Even though Shanghai sits on the Pacific (or East China Sea for you pedants), there ain’t much beach action going on here. Seems like they’ve used every inch of shoreline for container ports, factory waste dumpage or expo grounds. So it being summer and all, some friends and I decided to trek out to Shengsi Island to get some unhealthy doses of solar radiation, and booze.

Shengsi Island is actually not part of Shanghai. It falls under the administrative incompetence of Zhejiang Province. To get there requires a taxi from wherever you are in Shanghai to the bus station underneath the Nanpu bridge, followed by an hour or so bus ride to a desolate part of Pudong where the ferry terminal is, and then a 70 minute boat ride to the island itself. The boat is the worst part, the seats are tightly packed, the Chinese tourists don’t handle the sea well, and if your stomach isn’t sick, the non-stop Mr. Bean on the TVs ensure your brain is. Avoid the washrooms at all costs. You’ve been warned.

Once you’re there, the island is pretty fucking ace. The air is as clean as you’re going to get in Asia, and that means there’s some awesome clouds doing their thing above you. Yes I love clouds.

When you plan your trip, it’s crucial you find a decent place to stay. I would not advise being bamboozled into 2 large rooms without beds for $150 a night, as our group was. Instead, there’s lots of guest houses around, and my independence seeking friend and I scored a nice air-conditioned and mosquito free place for $15 a night. Always remember to play the student card even if you’re rocking grey hair, suspenders and a sweater vest.

About those mosquitoes, you’ll want to bring the strongest repellent known to man, cause the little buggers aren’t little at all. They’re actually man eating beasts that move with the agility of mountain goats on crystal meth. I’m not really sure what that means, but they make Vlad Ţepeș look like a punk ass bitch.

The initial place we were staying at (the scamming rat bastards) had a “private beach”. What they really meant was a spit of sand covered in toxic waste from the nearby fishing/industrial village down the way. Luckily a 15 minute walk lead us to the massive, pristine Nanchangtu (南长途) beach with decent waves and practically no other people. Yeah it cost 20kuai to get in, but it was well worth being turned into a fried tomato, thanks to the Sun’s loving atomic rays.

The food on the island is mostly a poisonous variety of seafood that will destroy your intestines with the intensity of a thousand piranhas. I survived on granola bars and beef jerky acquired on the mainland. That’s called thinking ahead people. The best plan, would be to bring a small bbq, and get groceries from the town, and have a sweet rave party on the beach with glowing sweat. Interestingly, the main cash crop of the island was edamame beans that were in fact delicious.

If you can stomach other people not stomaching the boat ride, Shengsi island is a natural escape from the evil clutches of Shanghai. Just remember mosquitoes as big as 747s and seafood as bad as Michael Jackson circa 1987.

Amsterdam was my second stop on this prolific pan European tour. It is one of the most pedestrian friendly cities I’ve been to, being perfectly flat, loaded with human scale urban design, and plenty of easy ways to get around. Sometime in the past the potheads who were tired of getting lost in the forest and the bush found out about it, and they migrated here in droves. This made it not just the Netherland’s capital but also dope culture’s capital. Even though it’s the capital, it isn’t the seat of the government. They probably had to move all the important administrative organs to The Hague because everyone was getting high and sitting around playing bongo drums in Vondelpark.

Reduce

If you were blind and had to judge a place by nothing but what you could eat, you would most likely head back to the airport immediately after arriving in downtown Amsterdam thinking you had mistakenly landed in Istanbul. There appears to be more doner kebab shops than all other sources of food combined. While I’ll admit I enjoyed a doner pizza or two, it would have been nice to find more Dutch restaurants other than the ones that were obviously catering to tourists with jacked prices and junk taste. If I was the merciless dictator of Amsterdam, I would order some of these doner places to be turned into convenience stores, which are conspicuously lacking considering the need for 24 hour munchie depots.

The number of weirdo Dutchies should be restricted by an official cull. While my interaction with real live Dutch people was limited because somehow I kept winding up in doner shops, here are two lovely encounters I had:

Encounter 1) while going through airport security on the way out some old guy starts bitching at me in Dutch. I ignore him, and then he says rudely in English “don’t you speak the Dutch?” I of course replied in the negative. He then asks, “Well what are you doing in Holland?” to which my travel buddy quickly replied, “leaving!” as we neared the metal detector. He had no comeback.

