Sleepy...

Were you wondering what kind of cool places I've been so far on my trips around Southern China? Well, the above picture is a perfect example. Thats right, I got taken to the exact scene that graces the back of the 20 RMB bill. Not only extremely beautiful, but pretty cool for novelty's sake too, eh? The days lately are filled with driving around the all manner of gorgeous backdrops for this movie that is being shot- if Guilin is full of anything, it's full of gorgeous backdrops. I have even been involuntarily nominated "English exclamation checker lady" as I'm the only English speaker on set and the main character in the movie is supposed to be an ABC (American born Chinese). Every scene or two he has some kneejerk English utterance, which is now run by that English teacher girl (aka yours truly). I am resisting the urge to give him extremely odd things to say, though if my resolve breaks the first thing they'll get is a 'Holy Cow, Batman!'.

In other news...what is my other news? Not much. Stuck down here in Southern China through the holidays. I never thought i'd miss Christmas, but I do. I enjoy being around my friends and celebrating the relationships that i've cultivated in all realms of my life. I enjoy cooking and especially baking, neither of which I'll get to do down here in my swank Sheraton hotel room. Swank as it may be, I'd much rather trade it in for the cold and rickety existence that is hutong life. Sigh. Hopefully I'll get flown home sometime around the new year, if only for a day or two...

Since i have no outlet down here in the business center (my room has no internet, so the lobby it is for me), my low battery life is telling me i have to go. Emails would be appreciated, since I can't get to a fast enough internet connection to call anyone at all, and the solitary Southern Chinese lifestyle I am becoming accustomed to could use a little breaking up by friends and family.

Love you guys
Jessie

Hello lovelies.

I'm sorry i don't have much for you today, its very late and i'm very tired. To make up for the lack of my own content on the post, I'll give you some interesting things to look at. And a quick update or two.

First off in the last few days I went to Guilin （桂林）, in Guangxi (广西） province. Guilin is one of only four cities in China whose historical and cultural protection are listed as a top priority. Well, thats what Wikipedia says anyway. What I learned on the way there is that there is a common saying in China that goes "桂林山水甲天下", which translates roughly to "Guilin's scenery is the best under heaven" or, "Guilin's scenery is better than heaven". And, from what i saw, it was rather majestic indeed. I got to hike up into the mountains and see the mist shrouded terraced rice paddies. They looked like this:

More or less, cause thats not actually my photo.

I also went to Guangzhou 广州 in Guangdong 广东 province. Guangdong is that province waaay down south, where, like in Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese in addition to Mandarin. In fact, Guangdong is a hop skip and a jump away from Hong Kong, which makes sense seeing as they speak the same language. It's also where most of the goods sold in China (and those sold around the world that bear the stamp 'Made in China') are produced, and where a lot of Chinese movies and commericals are shot. Guangzhou is filled with banyans trees, bustling street markets, and tall graceful hotels that peer down, down at clustered city slums. Like a lot of China it is a city filled with double standards and dichotomies. I enjoyed walking it's streets and seeing the trees and fruits that remind me of home, as well as feeling the closest thing to island air that i have in months. What was really nice about the trip down south was getting out of the icy terror that is Beijing.

Guangdong is, you guessed it, the yellow province. Guangxi is right next to it to the left- quick lesson, dong '东' means east and xi '西' means west. Get it? 广西 and 广东? Kind of like North Carolina and South Carolina? Wow, I never thought that I'd be 20, sitting in Beijing in the winter writing a blog post comparing 广东 and 广西 to North and South Carolina...odd the ways that life turns...

Anyway. This is whats stuck in my head:

Kisses and love to everyone. Talk to you soon, about adventures and ideas.

jess

mongolia revisited

I'm on the way to a beautiful tan.

