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.