Encounter 2) the hostel we were staying in had a series of doors to get past in order to get to your room. First was one you used your key card to unlock, which lead into a holding room where you had to buzz to get entrance from the front desk, then another separate secure door to get into your specific building and of course then your door room. All that security, plus checking IDs and filling out forms when checking in, and still the geniuses at the hostel allowed some Dutch guy with zero bags to check into our dorm who then of course ransacked the place, even smashed open one of the lockers. Fortunately for me the beer I had bought earlier was not pilfered.

Reuse

Amsterdam has the best bicycle transportation infrastructure in the world. Under normal Canadian circumstances I loathe bike lanes, because they lead drivers to think that bikes belong only in those narrow poorly designed paths of doom that are often blocked with parked cars and booby trapped with the infamous door prize. Not so in Amsterdam. The bike is definitely at the top of the transport totem pole, and is the best way to get around.

I’ll turn to this famous scene for one of my favorite things about Holland:

“Well, in Amsterdam, you can buy beer in a movie theatre. And I don’t mean in a paper cup either. They give you a glass of beer, like in a bar. In Paris, you can buy beer at MacDonald’s. Also, you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?”
“They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?”
“No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.”
”What’d they call it?”
“Royale with Cheese.”
“What’d they call a Big Mac?”
“Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.”
“What do they call a Whopper?”
“I dunno, I didn’t go into a Burger King. But you know what they put on french fries in Holland instead of ketchup?”
“What?”
“Mayonnaise.”
“Goddamn!”
“I seen ‘em do it. And I don’t mean a little bit on the side of the plate, they fuckin’ drown ‘em in it.”

Goddamn right! And it was hella good mayonnaise too.

Recycle

While the biking infrastructure is very good, the bikes are NOT. Most of the bikes in Amsterdam are heavy old style single speed cruisers with shit comfort and shittier braking. Riding around on them was like mowing the lawn with your teeth… if you were 85 years old!

Incinerate

The hippy population is out of control. Sadly they don’t make like lemmings and jump into the Keizersgracht. Vondelpark is overrun with them, as are other locations throughout the city that have 24 hour snack facilities and hallucinatory visual décor. I originally thought they could be reduced to a controlled number, but I’ve since realized that the best way to solve the problem is if they all went up in smoke.

Now instead of posting a bunch of photos of boring old buildings that every city in Europe has, here’s some crazy looking modern ones of which Holland has plenty.

Random bits of Qingdao/China I’ll yearn for:

Life in General

• 40 kilometres of the Pacific lined non-stop with beaches, paths, parks and scores of people getting their wedding photos taken. Perfect for scoping out the cutting edge in wedding fashions such as pink striped tuxedos, jean tuxedos or much more classy black tuxedos (matched with white Nike Air Jordans.)
• If smelling fried squid and watching the makeup melt off brides’ faces gets old, Fushan and Taipingshan mountains are mere minutes away for people who like to work that ass like Richard Simmons.
• Money makes the world go round, as Liza Minnelli circa the Third Reich would like you to know. Same deal in “Communist China”. Taobao makes eBay look like my local Pennysaver. After being used as toilet paper by a hamster.
• Anything can be repaired for prices that make you question if it’s really getting repaired or not. And I don’t know what I’m going to do with my days now without the mission of explaining to the call centre peeps what’s wrong with my thingamajig with technical terms in Chinese I’m not familiar with, then repeating the process all over again once the repair dude arrives.
• In the West, buy local is all the rage. Because everything is already made in China, their already ahead of the game. Hell, living in Qingdao I was able to buy most stuff made from factories not very far from my apartment, instead of some heat trap in Canton. Another perk of locally made stuff is being able to toilet paper the company’s bosses house and key his beamer when your shit falls apart.

Movies

• Assigned movie theatre seating. Forget being ahead, China is lapping us here. In a time when fewer people are going to the cinemas to check out Michael Bay’s latest 2 hour ode to explosions, you’d think the fatcats might try implementing something as simple as this. No more waiting aimlessly in the theatre 45 minutes before the show starts to avoid permanent damage to your neck. Gone is that annoying random distribution of empty single seats throughout the theatre. No more having to deal with fucktards who insist seats are taken when they aren’t. The whole concept is so damn simple it makes me want to strangle an aardvark for no apparent reason.
• Being able to walk into the theatre with your OWN damn food, drinks and booze, and not being harassed by night vision wearing pimple faced narcs. I know the cinemas’ lifeblood is their concession stands, but why not at least charge a “corkage fee” so that we don’t have to deal with the weak selection of toxic substances that they serve.
• Nahh, cinemas be damned. High quality pirated DVDs are commonly available with all the new releases and many random films of yore. Like Troll 2!

