Celebrated Chinese New Year’s Eve by doing the same as everyone else here…trying to blow a hole in space time with fireworks.

*
牛 = ox = cow = this year‘s new zodiac.
牛 = niú = sounds like English word ”new“
牛逼 = cow vagina = Chinese slang for ”awesome“.

It’s about that time of year again, where my rent is nearing expiration and I have to find a new home to live. I never bother resigning a new contract because I always feel like I can do better than what I’ve got, which so far, I have. Not to mention I quite enjoy looking for new apartments here.

Who doesn’t love a real estate agency, where within 2 minutes of walking in the door, they have some landlords bringing you up to take a look at an apartment? Never mind appointments, introductions, names or telling the agents what I was looking for. They just whisked me right up to some random dwelling. That was a stone’s throw away from the agency. As luck would have it, that turned out to be the best place of the day.

The landlords are always so into it, it’s great. They quote you a price, and then immediately say, but if you take it right away we’ll lower the price even more. The first ones I had where a young middle-aged couple. They were nice, perhaps a bit too nice. The guy looked like he had recently gotten facelift, and perhaps addicted to cocaine. He was always wide eyed and had this enormously open smile that I thought he might offer as an extra room in the flat.

After giving the place a good once over, we sat down in the kitchen to go over the details. Immediately the guy offered us all a smoke. Being a non-smoker, I politely refuted, at which point he pulled a half empty bottle of cola out of a drawer(?) and offered it to me instead. I was going to say that I only drank water and booze, but I was afraid of what substance he would pull out of his sleeve next, so I switched the conversation back to the topic at hand.

Even when I’m speaking English, I have a hard enough time with these awkward situations. It’s because I often feel pigeonholed. I like the place or thing that I’m looking at, but obviously I’m not going make big commitments right away. They seemed to think I was ready to sign a contract right after 5 minutes in the place. Really, who rents the first house that’s shown to them? As I tried to be as polite as I could for coming down on short notice to show me their apartment, I couldn’t help but see a sudden dejected look in their eyes when I told them I needed think things over and look around. It was like they just found out that their puppy was beheaded by pirates. Feline mutant pirates. They could watch the highlights on the news at 11. It was back to the drawing board at the agency.

It’s hard enough for me alone to figure out what I want in terms of a place to live, but then to have to explain it in another language to someone who has no concept of my utility-value system is almost a lost cause. Almost. But as it turns out, I still got to have fun practicing my real estate terms in Chinese all day while cruising around in a QQ.

First time in a QQ

As I was being ferried around looking at new and well…not so new apartments, I had the opportunity of having my first ride in a QQ. To those of you from countries where vehicle safety standards exist, the QQ is a diminutive little car that’s ubiquitous here. They’re powered by engines packing a whopping 51 or 67 horsepower, and are the same size as a large bathtub. I have to say I came away impressed. For a car so small, it managed to zip around without too much effort (so there were some points where it almost stalled, more than likely due to the driver) with 4 guys piled inside of it. Speaking of the interior, clearly the Ringling Brothers played a role in its design process, because everyone including myself had ample leg room. The only problem I could really feel was the flimsy construction of the doors, the walls, and… pretty much the whole car. If you get in an accident in one of these things, forget about an ambulance coming to pick you up, you’re leaving in a Hurst. SUVs would fly by us, and it felt like I was on the 401 in a Camry being passed by a Mach trucks. Despite these small faults, it was fun. Just don’t expect me and my homies to be rolling around in one anytime ever.

Despite 5 hours of visiting various apartments and offices in different states of neglect my quest continues. Will I find that royal habitat, fit for a golden goose? Or will I be pulled into the next landlord’s massively gaping mouth to the far side of another dimension?

And I really miss the clouds. Not to say there isn’t beautiful clouds in China. I’m sure there are. I’m also sure that place isn’t Qingdao. Here the sky comes in three varieties: blue, smog, and overcast. The last two being pretty much the same thing. So while I was in Canada, I tried to take as many pictures of the sky as I could. This post is the culmination of that effort.

Good news is that once the swamp-ass summer is over, the weather here dries up quick and remains so until spring. Maybe the smog will clear enough that we’ll get some cirrus, stratus or altocumulus undulatus up in this bitch. And maybe I’ll grow a tail….which come to think of it…

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.

I just got back from Korea. I’m not sure which has paralyzed the city more, the half inch of snow on the ground or the mad rush of the holidays.