The big island so far has been much more condusive to me being naked in the sunshine than oahu ever was. Maybe i should have hiked more on oahu and laid out in the koolaus, but still. its just so easy here. open door, lay down in hammock. smile at alea and jonah when they wake up. repeat.

its rather nice.

i wish i had pictures to show all of you from china and from the past few days, but alas and alack i wont be back to them until i get home next week sometime. youll just have to let your imaginations run away with you until then. 

i dont think i ever fully explained the unexplainable beauty of Inner Mongolia to all of you, but suffice to say it left me utterly breathless. 

We took the train up on Friday evening, an adventure in and of itself. I'm sure we all recall how much j.filth loves trains, and this train was no dissapointment. It was about a 10 or 11 hour train ride from Beijing to Inner Mongolia, and in order to pass time before bed Kalinda and I did flashcards for shots. Fun, and educational! I slept well that night.

Next morning we rolled on into Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia. From there it was straight out to the grasslands...just a note, i would be giving you all the Mandarin names of these places, but as previously mentioned I'm not on my own computer and the one I'm using doesn't have characters on it. Such a shame. Anyway, the grasslands. Sexy, alluring, rolling, grasslands. Home to sexy matou players and horsemen. We slept the night in a yurt after a day spent being shown various facets of traditional mongolian culture. some people went horse riding, while the vegan in me wouldn't allow me to do this and thusly i wandered the grasslands on my own. so lovely. a storm came upon me in the middle of my wanderings, and drenched me down to my bones. it was beautiful. the men were beautiful. they had long hair, and were mongolian. we smiled at each other across stretches of open plain. that is, until i pinned one to the ground and did a victory dance in the first drops of a grassland storm.

yeah, so i wrestled one of the herdsmen. they were doing some kind of demonstration showing traditional monoglian wrestling antics, at the summation of which i somehow ended up insisting on attempting. after much laughing, i was strapped into some kind of leather vest (i shudder to recall it..) and found myself squaring off with a small, wiry, sun kissed mongolian. We went two rounds, the first of which i was taken down in. The second of which i somehow managed to end up on top of my adversery, in the dust, victorious. i've got the pictures to prove it :)

having made a name for myself with the herdsmen, i was approached all night long with shots of the white pungent liquor synonymous with china in general and inner mongolia in particular. yay for getting toasted under the full moon on the mongolian grasslands.  

The next day we awoke and feasted on rice porridge and various pickled vegetables. it made my day. The previous night's dinner had been typical Chinese fare (at least for me, the others had mutton), embellished with yak butter and yak milk tea. While it was exciting for everyone else, it held little interest for me- this is why the breakfast of rice porridge and pickled vegetables (a rarity in pastry and rice heavy beijing) made me so happy. then we hopped onto the bus to go explore Hohhot.

This post is becoming lengthy, so i think im going to take a nap and relate my exploits at a later date. love you all.

jess

She never updates...

I'm not dead, I'm just busy.
I swear!
Last weekend i went to Inner Mongolia.

I:
A. Wrestled a Mongolian herdsman
B. Rode a Camel in the Gobi Desert
C. Rode an ATV and almost killed a group of tourists in the Gobi Desert
D. Went sand surfing in the Gobi Desert
E. Had one of my piercings removed
F. All of the Above

This week I've got four papers due and a huge test tomorrow.

I promise that soon I'll update with pictures and elaborations on the aforementioned activites.

(ps. the answer is F)
(....duh.)

Not dead yet.

Hello one and all!

It's been about a year and half since i updated, my apologies. In this post, let's explore the nightlife in Beijing.

First, a word about something interesting i've encountered recently. Beijing is a vibrant city and attracts all kinds of people. This being said, the thing about Beijing is that if you want to surround yourself completely with english you really can. It is possible to get along in Beijing with very few mandarin skills. As a matter of fact within the last week I've met 2 different people who have lived in beijing for over a year and barely have the language aptitude of a year 1 mandarin student. And they do just fine. They know enough to tell a cab driver where they want to go, order a beer and ask for the check. And thats about it. They have their own apartments and full social lives, all while speaking about 50 words in Mandarin. Suffice to say, the expat scene is quite full and quite sheltering.

