Three Kinds of Smoke

Today was a long day, I smell like three different kinds of smoke at the same time, cigarette smoke, then the smoke from fake money being burned on the sidewalk for someone's ancestors, and the smoke that's always been here.

The smoke that's always been here was the first thing I smelled when I got here, driving into the city from the airport.  We suspect that this smoke comes from the coal that is burned to keep us warm.  The city seems to be warmed by various "central heating systems", which I think are identifiable by large smoke stacks.  While I worry that this constant smoke is bad for my health, especially in the long run, I am glad that I'm warm.  Today was one of the cold days, one of the days where any skin touching the air burns likes a bad sunburn.  This smoke is the same smoke that I see on the little weather indicator on my phone that says: -15 degrees (F), "Smoke".  That's what they call the "weather" here when the air is bad.

The smoke from the fake money isn't a brand new thing.  We've been seeing it since we got back from Korea about a week ago.  We saw it in Taiwan back in 2008.  In Taiwan you couldn't walk very far on any sidewalk without tripping over a coffee can sized burning barrel full of fake money.  People buy fake money, made from special paper, that they can burn for their ancestors.  That way their ancestors will have money to spend in the spirit realm.  I wonder who's face is on the bills.  I imagine that the exchange rate isn't very good.

Here in China they practice the same burning of money for their ancestors.  One difference though is that they do it in busy four-way intersections, and they don't put it in any sort of can or barrel, they just burn it in a pile on the pavement.  A friend of ours told us that they burn it in the intersections so that when their ancestors come by to pick up the money they can quickly be on their way.  Kind of like a drive-thru I guess.  I imagine people don't want their dead ancestors to stop and visit either.

It's hard to cross the street without weaving through a few burning piles of ash.  So I'd smell like smoke anyway.

The cigarette smoke is new, fresh you might say.  China has no shortage of "No Smoking" signs on buses and in buildings.  But, while I'm not sure of the laws about it, restaurants do not necessarily have "No Smoking" signs.  Honestly I never looked, there's a good chance that there actually was  one.  I guess when it's -15 degrees (F) outside it's even harder to get people to go outside to smoke.

I haven't really experienced this in a restaurant until tonight.  It seems that most restaurants I've been too don't have people smoking inside.  But tonight was a little extra special, the restaurant we went to was a lot more "Chinese", or a lot more of a local favorite than many of the restaurants we've been too, which may have been more like chains or more catered to foreigners.  The restaurant we went to tonight just seemed extra Chinese to me.

The first floor reminded me of a standing auction or something.  It was loud, and full of fish tanks with huge limpets, a cute little turtle, and lot's of fish, the kind you eat.  There were young women wearing red caps standing around with cell-phone like devices in their hands taking orders from people who were standing around looking at pictures of food on the walls.  There were also plates of food covered in plastic wrap set out to look at.  There were at least a hundred cases of the local beer stacked against the walls, and think along the stairs too.  I don't remember anyone actually sitting and eating at a table on the first floor, it was more like a market or a tiny airport.

We were led to this exciting restaurant by our friend.  We had invited him and his wife over for dinner but his wife wasn't feeling well so it was just hime and he couldn't eat fish.  The place we had planned to take him was a fish restaurant.  Needless to say I was kind of surprised that the majority of the food I was looking at pictures of had fish in it.  Not to mention the fish tanks.

The large colorful pictures of the various dishes you could order were not as helpful as you might imagine, but we managed to order four dishes for our little table of three.  We got a table card from some other person, I think she was wearing a black cap.

All the tables were upstairs, there were at least four private dining rooms, lined with low glass windows looking in.  Private rooms seem to be extra popular here.  There were three little kids playing next to windows facing our little table.  Every once and awhile I'd make a face at them or wave.  One of them tried talking to me through the glass.  I said "What?"  Eventually he came out the door so I could hear hime, but I still said "What?"  I said it in English just to be annoying.  That's how I am.

Often times there is something that triggers my desire to blog about it.  It's usually not even the thing that I focus on in the blog, like how this blog starts out talking about smoke.  The thing that triggered the blogger inside of me was the bowl of fish that was set or table, the first thing that showed up.