Last night a fierce competition erupted in the sky of rivaling fireworks. I believe all 7 million residents of Qingdao participated. What better way to ring in the new year than by having that ringing sound made permanent? I’ll give China credit, they do fireworks better than anyone else. If you have an apartment with even a half decent view, you’re in for a hell of a show. It really picks up at dusk and goes till…well I don’t know I went to bed at 2am and there were still explosions happening somewhere.

Year of the rodent? Not for this guy. Maybe he was knocked unconscious by a M-1000.

Update: I don’t know what I was drinking, cause that first set of pics sucked a mean pair of balls, here’s some better ones to make up for it:

Written Chinese consists of these funky characters you may have seen on signs as you quickly made your way through the local Chinatown to escape the toxic smells. Those characters are called hanzi, which is actually pronounced han-tse. Each of those characters can be components to words and are usually words on their own. So they aren’t letters ok? To make things easy for us foreign devils, there is a system called pinyin, which turns each of these hanzi into Romanized letters so that we can know how to pronounce each character. In the spoken language one thing can be many, because there are only a certain number of possible pinyin combinations in the language. This results in some characters/words having the exact same pronunciation as other words. This makes speaking and understanding a fun game.

Today I want to look at one specific pinyin pronunciation: shì. Using you’re observational skills you should notice that on the “i” there is a ` mark which means that the tone is a falling tone from high to low. Yes Mandarin is a tonal language and there’s 4 different tones, but I want you to forget about that because if you don’t your brain will short circuit and burn up just like one of those “this is your brain on drugs” commercials. To pronounce this pinyin simply say “sure” but without the “re” part. Easy as eating a freshly baked yet highly sought after in China apple pie. Now lets look at the possible hanzi for this pronunciation and the corresponding English meanings.

To be fair some of these are word components. Just remember though that there are only a few hundred pinyin pronunciations, but over 60 thousand characters, which means…an entire People’s Army of words have the exact same pronunciation. Remember now that there are four tones and they can sound practically the same to the untrained ear, therefore more words sounding the same. By now you’re probably thinking that Chinese people only say 7 different words. So how do we deal with this? You could wrap yourself in a carpet and jump off a bridge, but luckily tons of words are obscure terms and names that hardly ever get used unless you’re reading classical texts or are training to be a nuclear scientist. Mostly there’s only about 15000 characters that get used and about 3000 of those are common. So we’ve watered it down quite a bit. Finally, Chinese is really contextual language, meaning you can’t just pull words out of your ass whenever you feel like it. It just doesn’t work; people will have no idea what you’re saying because words need other words to make sense. They might even get angry and eat you. Just like I ate a person once. But it was at a Korean restaurant so it was ok. Actually, just forget trying to learn, it would probably just be easier to travel back in time and fly a 747 into the Tower of Babel. Case closed!

I met up with my friends at the Jusco, where they instructed me that we would be going to a Korean restaurant not too far away. This was highly logical because my friend who was taking us out was Korean. After a brief walk, we made it to the restaurant street, which is an area in Qingdao highly populated with erotic cake stores….mmm erotic cakes… actually…wait, that’s a different street, this one has restaurants on it. We arrived at the anomalous Korean establishment, defiant against the perpetual clones of seafood joints flanking it. Inside, I was introduced to my classmate’s older brother, younger brother, sister and maid. Before you ask, I don’t know. As soon as I sat down, a large bottle filled with an ominous liquid was being liberally poured into everyone’s glass and I had the fortuity of a seat next to older bro, who was doing the pouring. I quickly learned two things. One; always have food in your stomach before going to a restaurant where you might be drinking. Two; it’s ok to not completely down your mini-glass of liquor in one shot. It took me about four consecutive rounds to learn the later. As soon as your bottom’s up, you refill and toast again, it’s an unending cycle.

My liver’s torment was vanquished by the efficiency of the waitresses, who brought us our dinner. Kimchi, pig’s blood rolls, bulgogi, you know, the usual Korean treats. In between my furious attempt at sheltering my stomach from what would soon be an assault of baijiu (a Chinese liquor that it is also used as jet fuel) courtesy of big bro, I happened to notice something curious about the waitresses. They were all wearing name tags with the North Korean flag emblazoned on them. Within seconds after I noticed this, an all girl band jumped out on stage and started blasting out what I assumed was Korean oldies. I quickly turned to my friend who spoke English, and I asked her for the low down. To my surprise and twisted delight, our waitresses and the band were all from North Korea! Now, there’s only two ways for them to be here in China. One would be escape from the land of the eternal president by crossing the most heavily fortified border on the planet. The other, and the way in which they were here, as my friend tried to explain, was that they came from the highest peerage of the North Korean aristocracy. Amazing. I was getting drunk while being entertained and fed by socialites from the axis of evil.