The Roads

• No taxi ride costs more than $10. …Well as long as you don’t take a “Beijing Shortcut”.
• Right of way for the biggest vehicle users on down to pedestrians. I know I’m going to lose what few friends I have left for this point, but the fact is that it’s easier for a person walking to notice if a relatively loud car is coming than for a driver to see a silent humanoid dressed in drab clothing pop out into traffic like a whack-a-mole.
• Vans that look like loafs of bread. Everywhere.

Food (no this is not a joke)

• As much as I love to hate on the “can I have some food with that oil and MSG” Chinese cuisine, there are some dishes that will knock your socks off, if you’re socks had little mouths that got the munchies after getting high on dope. 锅贴, 烤饼, 羊肉串, 清真烤饼, 新疆拉面, 火锅,蛤蜊,上海炒面，小笼包，just to name a few.
• Plentiful Korean BBQ that will pick you up, knock you down, and make the word Aardvark wish it had three A’s.
• Japanese izakayas hidden away where you won’t find them, but will turn into a redrum raving madman if you don’t.

And most important of all:

Booze

• My Mao-given right to walk into a variety store, buy a big bottle of beer for 50 cents and then have the clerk open it for me so I can start drinking right away. The alcohol laws in Canada now seem as if they were concocted by fascists.
• Watching 10-year-olds walk up to the draft beer vendors on the street to fetch a kilo bag of beer for their parents and hobbling away with it like leprechauns with their pot of gold.
• Bars stay open as long as customers continue feeding the bartenders banknotes. The archaic and absurd concept of closing time can go rot in outerspace.
• Binges at the beach with 10-buck kegs, BBQ’d beef and where’s waldo searches for bikini clad girls in the sea of budgie smugglers, banana hammocks and good ol’ fashioned speedos.

I’ll no doubt be smacked on the head with more, as the vexations of life at my current locale do the same, but no use flogging a dead horse…unless you’re into that sort of thing.

Ahh yeah…can you smell that? That’s the smell of the Chinese Internets tearing the government’s censors a new asshole. It’s one thing to try and purge all memory of a certain incident that happened 20 years ago today from the national consciousness that for the most part has been successful. It’s another to go overboard and create a cause for concern into what that incident was.

Back in the day, when I was cruising through the suburbs with my friend Mike on our bikes, we stumbled across an area the size of a small house that had been walled off using particleboard with large warning signs on all sides, saying “Keep Out”. You just don’t do something like that. If you’re going to put up a conspicuous looking set of walls in the middle of nowhere, at least make them dirty and covered with wines and shit so that anyone who happens by the thing will ignore it for an old shed or something. Instead it looked as though those plywood walls held secrets just waiting to be exploited for our amusement. Abandoned military installations? Area 52? Weird Science? BOOBS??! Hell, the damn signs were basically an R.S.V.P. invitation to see what was on the inside of that enigmatic rectangular space. With some MacGyver work jigging our bikes into a ladder of sorts, we were able to climb up and into the space. Low and behold, there was nothing there. But that’s not the point.

In the Chinese Government’s all knowing, all seeing, and all screwing wisdom, the censors have been blocking every popular site you can think of. Even poor old Microsoft had their new search engine’s birthday bash rained on with the blood of the Net Nanny’s rag. Many popular Chinese sites have also been forced into shutting down during this time. While they aren’t blocked outright, they’ve taken to self-censorship in order to avert being completely shut down, or maybe receiving a special visit from some random acts of violence. A bunch of them have put up pages saying that their sites are under “Server Maintenance”. Some are even going so far as to reference other sites being shut as National Server Maintenance Day.

The government played its hand poorly. Most of the 80′s and 90′s generation kids don’t give a fuck about what happened 20 years ago today even if they do know. Regardless of whether or not they’ve heard what happened, they almost all think that China’s development in areas of the economy, living standards and technology are like moving forward like a stallion in the moonlight. Who needs the abstract concept democracy when you’ve got online games, video-chat, and free porn to keep you busy? But what happens if out of the blue, for some mysterious reason, the popular websites like Dance Dance Super Dancer and all 700 Twitbook clones are undergoing maintenance, or blocked completely over till around June the 7th. Well if I was some Internet café dwelling troglodyte, I’d probably hop on my magic proxy carpet and fly over the Great Firewall to see just what the eff was going on. Once I found out, not only would I be steamed like a dumpling that all my sites were shut or blocked, I’d also be angrier than a bunch of bees on Nic Cage that it’s cause of the shit that went down 20 years ago.