What do i think of this? Well, I think it's a waste of an available and valuable opportunity. To me the best part of living in a foriegn country is that you have access to what is, for all intents and purposes, a free education. I think it's a shame that someone would move away from the familiar and into the unknown only to, once arriving, isolate themself from their very surroundings. But, in all fairness, that's only my opinion. Not everyone comes to China with a cultural curiousity and an eye towards integrating (to whatever extent it is that you can integrate as a non-ethnically chinese person in china, that is). I didn't come to China to continously rotate between the same english speaking expat hang outs, but apparently some people did. And if thats what they want, so be it. I'll be down the street at the Chinese punk bar, thanks.

Now, about the nightlife. Beijing is a huge city, and there is something to do at all hours of the night. In this way it reminds me of LA, except that in LA clubs close around 2- in beijing they go until 7 or 8 in the AM. A few are even 24 hours. This is dangerous. It is also fantastic, though mostly dangerous. It lulls you into the idea that being out at 5 in the morning really is ok, cause after all the club you started at at 10pm is still open.

This is especially dangerous because on a tuesday at 5 in the morning you will most likely find yourself wanting to believe anything that tells you being awake and tipsy is acceptable. Whether it really is or not is an entirely different matter. In terms of selection, there are some tastes i have yet to adequatly indulge. I've yet to be to a good jazz club, but Vegan Mos Def says that he knows a couple of good ones. Have I introduced you guys to vegan mos def? Suffice to say, he's a vegan i met who looks like mos def. The gay scene is not what i'd like it to be, but then again i haven't been able to make it out the any of the les bars that i've looked up. This friday i hope to check out one or two and though ive been saying that for a couple weeks i'm pretty set on it going down this weekend. It'll have to be friday, cause saturday is a party at the junction of the Great Wall and the ocean. Yea, i'm even a little jealous of myself, don't worry.

Love you guys, another update later on. My stomach, it rumbles.
Jess

Great.

I really like dried apricots.
This post is about the Great Wall.
A few days ago, I traveled there. I bought dried apricots, and they are tasty.
[edit: I started this post yesterday and have since finished all of the apricots. I am sad.]

The wall itself was amazing. Breathtaking. It really cannot be describe in words.
Scratch that, were that true, my writing this and your subsequent read of it would be wastes of time. It can be described, albeit poorly, in words.

Mao’s famous quote about no Chinese man being a man until he has visited the Great Wall may be stretching it (we all know how I feel about gender related heteronormative generalizations), but something definitely resonates when you get up there. It is a truly amazing, mammoth construction. As far as you can see along the mountainsides, the wall continues. And the view. Amazing. The Great Wall is about an hour and a half outside of Beijing but it seems like much longer. The landscape is still very wild and peaks recede into the distance as far as you can see. After living on an island for so long (the panorama of my hikes on oahu concluding in endless cerulean blue) it was really powerful to see such a gorgeous untamed mountain landscape. The wall is also outside of the grey woolen bowler hat (which is how I have decided to henceforth describe Beijing’s smog, GWBH anyone?) and the air is crisp, clear, clean. Parts of the mountain side could be the Pali. Parts could be up Chantry. Parts could definitely be out near Rock Creek. (I think I hit up all the hoods I’m beholden to, with those three wilderness references). It’s pretty fucking awesome.

All in all, honestly, I really wasn’t that stoked on going. I had images of tourists and touristy things on some wall that thousands died to erect. And we all know how Jessie feels about touristy attractions. She loathes them. I envisioned one more marker of mankind’s desire to draw a line in the sand between what is ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ (which, honestly, it was, it was held more of tangible impact than I imagined). Plus I had heard there was a Starbucks, and that I think would have been too much for me to bear (there wasn‘t one, thankfully).

There was, however, a slide. A huge sheet metal slide that you can take from the top down to the bottom. Now that, that was awesome.

Now go look at it, over on my flickr (cause I hate uploading to blogger)
Flickr.com/sinksync

Love&luz