As the feast wore on, we were treated to traditional song and dance that was native to North Korea. For a few songs, one singer went all out, and big bro explained to me that this particular girl was one of the most popular singers in her homeland. After the performance was done, I had the opportunity to meet her and talk to her briefly, which blew my mind. Supposedly, every new years she sings for…Kim Jong-il the nuclear cowboy himself!

Ironically, though the girls were allowed out of their country, they weren’t allowed out of the restaurant. They also had to wear the funny ID tags, and a little pin just like George Bush wears, but instead of the American flag, it was Kim il-Sung’s face. I also noticed on all the TVs in the place, they were showing our goose-stepping buddies do their thing to patriotic background music. I could never unravel the riddle of why all of this was happening or what the occasion was, but it will be nice to scratch another item off my list.

I managed to take some shoddy pictures of the happening, but to make up for the poor quality I have shoddy videos too.

UPDATE: It appears I’m not the only one with a perverted interest in the Hermit Kingdom’s restaurants, so I hope it helps to mention that this restaurant is named “Pyongyang” (Pingrang in Chinese) and it’s located on Yunxiao Rd. between Mingjiang Rd. and Hong Kong Middle Rd. Not far from the Carrefour.

Also, I’ve managed to dig up some news on these places. Apparently many of the waitresses would rather be doing something else.

If you’re the type of person who gets nosebleeds from altitude change, don’t come here, you will die.

Everyone still drives around obliviously here, the only difference being that instead of everyone in little Cherries and VWs, everyone is driving around in big old school SUVs. Safety first.

The air for the few days I was there was not only breathable, it was actually invisible, like air is supposed to be. It doesn’t rain or snow here very often. The altitude of the city is about 3.6KM above sea level. It can get very warm during the day (20C) and cold at night (-10C?)

There aren’t any ridiculous skyscrapers, the only thing that rises in the skyline is the massive Potala Palace which sits somewhere in the middle of the city and is awesome. I could just stare at the place all day and eat yakabobs.

All of Tibet only has 1.6 million people, but about 10 million yaks. And they need all the yaks they can get, because in every Tibetan meal there’s some yak. I had yak burgers, yak soup, yak ribs, yak steak, and passed on a try of yak yogurt.

Tibetan people are very relaxed and laid back. They don’t give a shit about money, rather they’d prefer living free happy lives. Common activities include Internet cafes, hanging out at teashops and all night ragers.

Many Tibetans are religious, and practice Buddhism like it’s going out of style. They do all kinds of wacky things like doing hundreds of pushups in front of temples, walking around the Palace all day chanting and spinning prayer wands everywhere they go.

Tibetan girls are hot. They have a natural appearance; they don’t pile on the makeup or dress in designer gear. They’re do a bunch of hardcore shit like washing their hair with a bucket on the side of the road (this was common) and carrying kids around on their backs.

Tibet is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in China, even though that isn’t much of a compliment. Rugged mountains surround it, city-sized factories haven’t tainted the air and the rivers are actually blue. This will probably last another 2 years.

I’ve got more pics than you’ll know what to do with, after the click through.

Once outside of the station there’s really only one way in through security and as expected it’s a vortex of people funneling in through one set of doors and a bag xray machine. They don’t even bother putting you through a metal detector or doing any body searches so I have no idea why they even have the machine. They’re pushing people through so fast that someone could smuggle a patriot missile through and they would just assume it’s a model rocket.

Although Beijing West is a pretty big station, leaving to Lhasa on platform 2, basically you just go up the escalators and then hang a left and go through the first set of doors into the soft seat lounge. They have food and drinks in here, and it wasn’t so packed. There’s another room right next door which leads to the same platform, which is more packed, and doesn’t have as comfortable chairs, so why you would wait in there is beyond me. They didn’t check our tickets going into the waiting area.

Having previously taken the overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai, I was going on with some expectations, mostly because this was a brand new train and is supposedly a pride thing for China as it’s the highest altitude train in the world or something to that effect. The train ride from Beijing to Shanghai is pretty decent, as it’s 16 hours, you get a soft sleeper with 2 beds to a cab and you get your own washroom and meals. This was different. There are 4 beds to a cab in soft sleeper and 6 beds in hard sleeper. There are community washrooms on each car, one of which is a regular western toilet; the other is one of those hole-type things. There were no showers. This is a 48-hour train ride. I’ll admit I’m no stranger to not taking a shower after such an interval, but I’m sure things got pretty nasty back in the cheap seat cars.