We can infer from this highly illuminating analysis of socio-networking dynamics in modern day China that the government committed an EPIC FAIL x2. Trying really hard to hide something is only going to make people try even harder to find it, and they will find it. Blocking millions of people’s regular web activities (porn) because of the slight chance that someone might ask what the deal is with that giant piece of pavement outside of the Forbidden City is only going to enrage millions of people and make them ask what the deal is with that pavement. My suggestion to all you Chinese netizens out there is: prime those proxies, activate those VPNs, get some of that sweet SSL action going on and fly my pretties, fly!!!

Just before leaving Kunming, I was getting ready, doing the planning, I figured, the country only has a GDP per capita of $233 per year, if I bring in say $700, I should be like Warren Buffet up in this bitch. I worked out that at 7 nights, $25 a night on a medium to high end hotel (split with my friend), $525 would be plenty left over for getting around, eating, and maybe even some left over to buy a precious gemstone or three. These optimistic plans of mine could be summed up nicely with one word: fail.

With my rough budget worked out, I thought I was good to go. Too bad I didn’t take into account several other factors that were destined to drain my cash with greater efficiency than a vodka shop opening up in my kitchen.

Just because it’s a poor ass third would country, doesn’t mean everything is dirt-cheap. Most things are more expensive, than they would be for people from other not quite developed countries like China. For example the taxis would routinely cost twice as much as in China, yet in China you can put your feet down on the floor without worrying about causing the car to slow down Fred Flintstone style.

If you’re a foreigner (ie. unable to speak Burmese), Burmese people just assume you’re a living breathing pile of American dollar bills. I mean; I’d love to look in the mirror and see a thousand Benjamin Franklins staring back, who wouldn’t? The guy was a sexy beast. But thanks to this perception, you’re charged at least double for everything. I would be cool with it, because outside Burma, I make a million times more than they do, yet in the small warped reality within Burma’s borders, chances are they’ve probably got more saved up under a mattress somewhere than I do, and I have no way to get more.

When they aren’t charging you double or triple what the locals are paying, they’re trying to figure out new ways to charge you for things. Take for example the airports, where when you arrive in taxi, a guy will quickly run over, grab your bag a bring it to the check in counter 10 feet away. He’ll then ask you for $1 for that amazing service. The first time this happened to me, shame on me, the second time it happened, when I wasn’t even allowed to take my bag, I told the guy to fuck off and was done with it. Don’t take this the wrong way; I’ve got nothing against the common Burmese people, who are all just trying to make a buck. I just think that there’s a line on what you can do to make that buck, and if you cross it with me, I will rip off your head and poop down your throat.

If you ever decide to go, and I know you’ve already heard about this if you’re planning a trip, but I’ll say it anyways, make sure your US dollars are MINT. Even the tiniest tear and they won’t take it. If it ‘s well worn, with heavy creases, they won’t take it. If it’s got certain serial numbers on it, they won’t take it. I find this all very hypocritical, considering most of their money looks like this:

An average looking Burmese banknote.

Finally, the solution to this money problem is simply to bring a suitcase full of it. No seriously it’s probably one of the safest countries I have ever visited. Next time I go I’m bringing like ten grand. Probably the most annoying part about this whole deal was that I didn’t bring enough cash to buy stuff from people whose profits would have gone into their pockets and other people who weren’t the dirty bastards of the government/army/demonic hordes.

The first few days I was running around like a decapitated chicken trying frantically to get my visa situation sorted. The last two days I was chillin out, maxin, relaxin all cool and shootin some b-ball outside of the school.

Japan’s main industry is awesomeness. There are so many good things about that little banana shaped island I could make a whole damn blog about it. Instead here are some things that are not just awesome, they’re also completely whack.

I love biking, and despite being one of the wealthiest nations on earth, a large percentage of Japanese still use bikes to get around. So what’s the problem with that you ask? Well, they all do it at the same time, ON THE SIDEWALK. They have this tendency to wiz by you, their handle bars just barely impaling you like a piece of street meat. If I lived there, I would be maimed in short order because I have a tendency to walk crooked at night. It’s the effect of the moon.

