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ON THE MEKONG

It's now hot. We've descended into the tropical part of the province, with palm tree lined streets and guys walking around with their wifebeaters rolled up around their bellies. The midday sun beat us down, and we spent the late afternoon drinking ice-cold cans of Chinese beer in the shaded area below our obscenely cheap hotel.

Jinhong is a lovely town, feeling more like Thailand or Laos than China. Tomorrow we'll spend the day exploring the surrounding villages by bicycle, and on Tuesday we embark on a three-day jungle trek into the hills near the Burmese border.

It's now time for some dinner.

My Wired Hiatus

A few weeks ago, I discovered The Wire. From then on, until I ran out of episodes, time that would have otherwise been spent reading, updating this blog, or writing elsewhere, was spent glued to the computer screen watching episodes, analyzing them, and reading reviews. It was a very sad period for my social life, but an enlightening experience as a TV fangirl. Not that anybody asked, but Season 4 of The Wire is the best season of television that I've ever seen, and while I'm at a loss of what the Hell to do with myself now that I've run out of episodes, I can't bring myself to start on another show just yet.

(How exactly somebody who claims to be a TV dweeb went this long without watching The Wire is beyond explanation. I'm a bit of a farce.)

In between episodes of The Wire, life has just sort of happened. The eclipse came and went, though the combination of cloudy skies in Seomyeon and my digital camera of questionable quality resulted in poor evidence of this. I've lifted the following photo from my friend Melisa, who had a better view in Minam (my old stomping ground). Also, probably better photography skills.


I tried to blame it on the camera, but compared and found that our cameras are of similar quality. I now suspect that my camera is faulty, and thus, still largely responsible.

My failure to notice when the eclipse was actually happening may also have played a role.

OFF TO JINHONG

I'm tired. My body is slightly sore and I smell of sweat and bus fumes. Yesterday was all about hiking, and today we rented bikes and cruised all over this city, seeing it the way it should be seen. Kunming is great because all of the big roads have large, well-established bike lanes, blocked from the rest of the road by metal barriers. A lot of locals do indeed get around via bicycles, along with electric scooters. It seems that China has banned gas-powered scooters in many of its cities, so people cruise on electric models. This is good, as it cuts down on both air and noise pollution. If they would only do the same for cars...

I'm killing a bit of time right now, riding on the waves of an iced coffee that I downed in the atrium restaurant of our slightly run-down but cheap hotel. We catch a night bus (10 hours) in a few hours that will deliver us to Jinhong, the main town in the southernmost bit of the province, close to the border with Laos. It's a "sleeper" bus, meaning that instead of a seat, you get what approximates a small bed. The only problem with these "beds" is that they are designed for Chinese-sized people, not tall Westerners, such as ourselves. The result is limbs that stick out of the confines of the berth, stretching into the microscopically narrow aisles for any an all riders to trip on. These aisles are indeed narrow, and anyone except anorexic Darfurians will have trouble squeezing through.

Before we take the bus, we're going to eat "Over the Bridge Noodles," which evidently is a Yunnan specialty consisting of delicious noodles and even more varieties of delicious animal flesh. Sir David Scraggs is a pescatarian (a veggie who also eats fish), so he'll be sitting this one out.

The food here has been pretty good. Kunming is famous for its street food, and so far we haven't been disappointed. As I mentioned yesterday, we ate some spicy noodles on the mountain, and later we snacked on small fried potatoes smothered in a chili/fish sauce. Great stuff. Today we rode out of the shiny shopping mall city core and into the narrow sidestreets of the old part of the city, where I hunkered down over a plate of wok-fried wide noodles in a hole-in-the wall joing populated by hardscrabble locals. It was delicious and obscenely cheap, and a great place to observe the street life of this town's regular citizens. There were old men smoking what I think was tobacco out of huge bongs, a woman with her tit out suckling a pantsless baby, people selling fruit and other strange cart-foods, uniformed men slurping these noodles, old ladies laughing and teasing each other in singsong Chinese. I took some photos, but I don't have a USB on me and neither does this hotel, it seems, so you'll have to wait.


So that's that. This is our last taste of the real urban experience, as each destination from here on out gets smaller and smaller...

Thomas's Dog

Studies have shown that patting an animal lowers your blood pressure. If I had time and energy, I'd get a fish, because there's not much space in Korean apartments. Attempting to pat a fish though, would probably raise the stress levels of both parties involved.

When I tutor Thomas these days, his dogs are usually in the room, scrounging about and generally wanting attention. This one will sit like this for minutes at a time, just looking at me as if it wants me to do something spontaneously entertaining. It's funny when you do something silly and unexpected in front of most dogs. They'll just stare at you with that look on their face that says "You humans have too much time on your hands."

Korean Sociological Image #14: How And Why Koreans Became The World’s Greatest Consumers

( Source ) If you’re reading this, then the news that Koreans now spend more and save less than Americans may well come as a bombshell. I base that on the natural assumption that, as an English speaker interested in Korean sociology, most of your earliest and most-deeply held views on the subject were likely gained [...]
  

