Despite the odds of me crossing paths with these brave avians within the sterile confines of my subdivision being galactically low, they decided to show their shriveled faces the very day after the turkey holocaust! Their exhibitionism is akin to a batch of donuts dancing the Macarena on the counter of Tim Horton’s after all the cops get called out on a 187. Here’s a few scenarios my mind has formulated on how this came to be.

A)

Some McMansion dwelling dickcheese in my neighborhood thought he would be the man and brought home a bunch of wild turkeys for the feast. Little did he know the turkeys were really gallinaceous warrior princesses from a parallel universe, and they promptly pecked his brains out with merriment. During our brief encounter today, they used their telepathic abilities to recognize that when I go back for seconds, it’s only mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy. They let me on my way.

B)

The MSG from the excessive Chinese food binge I went on this weekend, in combination with all the growth hormones in the turkey meat I consumed created a hallucinatory effect. Even though I wish this was the obvious answer so that I could somehow capitalize on the discovery of a new psychedelic snack, it doesn’t do a great job of explaining where the pictures came from. Unless you guys all had chinese and juiced turkey this weekend too. Then we could be on to something.

C)

The large birds I caught a glimpse of were eastern wild turkeys or Meleagris gallopavo silvestris to be precise. The vicinity of my casual stroll was not outside of their native range of northeastern North America. With a rough population of about 5.2 million birds, the occasional flock will make itself known in non-urban locales. Early morning and late afternoon being ordinary feeding time for these fowl, the group stumbling across my presence was not unusual for the time of day. Being foragers, there was a high probability they were scavenging for food in the area. It is even possible that if they came across some compost or improperly disposed of leftovers in the area, they might ZOMG!!…cannibal zombie turkeys! They might gobble our brains! Sweet merciful Christ! Head for the hills before it’s too late!!!

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.

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…

If you’re flying from Toronto to Beijing, make sure to get on the direct flight. The airplanes are the most modern in the fleet and every seat has its own standard electric plug and TV. Compare that to flying with a connection through Vancouver where you’ll be on jets that feel like Russian hand me downs. Before you get to the Beijing airport, stock up on all necessary goods. Once inside the giant liquor and cigarette warehouse that is PEK, you won’t be able to find any decent food, reading material or batteries, which I learned the hard way. You will be able to find lots of overpriced but duty free booze, and 4 stores selling the exact same Olympic merchandise adorned with the rainbow gremlins.

I noticed all the usual things once back in Canada, for example the streets are quiet, the air is so clean, everyone is obese, etc. There’s also some other things that I noticed that probably aren’t as normal. The service here blows. In China I do find it mildly irritating having a chorus of “欢饮光临” everywhere I go, but I never realized not having it and being totally ignored would be so much more annoying. There’s no hustle. People cross the streets whether or not they have the right of way as if they were immortal beings and time didn’t exist. Back in the PRC, they scurry across like little squirrels trying to avoid the onslaught of poorly built and poorly driven vehicles. Finally an obvious one: everything here is absurdly expensive. $2.75 to take the bus, are you kidding me? I can take the bus twenty freakin times for that price. Tonight I just had dinner for $30 and it wasn’t even that great. For that price I could have dinner for two at the fanciest restaurant in town OR I could eat so much street food that I’d need to see a proctologist.

It’s nice to see everyone again, which is the principal reason I came back. It’s good that I’m only around till next Friday though, cause with my world class whining, I’m sure they’re already counting down the days. Finally I’d like to announce to the world my discovery that jet lag is a bitch. I’m sure the scientists of the world have been waiting for such a breakthrough announcement. No matter how many sleeping pills you pop, no matter how soft your bed is, you’re still sure to screwed by random intervals of exhaustion and waking up in the night from sweet sweet dreams of cars honking and people horking.

Thanks to Mark for the turkey.

]]> http://dragonhunting.com/2007/re-entry/feed/ 1 http://dragonhunting.com/2007/flight-from-yyz-to-yvr-plus-bonus-anxiety/ http://dragonhunting.com/2007/flight-from-yyz-to-yvr-plus-bonus-anxiety/#comments Wed, 28 Feb 2007 08:44:50 +0000 james http://dragonhunting.com/?p=3 It has begun. This will be my last post from Canadian soil. Trying to sleep last night was a mission in itself. For some impromptu reason a noise manifested itself from within the walls of my room right by the head of my bed, and my head. It was like there was a team of lego men hiding in the wall doing heavy construction. I ended up moving to the couch where I actually got some sleep (5hours) before getting up at five thirty.

After getting to the airport about 2 hours early, the weirdness began. It started with my own idiocy. My dad dropped me off at the very front of Terminal 1 at Pearson. This is the new terminal and it is the size of Donald Trump’s ego…times ten. I’m carrying about 400 pounds of gear so moving anywhere isn’t going to be pleasurable. I get in and notice the gates go from A to Z. Departures to asia are at Z. I’m at A. I manage to navigate my way through the mindless hordes of senile seniors on their way to Florida and get to the gates that go to Beijing. As I get to the lineup for boarding passes, the helper monkey lady asks me where I’m going, to which I reply PKK. She then asks if I’m flying direct, or through Vancouver. I inform her I’m going through Vancouver, to which she tells me that I should be at Gate A. Great, I got my chance to battle through the masses of pastel polyester and golfclub bags once again. But the fun doesn’t stop there…oh no…

I got my boarding passes from the automated machine that Air Canada makes you do now, in some kind of futile attempt at speeding the whole process up. They fail miserably. So I’m waiting in the motionless line and I notice a putrid scent coming from the guy infront of me. Now as some of you may know, I’m no stranger to smells, but this guy smelled like he had just taken a golden shower, minus the shower. Turns out it wasn’t the guy infront of me. A few people farther ahead had brought one of those styrofoam coolers you buy at the beer store and filled it with raw fish. They were hoping to check this in as baggage along with everyone elses stuff. Keeping it closed was two thin straps of tape. This was a classic WTF moment. As in, what the fuck were they thinking? Who brings raw fish along for the airplane ride? I’m sure you can guess where they were going too. Luckily another security/helper monkey lady came along and denied them baggage check before they got to the counter, which is swell because I had no interest in having every piece of clothing I own reek of rotten snapper.

When I finally got to the check in, I had to go through a big deal because when they checked my visa, they noticed that it was valid for 60 days but my return ticket wasn’t until December. They decided to let me go because it’s up to the Chinese to make the final say. So I’m in Vancouver now and I’ve got something great to think about till I get to Beijing…