The girls. It’s a giant parade of hotness. A nuclear arms race of Gucci and fake tans. In an average day in Qingdao, I probably see about 2 or 3 really good looking girls. In Fukuoka I couldn’t open my eyes without being blinded by the hot. Problem with them is, that’s all they are. Hot. Nothing more. No substance. They’re like a really fancy hotdog, with all the trimmings, maybe even some chili. But hot dogs don’t fill you up. Hell that one Japanese guy can eat like 50 of em.

Everything is clean. So clean, I would abide by the five second rule outside on a street corner. It’s that clean. You’ve seen the robotic toilets that do the dirty work for you. The anti-bacterial napkins that are given before each meal. The no shoe rules for going inside many buildings. Yeah it’s all well and good to be clean, but you gotta draw the line somewhere. I mean the hostel I was staying at, SHUT DOWN every day from 11am-3pm so that the staff could scrub every crook and cranny in the place. And it wasn’t just one or two people, no, it was like 6 or 7 people, mopping, sweeping, vacuuming, everywhere. I mean no one wore shoes inside, so how could this place become THAT dirty after less than 24 hours?

Rules rule. Japanese society has gotta be one of the most organized and orderly on this planet. Their manners are amazing, people are always polite and no one seems to get mad. But damn, do they love following the rules even when said rules were obviously written by some half-retarded monkey. The last day I was there, I had to change hostels because the one I was in was full. So I went to go check in to the new one at 11:30 am. It was a ghost town. Absolutely no one around. The guy at the front desk duly informed me that check wasn’t until 4pm sharp, but he could take my bags and put them in my room for me because no one was there! Pedants are as common as crab cakes.

Finally. The Nissan Skyline GTR. The best Japanese car ever made, and by extension one of the best cars to come off an assembly line. Too bad the piggies get to drive them too.

This is the process of getting your haircut in China.

You walk into the usually large shop, where there will most likely be a set of couches in the middle with 15 of the 16 staff sitting watching a movie or sleeping. On entry, the one person actually doing work is the peon that has to open the door and greet you, and upon doing this a few of the staff will look up, notice you aren’t Chinese (if you aren’t Chinese that is), mumble something, then all of the sudden you’ll have 16 pairs of eyes staring at you as if your space ship just crash landed outside and you’re looking to do some bum busting experiments.

After some chuckling in what I can only assume is the “who wants to wash the dirty foreigner’s head” game you’ll be guided over to the hair washing station, laid down and borne witness to the most excruciatingly painful head massage you’ll ever receive. It seems they want to remove most of your hair by squeezing it from your skull before you even get the cut. It’s so horrible, that after my first experience with this, I’ve always made sure to inform the washer that they don’t need to waste their time or my brain cells on the techniques they stole from Guantanamo.

Once your seated in the barber’s chair, some guy (not many girls do the cutting, they just aren’t feminine enough) will come over and ask what you want done. If you can speak somewhat decent mandarin prepare to have exactly the opposite of what you want done. If you can’t speak mandarin, this is the part where you slap yourself across the face for trying something so dumb and you bolt out of the store, heading home to a cereal bowl and rusty pair of snips.

The guy will proceed to cut your hair, continually cutting and cutting, until you physically stop him by man handling him to the ground. I don’t know what the deal is, but they keep making little touch ups to parts they’ve already cut as if they missed something. They do this to every part of your head. The real trouble is that this will be done to the point where you could have your own brand of cleaning products.

If you’ve survived up to this point, you’ll be lead back to the hair wash station for another go to get rid of the little particles of hair, which I have to admit is a nice touch that I’ve never had back in Canada. Once that’s done you head back to the chair, they’ll dry you off and proceed to give you a style that’s straight out of a Japanese comic book, but will turn into a drunken birds nest the moment you step outside into wind. The silver lining is that haircuts including the wash run anywhere from 20-70rmb, which works out to less than $10 in the most kitschy places.

I’ve been lucky. I’ve had about 8 or so haircuts since I’ve been here, and most have been ok. The first 4 I had were acceptable; they were all at the same place, from the same guy. One day however, I returned to this place and got a different guy, and he fucked my hair up so bad I actually went to a different place an hour later to get it fixed. I have never had to that before in my life. To give you an idea, he basically shaved the sides of my head really short, but left the top really long. Remember Kid n’ Play? Yeah neither do I, but I’m sure he looked more dapper. I suppose I could have told him I wanted the top shortened, but I was afraid that he would make it as short as the sides. I went to another place to try and get it fixed, and of course, they made the top as short as the sides, resulting in me looking like what I imagine an ubergeigh commando would look like. Sorry gay army commandos, nothing against you personally but your hairstyles are wank.