 

Going yeast



The summer after I finished school I worked for a time at Belfast's Asian Supermarket. Whilst there I stacked freezers, lugged sacks of rice and put together orders for the city’s numerous Chinese restaurant owners. During this time I also became acquainted with Tsingtao, the German founded beer hailing from a city of (almost) the same name in Eastern China.
My acquaintance with this particular brew developed over the years and when I started researching our China trip I found that a visit to Qingdao would not only yield a trip to the brewery itself, but would also give us the opportunity to view some fine German colonial architecture to boot.
When I got there however, I soon found out the yeast had been busy in other ways too. Apart from the buildings and the beer, Qingdao is also possessed of some of the finest bread and pastry I’ve tasted during my time in Asia, much of it sold from open-air street bakeries and food stalls.
My first encounter with what is perhaps Qingdao's second most valuable asset, was at a hole in the wall pie shop. This unassuming set-up located some way away from the city centre sold pork and beef pies, charged with spices and encased in a flaky buttery pastry, the like of which would give any sausage roll or Steak and Guinness pie a run for its money.
Later, when perusing the market close to our youth hostel I discovered some other fine specimens. Ever had a pie lid that tasted so good it outshone the filling and left you lusting after more of the same? These long rectangular pastry fingers would probably have done the trick. Constructed from layer after layer of thin filo-style pastry and served warm and bready, these ubiquitous beauties were a staple of our time in Qingdao.
Also prevalent were a variety of flat breads. These ranged from thick doughy foccacia style offerings seasoned with salt and pepper and brushed with oil, to thinner more pliable versions similar in texture and appearance to potato bread and strongly flavoured with garlic and green onions.
Everywhere I looked there were people selling small cakes, biscuits, or buns so freshly cooked to eat them straight away would be to risk severe burning. The buns, paired with some sliced German sausage from a street side salad stall made the perfect sandwich, one that was repeated several times on the nightmare 20 hour hard seat overnight to Shanghai!
With all that bread going around, I didn't even have time to think about beer.

Time to Evolve

While I've always tried to keep Lee's Korea Blog running in the background of my daily life, I must admit that it has grown into something I'm rather proud of at times. However, the downside of this is that it has become something begging a certain amount of upkeep. A compulsory voluntarianism of sorts. Usually a week after I blog, I feel fine. But toward the 2 week mark, the impending urge to update the blog increases to a dull roar.

The main obstacle to blogging is coming across interesting things, and having enough time to post them up here. These days I'm fairly busy, and a 20-photo blog post takes about an hour and a half to organise, write and proof read (I am mildly obsessive about correcting spelling errors). It's getting more tempting to put off a large blog post for an extended period of time. I also don't feel it especially necessary to blog for the sake of blogging, and waste other people's time. My general aim is to provide something slightly informative and slightly entertaining. Kind of like a more amateur version of David Letterman's The Late Show. To that end, I think I'll start a trial run of blogging in shorter doses. Like a couple of photos at a time, and maybe some longer ones from time to time. This should be easier to manage and the posts will come in higher frequency. I'll try and keep it to every few days at least.

Because I'm living more cheaply and going out less, I may digress a little more from just 'Life in Korea' and delve into other things, which I hope will be relevant to the readers. At this point in time too, I'd like to say that I appreciate the readers out there and the feedback I get from time to time. It's because people read this thing that I continue trying to keep it read-worthy.

So let's try this out and see how it goes. Here's hoping it evolves into something that continues to interest you...

KUNMING

Well it appears as if the Chinese censors have UNBLOCKED livejournal for the time being. This is cool, since now I don't have to email posts to my girlfriend or go through unreliable and slow proxy servers.

I am now in Kunming, which is the capital of China's southern Yunnan province. I flew in yesterday from Busan, with a brief stopover in Shanghai. After boarding the plane in Shangers, the sky opened up with solid sheets of rain, beating the roof and wings of the plane. It was a properly huge thunder/rainstorm, and we were stuck on the tarmac for almost three hours as we waited it out. I passed the time by busily reading Christopher Hitchen's anti-religion screed "god is not GREAT" and knocking out a crossword.

I arrived last night and taxi'd it to the hostel where I agreed to meet the boys. They were there, but the joint was booked up, so we hauled our asses across town where we got a room (four beds!) at another place. We broke open the giant bottle of duty free Chivas Regal I brought and then hit a popular local watering hole, where we downed coldish bottles of Carlsburg lager (omnipresent here) and commiserated on our new adventure. We returned to the hotel around one thirty, drank more whisky, and debated religion (iniated by the book I read earlier...).

Kunming is a cool city. It's pleasant, with tree-lined streets and nice new buildings. The people are generally friendly and laid-back, which is nice to see. China is hit and miss with the locals. Sometimes they're nice and sometimes they're nasty. This is one of the "nice" places, or so it seems. Yunnan is China's gateway to Southeast Asia, and you can already get a sense of that from the food and the easy-going nature of the people.

We woke up this morning and took a bus to Xi Shan, a mountain shooting up from the side of Dian Chi, a huge lake which borders the city. We hiked to the top of the mounain and took in the scenery. We ate some noodles with a blistering chili-sauce that is sure to burn the o-ring tomorrow morning.

Tonight we'll chow down on some proper Yunnan cuisine and end the night on a rooftop bar, drinking (hopefully) cold beer. Truly cold beer can sometimes be hard to get in China, as they often pass off lukewarm bottles on desperate tourists.

The weather is warm, but significantly cooler than Korea was. I think this is mainly a result of elevation. We're a bit up, here. There was a fifteen minute thunderstorm today, but other than that, no serious rain.

Tomorrow we're heading south to the Xishuangbanna Region, home of the Dai people, who are evidently ethnic Thais who settled there a long time ago. I sure we'll eat Dai food tomorrow and endure the inevitable "cutlural dance show," repleat with traditionally-costumed, singing children. It's a ten-hour bus ride, but Angry Steve has enough valium to make it an easy ride.

LAST POST IN A NON-TOTALITARIAN STATE

I'm off to China in the morning. I'll be posting through a third party for most of the trip, since livejournal is BLOCKED in China, along with facebook and any/all other "subversive" sites.

What this means is that I will be generally unable to respond to comments, but don't let that stop you from pitchin' in your two cents or abusing this here silly blogger. Anywhow, the material should be juicy; let's hope it passes the censors' muster.

Talk amongst yourselves.

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