This bowl, the first dish that showed up at our table, was huge.  It was almost a joke size, It must have been two feet across.  I took pictures of it but the pictures, like the grand canyon, just don't look as big as it actually was.  Maybe it just felt extra big because I was aware that there were only three of us to eat all this fish.  Yes.  Fish.  I'm not sure why we ordered fish when the whole reason we came here was because our buddy wasn't able to eat fish.  Oh well.  It was full of hot peppers and tongue numbing peppercorns, delicious.

Of course it turns out that the bowl was mostly full of bean sprouts with a layer of fish floating on the top to make it look like more food than it was.  Even so it was a lot of food, and there were three other dishes, though not quite as expansive.

The dinner was pleasant other than the two guys sitting right behind us smoking cigarets.  On their second round of smoking our friend started waving the smoke around with his hand.  I told him that waving the smoke around wasn't doing us much good, it didn't have anywhere else to go, but eventually the smokers notices is smoke waving and apologized and moved to some other room or went outside.  I guess waving smoke around actually does help sometimes, and I guess smokers here are pretty nice about it if they notice.

Our dinner guest, who guided us to this restaurant, told a few times us that this restaurant was very popular with the locals and very well priced.  I believed him.  I've heard that the way you rate a Chinese restaurant is by how loud it is, by how many people are in it talking loudly and enjoying their food.

He told us too that it wasn't a popular "foreign" restaurant, mostly local.  I believe him there too because as we were finishing our dinner and as plates were being cleared away one of the "foo woo yen" (waitresses) gave us a small questionnaire.  Initially she gave it to him, since he had done most of the talking, but he asked her if she wanted me, the white guy, to fill it out in English.  She loved the idea.

After I wrote a short note complementing the food and the service I felt like I was the first westerner to ever eat there.  As we were walking towards the stairs Becky pointed out to me that our friend was translating my little note out loud into Chinese for five people behind the counter.

Of course this certainly isn't an every day occurrence in our life here, people usually don't care or even seem to notice that I'm a white guy in Chinese city, but I thought it was fun and I thought I'd blog about it.

So that's the story of why one of the three smokes I smell like is cigaret smoke.  I'm going to take a shower now.

Korea

Well I'm in Korea now.  To be precise: I'm on Jeju Island, South Korea, in the Best Western Hotel.  We will be here for six days total.  Our primary purpose coming here is to get our passports stamped. This resets our Chinese Visas which, although they last ten years, only allow 60 day visits.  So we're technically tourists touring Asia, technically and practically.  I'm not sure where we'll go next.

Before you get excited, thinking that we're seeing amazing sites and drinking fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them, I'd like to point out that we plan to spend a majority our time on Jeju Island in our 13th floor hotel room.

The first time I ever go to a country I start looking around at things, looking for things that I've never seen, new things.  In this case: Korean things.  The first thing I remember seeing Korean was the written language.  Like any airport, there are at least three languages on every sign. Here they have Korean, English, and Chinese.  Anything that's not a sign, or not meant to be read by as many people as possible, is in Korean.  Something I wouldn't really notice back home in America.  In particular I remember seeing lots of Korean writing on two 7ft tall metal boxes with lights on them that flanked the escalators.  We think that they were some sort of security scanners, but we couldn't read Korean.

Then, of course, there's spoken Korean, the language all the airport employees speak to each other.  To a large extent they spoke it to us too, the visitors coming through immigration.  I was standing in the very front of the line, obediently behind the yellow line, watching my wife talk to the quarantine agent ahead of me, when I felt someone squeezing past me in line.

A short middle-aged Chinese woman burst past me, slipping past my wife and the agent sitting in his little booth, and into the area beyond the barriers where only people who had been approved by the government quarantine agents were allowed to be.  He yelled at her in Korean as she ignored him and kept walking.  I felt my eye brows raise as I glued my eyes to her back pack, making sure not to lose sight of her, I expected him to run out from behind his desk and tackle her, or security guards to pounce on her.  But none came.  Eventually, after maybe a minute, she came back and walked back through the line pretending nothing had happened.