Thankfully my hair grows back, and quickly. So I began trying out a series of different places trying hard to find a half assed shop to get my hair cut (asking for a full ass is asking too much). On my most recent excursion last night, I enlisted the help of my Korean friend, to try one of the Korean shops out. For some reason, even with my friend translating for me, there was something very complicated about “TAKE 2 CM OFF EVERYTHING”. First they seemed to think I wanted to have my hair shaved with a number 2 shaver. My cat like reflexes pulled the electric shaver out of the stick-like barber’s hands before he had a chance to do anything dirty. Then he seemed to think I wanted my hair cut down to just two centimeters. Finally, I got some paper, and made a drawing like this to explain what I wanted done.

The guy took a good five minutes to look this over, examine it as if they were studying the blueprints to an engineering marvel of modern man, and then…disappeared. He came back a short while later with a book with all kinds of whacky styles in it, and pointed to what was surely the only white guy in the whole damn book, with hair that looked….wait for it… 2 centimeters long! My patience was lost at this point, and I told my friend “JUST TELL THEM TO CUT 2 FUCKING CENTIMETERS OFF, HOW FUCKING HARD IS THAT ?!?!” but it actually came out as “please please 2 centimeters, I’ll buy you some bibimbap later!”. Worked like a charm. The guy got to down to business and did a surprisingly better job than I’ve had done at the other places I’ve been to. I told him to remember me and to do the same thing next time. So I’m praying he doesn’t get kidnapped by some North Koreans or something. You gotta watch your back round these parts, those crazy bastards are everywhere.

The bottom line is that bald people have the advantage over here. Of course, with the process you’ve got to go through to get a haircut, it won’t be long before you’re one of them.

The imbecility of my prior actions began to set in as I accepted that I had in fact missed the train and this was not some horrible hangover induced hallucination. The hangover itself was kicking into full gear and I hadn’t had the masochistic pleasure of one like this for a long time. The only thing I could think about doing was somehow getting to the next station so I could jump on the train with my friend. There was no way I was going to abandon the journey we had planned because that would make me quite the ass goblin. Him having to take on the full costs of everything instead of splitting it simply wouldn’t be just.

I talked to my friend and tried to figure out what the next station was, for a brief moment I was actually exploring the possibility of jumping in a taxi and getting on the train at the next station stop. This idea quickly shriveled up and croaked when I found out that the next station was a good two hours away, probably more with all the goats and giant abyss-like-holes crowding the country roads. So I asked one of the security people what my options were and they said that the best thing to do would be to change my ticket for the next available train. With what little computational power I had left in my brain at this time, I decided it seemed like a satisfactory idea.

The next 30 minutes were the most horrible of the whole trip. I was waiting in this line for the ticket booth that seemed as if I was actually getting farther away from the window. I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the case what with the infamous queue jumpers partaking in my misery. My entire body felt as if it was stuck under a steamroller and the rolling apparatus was just about to crush my skull. Halfway into the line there were these railings to prevent line snakes and my lifeless corpse was dangling over it them whole time. There was an old guy behind me who literally pushed me forward every time the line moved up.

I got to the window and what was supposed to be changing my ticket, was actually buying a new ticket. At triple the cost of the old. Someone up above was finally giving me some slack however, because the ticket person informed me that I could grab an express train leaving at 10:45am. The amusing part was that I was actually going to get there only 10 minutes after my friend as he was on the snail train. So I grabbed this ticket for 160rmb (my original ticket was only 56rmb) and proceeded to take something like a nap involving loud overhead announcements and people barking into their cellphones until boarding time. After boarding I once more proceeded to nap off my pain until débarquement. In the few moments that I was awake on the express train, I discovered that China does have a countryside, and that the new trains go hella fast (225KM/h for you spec geeks).

I met my friend in Tai’An (泰安), a tiny hamlet of about 500,000. According to him, his train sucked because there were people sitting next to him in the aisles, and next to those people, there were kids pooping in the aisles. I know this isn’t true because he tends to downplay things, so it was likely the people sitting next to him were in fact the ones doing the pooping and the little kids were probably smoking meth and torturing their stuffed animals. In the ten minutes he had been there he found a hotel charging a larcenous price of $14 a night so I suggested we could do better. After a brief walk around the block we were booked into a dingy room (they’re all dingy rooms in touristy places like this, they save the good hotels for places where no would ever want to go to like Beijing) for $10 a night.

