I wore a watch today that I bought in Hong Kong. It’s black and square, and the face is covered with interlocking rectangles of neon blue and green and yellow and black. It’s a knock-off, and the paint (which probably has lead in it) is scraping off, but I think it’s rad. I noticed, putting it on, that the time was off by three hours. This sets the stage for a mini flash-back episode of Falling Though a Field.
I almost didn’t get this watch. I’d wanted a different one originally, one I’d seen and fell in love with in a small upscale boutique I stumbled into in one of many, many shopping districts of Hong Kong (Lord, does that city loves its retail!). It was all blinged-out shiny and uber-colorful, it popped off the countertop and into my heart. I’m into bright neon colors right now, and I have a soft spot for watches, so I was really bummed to see that it was way too pricey, even after I’d mentally changed the Hong-Kong-dollars price tag into American dollars (it’s about 7.5-1).
But then! The very same night I found a decent knock-off in a street market, for the equivalent of three American bucks. Sold!
Today when I put it on, a few weeks and a few thousand miles away from where I bought it, it was three hours off - I put it on at 7:15, but it read 10:15. I realized then that I must have last worn it in another time zone, and with immeasurable pleasure started to wonder where I’d last had it on - London? Berlin? Egypt? What continent was I on? Was the wind hot or cool? What had my eyes beheld the last time I wore that watch?
I compared the time to a world time zone map, and lo and behold - my watch still bears Hong Kong time. I never re-set it when I left that city and flew away to London. And I never will.
Remember my ranting and raving about the swine flu brewhaha? (My new favorite tongue-twister, by the way - swine flu brewhaha) Well, it turned out I shouldn’t have been quite so cavalier.
When my plane arrived in Shanghai (after oh, I don’t know, about 13 hours) we weren’t permitted to leave the plane. We had to wait, we were told, for the crew of quarantine swine flu screeners. Now, I’m not the type to lose my shit over long plane rides. I figure, it’s just a few hours in a magical tin can zooming through space. The hours are going to pass anyway. Just suck it up and deal - what’s the point of getting worked up? Yet, after 13 hours staring at Chinese movies about fat, mischievous boys playing pranks on their neighbors, I started getting ansty. So, at first I was pissed about being kept waiting on the tarmac - until the haz-mat suited people from the scary part in E.T. got on board and started scanning people’s foreheards with a laser. Then I was just scared shitless.
It was, they claimed, a thermometer: we were all going to be scanned for a fever. Anyone too hot would, they said, be kept behind. All of these announcements, by the way, were in Mandarin. A nice bilingual lady sitting next to me told me what was going on.
Luckily, I scraped through the screening (though they did scan me twice - I tried to think cold thoughts the second time around) and was released to wreak havoc upon China! One girl, though, I guess had a slight fever and was kept back, along with everyone in her vicinity.
I managed to grab the footage above before one of them spotted me.
After I made my previous post, full of witty observations on the state of hygiene on different continents, I came across an article in the New York Times detailing Egypt’s trash problem. I was very interested to read it, for you’ll remember that I called out Egypt for having some of the filthiest streets I’d seen in all my wanderings. I apparently had the disadvantage to visit the country in a period of transition: at the time I arrived, they’d recently concluded one of the most revolutionary cleansing experiments ever undertaken by the family of Man:
According to the article, the city of Cairo (a.k.a. Festering Garbage Dump) is usually patrolled by squads of pigs who eat up all the organic waste while hungry, poverty-stricken Egyptians pore through the rest, looking for usable materials.
That’s tragically funny enough already, right? Don’t settle down yet, cause here comes a bonus punchline.
When swine flu became a big deal last spring (the same swine flu that almost got me quarantined in China) the Egyptian government hilariously decided to just, you know, kill all the pigs. Cause it was swine flu and all. Even though live pigs have been shown to have nothing to do with the spread of swine flu.
They killed the pigs humanely at least, right? Not so much.
“…reporters for an Egyptian newspaper, Al Masry Al Youm, followed trucks that carried the pigs to a garbage dump. As they filmed, workers used a front-end loader to drop piles of live animals into huge dump trucks. They documented piglets being stabbed and tossed into piles, large pigs beaten with metal rods, their carcasses dumped in the sand.”