Leaving from Beijing, there really isn’t much to do but drink, then passout and sleep. You can’t see anything after you get outside of the city because it’s pitch black. There is the occasional bonfire, and by bonfire I mean entire building with no roof flaming up, but other than that it’s comatose. There is one stop around 11pm in Shijiazhuang I’m not sure if you can get on and off at this stop. I’m also not sure why you would want to if you could, the city is the Chinese butt-fuck-nowhere.

The next day on the trip, the morning was rainy and overcast, so there wasn’t a whole lot to see. We started off the day by traveling through Shanxi province, which I will remember as having the most colourful and steamy piles of garbage I have ever seen. There is a stop at around 9am in Xian where you can get on and off, which is nice cause they have real (MSG percentage was probably under 50%) snacks and food on the station platform. Speaking of food, the food on the train was classy. If you ever take this ride do yourself a favor and bring cases of food. Don’t rely on the warm wet bread and microwaved eggs for breakfast to keep your stomach from imploding during multi-day ride. Luckily the beers are relatively cheap, at only 10 yuan for Beijing beer (brewed by Asahi I should add). I tried to order a drink, but for some hilarious reason they only sell the booze by the bottle, and they only sell 26ers. So it’s like, “well we’ll sell you some vodka, but you’re gonna have to get smashed”.

Later in the afternoon, the rain cleared away, and the sunshine made a damned fine effort to penetrate the smog that seems to cover all of china all the time. We made our way through Guanxi province, stopping in Lanzhou. At this point it was real backcountry China. The cities and towns are basically mud and brick shacks, the roads are mud, and the people of the countryside must really hate the train because they dump all their trash along side of it. Lanzhou is the last million plus people city on the way to Lhasa. It consists of hundreds of commie blocks, and a bunch of factories spewing out gases ranging in colour from leprechaun green, to black hole black. Past this magnificent example of industrial development gone awry, the mud and brick shacks become mostly mud shacks and people are using tools and animals to farm instead of machinery. I can’t help but wonder if they’re happy in their less than developed conditions. I see the kids playing, seemingly happy, and some people wave to the train with one hand, while the other hand throws back a bottle of baijiu, so I guess they’re alright.

At night, I’m in the cabin with two Chinese people. Both have headphones on and are doing their thing. The guy is dropping ass like you wouldn’t believe, while the girl is laughing hysterically. It sounds like some kind of strange fetish. 24 more hours of this.

The next day I wake up to some sweeping mountain views and a stop at some tiny station where the assman gets off, I thought we were in the clear from there, but the day is marked by the pass through the highest altitude point of the train ride. We make it to over 5000m above sea level. Much before that, the effects of altitude sickness start to set in for everyone. The most common feeling is dizziness and headache, but some are worse off. The poor girl in the bunk above me, must have got serious nausea because she threw up a few times and was moaning in agony most of the way. I definitely felt the dizziness early on, but after a while the worst thing I really had was a headache. I didn’t eat anything but a small bowl of rice all day and had multiple naps so I’m not sure if that made things better or worse. The trip through the Qinghai Pass is a display of an entirely arid, desolate nothingness with big round hills. There is no vegetation, animals, or human settlement which is a huge change from the almost constant civilization that followed us most of the way. There are however these very unnatural grids of rock that a fellow traveler hypothesized might be to block snowdrift formation.

Once we finally made it into Tibet, the scenery changes for the better, there is very light mossy grass vegetation with different varieties of animals roaming about. The mountains turn jagged, like mountains should be. There are Tibetan settlements spotting the vast plains, with much different style of housing than what was in the other parts of China that we traveled through. The houses all look like mini-castles, with tower type things at the corners. There’s lots of random Tibetans hanging out by themselves with their yaks. Because Beijing likes to have the same time zone for the entire country, we don’t see any time difference, so it doesn’t get dark until about 8pm, which is a nice change from the daylight savings nonexistence back east. We arrive at the station at about 8:30pm, which is a bonus because we weren’t supposed to arrive for another hour. The station is huge considering only one train a day uses it. Off I got to the Lhasa hotel, which was formerly the Holiday Inn.

This is the most interesting stuff you will see on the Qinghai Express