We went to lunch at a Chinese fast food place not so great but not so shabby either, then we spent the day burning off what little energy I had left combing each individual avenue and street to get a feel for the place. The consensus? Graveyards in the middle of a desert on an abandoned island in OUTERSPACE had more life than this place. Satisfied that the town offered nothing other than its famed mountain, we retired for the night after a hot pot dinner that turned out to be less lethal (some could say, tazer-like) than most hot pots I’ve had.

That night I was raped HARD…by mosquitoes. I have a serious problem with them. First they love my blood. I am glad vampires don’t really exist and I don’t live in a place with vampire bats, because surely those suckers would be knockin’ on my door…with battering rams. Normally I can deal with them. Here in Asia, and this is all over Asia, the little succubi bite me, then the bite swells to the size of a tennis ball. I am not over-exaggerating as one would tend to do in such situations to arouse pity. But it’s HORRIFYING I tell ya! They transform me into a hideous deformity, so freakish even Barnum brothers would say ”OMGWTF?!”. So I got worked by these little pricks that night and of course they got the only part of me that wasn’t covered…my face. I woke up in the middle of their orgy screaming “NO, NOT THE FACE!!!, NOT THE FAAAAAAAAACE!!!!”. My friend must of thought I was just having one of those totally common for people my age boxtox nightmares because he just kept dozing. It was true, after examining my face they had bit me badly. So I folded myself into a position even a master yogi would be proud of that cocooned my entire body in covers and had a horrible sleep, dreading having to show my mangled money maker in the morning.

I know it isn’t as much of a cliffhanger as last time, but hey…I’m lazy and I need a break from writing this junk…so…IS THIS THE END??? Will I be able to show myself to the world? Will I have the confidence to make the mountain climb…of the MILLENIA?! If hippies, hipsters and hiphop merged would the world collapse at the hands of an unholy trinity of stylistic MALCONTENTS?!?! Find out next time!!!

Most people are aware that tap water in most developing countries is not something you would want to wash down your vodka with. This of course applies here as well. However it appears that by the mandate of heaven, measures are being taken to make the local brew less of a potent potable. In regards to this, there is ongoing construction outside my domicile wherein streets are being closed, holes are being ripped open, and people are standing around with shovels trying to look busy.

Unfortunately for me, I really had no idea that this was what they were up to until I had returned from my weekend escapade in Changyi (昌邑). I didn’t really shower while I was there, so I was looking forward to removing the bus stench from my skin when with the turn of a faucet I realized that the water was out. I went down to management to find out that there was in fact a notice posted outlining the construction and the time the water would be out from. Rats I thought, the flow wouldn’t be coming back online until 10 in the pm and I had plans. So I decided to just rough it one more day, and get the grime removed the day after.

The next day I spent most of the morning doing laundry that I needed to get done as I was planning on going away again soon and wash up a bunch of dishes that had been cultivating new and exciting forms of life. After this I went to have my much sought after shower.

The water was the perfect temperature as I lathered a generous helping of ITOUEN1899 shampoo and WALCH body wash into my hair and skin. I was thinking about cleaning up nice as I had to be in a photo shoot for something later in the day. All of the sudden, as can be predicted in such an all too familiar scenario, the water cut. I had just finished covering myself completely in soap. The water couldn’t have cut off at a more opportune time. It was as if someone with a sick perversion for soap suds and super-fit men had installed a camera in my bathroom and was just waiting to flip the switch. I waited, and waited. The water refused to show itself. After about an hour, the soap had formed a sticky dry paste over my body and I was able to put on clothes to see what the hell was going on. I went down to see if there was a new sign up detailing more outages. Much to my dismay, the notice didn’t exist.

I returned to up to my room to see if by chance the water had turned back on. No dice. So I went to my computer to write this ridiculous story and read a story about a Japanese host and his zany antics in the male host bars. By now, the acidity of the dried up soap that had seeped into my skin was starting to give a burning sensation on my face, which in all likelihood would not bode well for future blemishes. Back to the bathroom, to try once more, I found the shower head sputtering around on the floor like a headless goose. Finally water started to emerge. But to my dismay, this was what it looked like:

Not exactly tempting.

