walls only go up waist high when you're standing, and you could open the door yourself. it seemed pretty rickety. this conversation happened really high in the air in the old squeaky car:
katie: how often do you think these things get safety inspected?
foo: uhh, this is china. i don't think they do safety inspections.
nice.
but we made it back.
and that night went to a vegetarian buffet restaurant. which had mediocre food, but i was so excited to not have to pick meat out of my food it was the best meal ever.

next day my butt was really sore, and we decided to take a break from touristy things.

back to shanghai, on a domestic china flight which seemed sort of unsafe.

in shanghai we mostly ate a lot, saw some buildings, ate dinner with foo's relatives.
we went to another city called nanjing, which is the site of a terrible massacre in the late 30s. something like 300,000 chinese were killed by the japanese military. it is still a sore subject in china because the japanese still have not admitted any guilt. we toured the museum, which is huge, and sort of less serious-unbiased-facts than i'm used to in a museum. don't get me wrong, there are still lots of facts, but also clear evidence that china is still very angry and wants japan to know they did something wrong. there were lots of parts with poster and plaques that said, in summary, 'the historical factual evidence which is completely irrefutable and is found to be totally accurate and true by all of these important organizations proves that japan was a terrible terrible jerkface and in the wrong completely and they broke all the rules and they cannot dispute this because...' lots of that. but also photos of lots of terrible things that happened. basically, the japanese soldiers were given instructions that there were no rules, go in, kill, rape, burn, torture. and in addition to chinese soldiers, they killed lots of civilians. irony of the day: in the museum there was a certificate of gratitude/'you're doing the right thing', sent to some sort of missionary folk in china who were housing refugees of the massacre. from adolf hitler.

this past weekend we went to yellow mountain. pretty much the most beautiful place on earth. 6 hour bus ride there, then up a cable car (much nicer than the one at the great wall) then an hour hike to the hostel. the hostel was the most terrible hostel in the world, and since it was located on top of a mountain, they could charge really whatever they wanted. so it was about US$25 per person (expensive by any hostel standards, especially china) to sleep in a tiny room with 8 beds. the bathroom had chunks of food and hair clogging the drain and there was no toilet paper or soap and the room was mold and full of bugs. and the beds were wooden pallets with a pad on top and sheets that definitely weren't washed between guests. foo found a fingernail clipping on her bed. soooo gross. anyway, back to the amazing part. the day we got there we did a 9km hike. hike isn't really what it was, it was all stairs. maybe like 4 km down stairs then 5 km back up. it was 5 hours total. and it was all through mountains. if you've ever seen chinese paintings of tall jagged looking mountains, these are the mountains that painting was based off of. it was amazing. and soooo high up. until we got to the bottom, of course, then it was sooooo high to the top. and there is a little food shop in the middle. guess what. there are small but very very stong middle-aged-to-older-men that carry supplies up there. like two giant jugs of kerosene, or four cases of water, tied to a stick which he balances across his shoulders. the 9km was really hard. my legs were very sore and still are a little bit. after the 9km, somehow there was another hour and a half to get back to the hostel. also, foo is afraid of heights. who knew? i didn't. but she sure was nervous on some of the 'trail'. i'm not sure how people did this, but the path is made of concrete, somehow magically just like stuck on the side of a mountain. i'm sure there are very strong steel supports that go into the mountain and stick out to support the path. my question is, how did they get there? there appears to be no way to do it. it's on the side of a very steep mountain. it's not like you could just walk up to it.

so we made it back to shanghai. i bought some fake converse sneakers. they're green. also, at the fake market, when someone i'm with wants to buy something, i have to walk away. because pretty much anywhere a white face goes, the price goes up. by a lot. one woman refused to sell a bag (fake jimmy choo, maybe?) to irene's friend stella, who is actually from shanghai and buys bags from this woman often, while there were white people there. stella told the woman we couldn't understand anyway, but the woman wouldn't sell to her. so we had to go away while she bargained the price down.
other things about the trip to china:
i bought a book on the street, obviously not legally printed, for like US$2, only to get home, open it up, and find that it was missing pages 15 to 78. there are tons of stores with pirated cds, dvds, and games. i don't even know where you'd buy the real thing. the dvds are about US$1, wii games are about the same price. amazing.
oh yes, china drivers: everyone drives like a crazy fool that wants to die. pedestrians will be run over if they're not very very careful. and everyone honks their horn like it's their job. as far as i can tell, the car horn can signal the following things:
-i am going to overtake your car (on the highway)
-don't change lanes, i'm going to pass your car (also on the highway)
-move, you are where i want to be
-don't move, i'm going to drive to where you want to be
-i'm going to drive somewhere i shouldn't, get out of my way
-i am angry because you beat me to the space we both wanted to occupy.
being in a car in china is a very scary thing. on a highway with two lanes, one going each direction, drivers create a third lane for passing other cars which goes down the middle of the highway, on the dotted line. and cars from both directions use this secret magic mystery lane to pass cars in front of them.

so it goes like this: let's pretend i am driving a van carrying 10 frightened tourists to the great wall. i am driving like i'm on a suicide mission, and there is a giant truck in front of me going a little too slow. and there is a string of giant trucks and also small cars coming towards us in the other lane. without slowing down, i will honk my horn 8 to 10 times as i swerve a bit to the left, drive up the center stripe, between both giant trucks, so there are three vehicles side-by-side on the two lane highway, all traveling at high speeds. and then i will continue honking while i swerve right, back into my lane, missing the giant truck behind me by 6 inches or so, and the oncoming traffic by about the same margin.
ok, now let's do it again and again for the next two hours!

this is driving in china.

another exciting bit: on the way to the airport to come back to singapore, we took the mag-lev train. mag-lev means magnetic levitation. so this train floats, basically. and it is propelled by some sort of rotating magnets. i'm sure that's not totally accurate, but it involves magnets and travels really fast. like 430km/hr. it was very exciting.

now i'm back in singapore, sweating pretty much all the time. foo's granddad is such a peer pressure drinker. he's always trying to share a beer with us. this weekend foo and i are supposed to remove the rats which have infested her parents' house while they've been living in vancouver. i predict that i will be the one to deal with the dead rats.
and then to australia in a couple weeks!
i'll try to update more often so it's not so long next time.
lovelovelove
katie