Now the Egyptian people are overwhelmed - not by the swine flu the government was trying to avert, but by mountains of garbage rotting in the streets.
And the landfills are full of pig carcasses - in a poverty-riddled country where no one eats bacon (Egypt is a strictly Muslim nation).
Americans are more obsessed with cleanliness than any other people I’ve ever seen, with the exception of the Japanese.
There are certain cleaning amenities I’ve become accustomed to in day-to-day living, as most people do. These included clean tap water, napkins, toilet paper, and toilet seat covers. I did not, in my limited experience, realize that these were luxuries.
The first inkling I had that this was going to be a issue was two minutes after I got to my friend Stephanie’s hotel in Downtown Shanghai. I went into the bathroom and, totally absentmindedly, filled a cup at the sink and took a gulp. It tasted, well … just wrong. Off, somehow. I poked my head out the door and said, “Hey, guys, is the tap water okay to drink here?” and was met with yells of “NO!!!”
Thoughout our time in China, making sure to carry bottled water was a constant worry. No bottled water meant you were just shit outta luck, even at the lodge we were living in. Welcome to being thirsty. It was kind of jarring to be at home and not be able to drink any water. I know, logically, that access to clean water is a huge issue for billions of people and that the global situation will only get more dire as the world’s population skyrockets, but this was the first time I’d actually been touched by that reality. Restaurants, in every country I was in, did not simply set out glasses of free water for every person. Fresh water was treated like the precious commodity it actually is. I had to ask for it, and more often than not I had to pay for it, too. As I made my way into warmer countries it became more of an issue, especially in Egypt. Making sure we had drinking water (and a lot of it) with us at all times became a very big deal.
Paper goods were also hard to come by. It was very rare to find napkins sitting on tables in restaurants. All over the planet, I nearly always had to ask for them. At a Thai food joint in Hong Kong (which was excellent, by the way), when my friends and I asked for napkins, we were given a roll of toilet paper. And toilet paper, by the way, suddenly became very important. I took to carrying toilet paper with me wherever I went. It simply wasn’t there in most bathrooms. In Cairo I actually had to pay for it in the bathroom, in more than one place: there was usually someone posted at the door of public restrooms, and they wouldn’t let you enter until you’d paid something like 10 Egyptian pounds (around $1.30) and then they’d wind some TP off a roll they were holding and hand it to you. In Amsterdam, there were no free public restrooms - they were all (even in the McDonald’s) pay-per-use. (One use = one Euro.)
And I pretty much forgot what toilet seat covers looked like. I just did not see any toilet seat covers, anywhere.
In addition to different standards in terms of personal hygiene, there was a difference in public hygiene, too. Many cities were, compared to most large American cities these days, just gross. Shanghai was disgusting: babies don’t wear diapers there. They simply make their mess on the ground. In public. We saw a woman holding her infant in mid-air above a grate in a huge, outdoor courtyard, as his shit simply fell out of him into open space. This extended to the habit, exhibited by quite a few grown men we saw, of pissing in public. We actually saw one guy on a cell phone in a business suit, standing on a big, wide boulevard in the middle of the financial district, pissing into a bush.The whole city, especially in the dense urban centers, reeked of piss.
Cairo, too, was a nasty city. There were piles of trash everywhere, everywhere. Everyone littered. It was weirdly incongruent to see the men of Cairo all turned out - nice slacks, silk shirt, fancy blingin’ watch - standing on piles of used facial tissue and crushed cigarette cartons.
This was all, of course, in huge contrast to Japan, where the toilet in my hotel not only had a built-in bidet, but three seat-warmer settings: would you like your ass cool, warm, or piping hot today?
Throughout my travels on this big, lopsided planet of ours, I was surprised at how our new president mediated, to some degree, the way I talked to and interacted with citizens of other countries.
I can remember a time when Americans were admonished to try to pass as Canadians when traveling overseas. To some extent, I think that’s still applicable, but I felt no such stigma anywhere I went. Though I got a couple reactions that were downright cartoonish in their stereotyping (there was one guy in Egypt who loved to shout, “Hey, America! Howdy howdy! Yankee doodle dandy!” every time I and my friend Chris walked by) most people were really positive. And a lot of that positivity, I felt, was due to Obama.