There were moments where I was close to grabbing the water cooler bottle from the machine and somehow figuring away to turn that into a makeshift shower, just so that I could get the crap off my face. I guess a little clean water is just too damn much to ask for.

After about 20 minutes, and me drawing up schematics to tube water from my water cooler into the shower using straws and duct tape the water came blasting back to life. I got in there faster than an obese person rolling down a hill and cleaned off the rotten suds as fast as I’ve ever done to try and avoid another blue-out.

So for those keeping track, I now have had water in my apartment when I definitely don’t want it, and haven’t been able to get water when I needed it most. This is in a building and neighborhood that was built 7 years ago. I’m scared to think of what goes on in the old commie blocks that were built 50 years ago. I would imagine it being like living in one of those air chambers the lottery number balls are drawn from. Instead of having the numbers, every result would be some kind of weird problem with the room, like water, electricity, rodents, and stray wrecking balls. Good thing I don’t gamble.

My less than stellar Saturday morning sleep was destroyed by a constant dripping sound. At first I got up to go to the bathroom, as normal in such situations. Then when I was dazedly walking back to my room, I noticed a long wet tear in my ceiling with a few heavy dripping spots at the one end. At first I was obviously irritated, mostly because I knew that this tear in my ceiling was actually a large bovine, who had suddenly materialized in my apartment and taken a nice big steaming shit on my lap. So I went upstairs to see what the hell was going on.

It was 9 am. The first doorbell was met with the typical moaning of unintelligible Chinese behind a still shut door. The door didn’t open, but I heard the second door close. I definitely woke the guy up, but because he didn’t have the common courtesy (in China yeah right!!) to open the door, I gave him an assault of the sonic variety courtesy of the ridiculously deafening doorbells that all the apartments in the building are equipped with. After that he did open the door and I tried to explain what was going on in my tired Chinese. As was expected, he had no idea, didn’t care, or both, because to his freshly woken knowledge there was no leaks on his floor, and he wasn’t running any water. I apologized and went to inform the building management, who seem to be open even on Saturday mornings.

Too bad for the prick upstairs because the security guard came up to check things out and went to the guy’s apartment that was directly over mine. Again he was woken, this time his wife was there talking, and a nice little heated exchange opened up. The laughing that occurred at the end of the exchange informed me that nothing was going to happen at this point.

The security guard disappeared back down to the management office, and I went to call my landlord so she could get on it ASAP. Luckily for me, my landlord, despite being a five foot tall middle aged lady, transforms into the terminator when it comes to any issue that puts her prized investment into jeopardy. She would be over in one hour I was told.

I highly doubt that it was someone who left their water on or something dumb like that. The most probable culprit was the absolutely piss poor quality that goes into Chinese buildings. Really, what can you expect when you pay your workers $50 a month, or sometimes nothing at all! During my travels throughout the country I’d have to say 75% of the hotels I’ve stayed in have had pipes burst while I was staying there. I’ve only been to about 5 hotels, and only 3 of them had leaks, so that statistic really only reveals that I’m a horrible mathematician, but still.

My landlord arrived 30 minutes after I called, and proceeded to go upstairs to see what the problem was, and back down management to see what was being done about it. Eventually a large congregation of people formed outside my door, the penisface from upstairs and his wife, my landlord, the building manager, the janitor, the security guy, and some other random people who apparently had nothing better on a saturday morning than take a peek into the foreigner’s room. After about 15 minutes of high speed discussion I couldn’t understand, everyone left except my landlord, who then explained that know one actually knows where the water was coming from, and there was nothing we could do about it right now. She did however give me the sick satisfaction of knowing that the dink from upstairs’ place was actually hit pretty hard, and it was coming from somewhere in the vicinity of his water heater. Finally she made sure that there wasn’t any other leaks or problems and told me not to worry about it, because it wasn’t my problem. That was good enough for me, because as long as I didn’t have to deal with anything else that morning I had more important affairs to attend, namely getting back to my dream where my money printing factory was about to open up. I was incredibly lucky however that the leak didn’t hit the second bedroom with all my computer tools in it, or there’d be hell to pay. Now I’ll have to use protection.

The great thing about all this, is that I can be assured there will now be an incessant stream of construction noise coming from above me trying to solve the problem. Which is great really, because I was getting unnerved with all the peace and quiet I had to deal with after the other people above me just recently finished tearing out their tiles and putting in hardwood flooring.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a factory opening to attend to.