In every country where people were excited to meet an American, it was connected to Obama. In England, I saw a guy wearing an Obama t-shirt. I held up my fist and shouted “Obama!” and he held up his fist and grinned in kind. I got plenty of “You American? Yes? Obama!!!” There was a Belgian guy in a hostel in Hong Kong who got especially excited.
I was also surprised at my own use of Obama as a positive avatar for America. Any time I found myself trying to talk to someone whose language I didn’t speak, and who didn’t speak English, my monologue went something like, “I am from America. You know, America? No? Uhh … Obama? Yes! Obama!” and was mostly met with happy enthusiasm.
There were those, however, who reserved their judgment and were measured in their responses. I got surprisingly similiar reactions from two very different people: one, a train station clerk in Amsterdam and the other, a papyrus salesman in Egypt. The man in Amsterdam said, “Yes, it is good that Obama was elected, but I will wait to see what he does with the office until I am happy.” The Egyptian noted, “Oh, Obama, you know he came here to Cairo? Yes, he makes many pretty words, but it is easy to make pretty words. Let us see what he will do with those words.”
Yes, people of the world, let us see what he can do with those words.
I got a bad scare when I incited a near-riot during the making of a video art piece.
While I was filming myself for a project I’ve been working on (which involves me crawling on the ground towards my camera, also sitting on the ground) an hysterical Chinese woman ran up and grabbed me and tried to pull me up. She was foaming at the mouth and screaming, “CHINA! NOT ANIMAL!!! YOU AMERICAN? I LOVE YOU! CHINAAAA!!!!” while sobbing and clinging to me. She dug bruises into my arms and tore a gash in my hand with her fingernails before I was able to physically beat her off of me. And when I say “beat her” I don’t mean metaphorically - I actually had to kick and punch her and wrestle myself out of her hands to get myself back on the ground to continue the piece. Every time I managed to get away, she threw herself on top of me again.
After a few minutes a crowd had gathered, of about 200 people. They surrounded us closely, and I could only see their feet crowding around. I couldn’t tell, from my position, what they were thinking of the whole thing. They were all shouting in Chinese. I concentrated only on getting to the camera and finishing the piece. Every time I managed to edge forward an inch, the crowd gasped and screamed and hurried out of my way - all the while I was fighting off the hysterical Chinese woman, who was still clinging to my body.
Amid the din of yelling and my own shouts of, “Shea shea no! Shea shea no!” by which I was roughly trying to tell the woman in Mandarin Chinese, “Thank you no!” I heard the crackle of police walkie-talkies.
I made it to the camera just in time to see a Chinese cop pick it up and turn it off as I screamed, “NOOO!”
He shoved the woman away and gathered up me and my two friends and took us aside. He made us hand over our passports, train tickets, and my camera. Through a passerby who spoke English, he told us he didn’t like that we were making art in public, that it was too unusual in China, and that I had to delete the video.
The translator hinted that the cop didn’t know much about video equipment, and maybe there was something I could do?
I managed to lie to the cop and trick him by deleting a video I’d taken a few days prior, of a bike ride through Pudong.
I gestured to him, “See? ERASED!” and snapped the camera shut. He nodded and hustled us through security.
We managed to catch our train heading for Hong Kong and got the fuck out of Shanghai.
The fact that I’m in Hong Kong right now, and out of mainland China, is the only reason I’m able to even post on this blog right now. It’s blocked on the mainland by the government.
There are a bunch of new illustrations in here that I don’t remember being in the old passports. My original was cheerfully empty of all pictures save my own (if you’re reading this and you’re the bastard that stole my old passport, feel free to draw a mustache on it cause I’ve got a new one … It’d make a pretty sweet flip book actually… ). This thing is loaded with enough American nationalism to give Stephen Colbert a woody. There’s a giant eagle soaring above the profile picture, and images of conquest and manifest destiny marching across the pages. My favorite is on the last page: a satellite cresting the rim of the earth with the Milky Way winking in the distance. It’s like they’re symbolically extending America’s natural territory into space - naturalizing America’s ‘rightful claim’ over the very stars. They might as well have scribbled “America! Fuck yeah!” in crayon on every page and saved the tax payers a few bucks.
Chinese Visa: check!
The Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles is sadly like any other government institution during a budget crisis in California: woefully understaffed yet gloriously overcrowded. Just like the DMV, except more Chinese people and less white trash.
Traveler’s checks, health insurance, foldable toothbrush, and hilariously tiny bottles of shampoo: check!
I’m beginning to feel a twinge of electricity now (hence the eels-in-the-blood headline): I pulled my suitcases out of the closet today, and bid “Have an awesome summer!” to a few rad people (you know who you are! Can’t wait to see more of you tomorrow!). This is actually happening.
Oh, plus Stephanie emailed me today and said, “Make sure you have a printout of the hotel’s address in Chinese to show to the taxi driver - hardly anyone here speaks English! Good luck!”
I’ve spent the last few months scoffing at the idea of swine flu. I’m one of those obstinate douche bags who likes to remind people that hundreds of thousands of people are killed every year by the regular ol’ flu, while the swine variety has offed less than 500. Shoot, bacon kills more people than the swine flu, and you can have my bacon when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
My lack of respect for the whole debacle may turn out to bite me in the ass: traveling students are being quarantined upon arrival in China:
I’m not sure which way my attitude will swing if this happens to me.
Either I’ll kowtow and realize I’m not immortal, after all, that I’m just another human just like anyone else, and I’ll develop a new-found respect for the government’s pandemic warnings …
or I’ll assume that the Chinese government is so threatened by my blinding greatness that they must attempt to contain it, and I’ll admonish them stridently that such greatness cannot - nay, WILL NOT be contained. At which point I will probably be beaten and thrown in a Chinese prison. Maybe one day my story will be told. Somehow I see Richard Gere playing myself …
This is the first post of what will eventually grow into your favorite travel blog. Shhh you don’t have to thank me now.
I am planning to fly by the seat of my pants (pants that happen to be inside of an airplane) all around the world this summer, with planned stops in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and London. Hopefully there willl be many as-yet-unplanned stops after that. I know you’ve never heard of a college kid traveling about the Earth the summer after their graduation. I totally invented it!
Today is June 15. I graduated from the University of California, Irvine two days ago. For the first time in twenty years I am not a student. I’m just another asshole with a BA. I’m attempting to better myself with this trip + project.
I am actually stoked beyond belief to take part in the great narrative tradition of The Journey of Self Discovery.
I board a plane for Shanghai in nine days. The plan is to meet up with my friend Stephanie and her family there and then be delivered, like the human cargo we are, to the organic farm we’ll be working on with the third mouseketeer, Lisa!
This is the organization that Stef found to place us on the farm (just an FYI, Stef is amazing and made all of these plans and I cannot take credit for ANY arrangement. I am blessed that such awesome people seem to find me amusing enough to keep around):
After working in Shanghai, we’ll be boarding a train to Hong Kong. Hong mother-fucking Kong. We’re taking the train on the most American of holidays, July 4. While you floozies will be lighting Roman Candles and singing the National Anthem, we’ll be riding public transportation in the People’s Republic of China.
We’re staying in HK at a hostel called THE COSMIC GUESTHOUSE. We’re doing it big, people. Off-this-godforsaken-planet-and-into-the-COSMOS big.
On July 13, I’ll be parting ways with my comrades and boarding a plane for Heathrow Airport, where I’ll be joining my friend Chris on yet another farm. Chris made the arrangement through the World Wide Opportunites on Organic Farms program.
After a week in the treehouse comes the really fun part: Chris and I will be traveling together like dirty stinking gypsies all over Europe and perhaps North Africa. I have no idea where we’re going. I want to go to Amsterdam … cause I really want to see the Van Gogh Museum (what?).
Also, I have had a craving (since I read The Alchemist years ago) to see the Sahara desert, and Chris wants to ride a horse bareback between the pyramids, like his father did long ago.
Our ambitions are small and manageable, no?
So, things I have yet to do:
1) Pick up passport waiting for me at the Federal Building in LA. When I applied, I had to sign a written avidavit swearing “These are my real glasses. I must wear them in my passport photo.”
2) Get Chinese Visa at the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China. They insisted I call it that. I didn’t ask questions.
3) Get traveler’s checks.
4) Figure out what the deal is with phones. Does my phone work over there? Does my phone even work here? The answer to the latter question is not really, no, indicating the probable answer to the former question.
5) Health insurance, in case I fall into a proverbial ditch or cut my finger off chopping wood, a la Margot Tenenbaum.