As a rule-following oldest child, and according to child-order psychology, I always find it interesting to see what happens when people break the rules.  Usually nothing.  Thankfully international air travelers can rest easy: although she was able to break through the quarantine barrier, she returned to the back of the line with her small yellow form, that she had honestly filled out like the rest of us, with a list of symptoms and yes/no check boxes.  Let's call that a "Korean Quarantine" even though it's exactly the same as an an American quarantine we can call everything "Korean" here because we're in Korea.

After we got through all the check points and retrieved our luggage we were outside looking at more Korean things, like palm trees.  Even though it's just the right temperature outside for snow, Jeju Island is apparently covered in palm trees.  Yes I know that Korea isn't the only place with palm trees, but I didn't see any in China.  So, now, when I think of Korea I'll think of palm trees.

Jeju Island looks a lot like California to me (probably because of the palm trees), mixed with China town, but with that circular Korean script written on all the signs.  In many ways it looks more like China than where I've been living for the past two months.  But it smells a lot better than China, the air is very clean here, and the plumbing and sewers seem to work correctly.  Sorry China, I try not to say mean things about China, but it's the truth: China smells bad.

Becky and I went out for lunch at 3pm, but most places are closed at 3:00 I guess, so we ended up eating fried chicken.  But on our way back to the hotel we saw a tank outside a restaurant full of little octopuses, one my favorite animals, some were stuck to the glass, one was walking all octopus-like across the bottom, and another one was swimming back and fourth.  It makes me kinda sad that people eat such wonderful little creatures, but I also find them delicious.

The thing that surprises me the most is Korea's lack of chairs, they just use the floor.  At the Best Western here you can even get a room with no beds or chairs, just a hardwood floor and maybe a few sleeping mats hidden somewhere.  Everybody sits on the floor.  When we were flipping through the channels on the TV in our room we saw a reality show that showed the inside of a few apartments, everyone was on the floor, there were no chairs in sight.  The dinner table was a foot or two off the floor.  Even as a skinny kid I found sitting on the floor to be a pain in back.  Now as an old fat guy, I'm crossing Korea off of places I could live.  Although I guess I could just buy some chairs and turn down all invitations.  Either that or I could invent pants with an inflatable chair sewed into the butt.

Snow World Part 1 - Freezing Electronics

I always thought that electronics, computers and phones, liked to be cold.  Probably because some super computers have super cooled chips.  But that's only partially true with smart phones, some parts really don't like the cold, like the battery.

A Few days ago Becky, Jessica, and I, put on our warmest long-underwear, our woolen long-sleeved moisture-wicking undershirts, our down-stuffed jackets, you get the idea. Then, after getting a little lost, we met three of our friends, got on a bus for about 45 minutes, then we got off a little sweaty from all the clothes we were wearing.  After getting off the bus we walked for several blocks through the city to the riverside.  It started to get exciting when we saw pillars lining the sidewalk that were made from ice blocks.

Although it has nothing to do with the story, when we got to the riverside there was a big IMAX theater where I thought about trying to watch Star Wars.  Star Wars only came out a couple days earlier here in China and I hadn't had any time yet to go see it.

At this point, standing in the frozen riverside park, we were starting to feel the wardrobe mistakes we had made that morning.  Jessica and I both felt that we'd feel more comfortable if we'd worn more layers of pants, our legs were cold.  My jacket was warm, but I felt little drafts hear and there when the wind blew.  One of our friends asked us if we wanted to warm up in the hotel or start walking to our destination.  It was a long walk.

In the end, although it was barely noon, we had to make a few phone calls and reschedule dinner otherwise we'd have to rush ourselves across the river, see snow world, and rush back.  So, thankfully, we walked towards the hotel.

The hotel was quite beautiful, it's lobby had massive marble columns and a huge sweeping marble staircase.  Along the side of the sweeping staircase there was series of about 50 bathtub sized glass bowls each suspended from the ceiling a little higher than the next.  Each bowl was pouring water in the next bowl until they reached the bottom where the last bowl spilled out into a fountain.  So this was where we hung out for fifteen or twenty minutes, huddled in the corner of this huge swanky hotel lobby where we had found a small sitting area.  There were a few other people there that looked like they were resting too, I think the girls used this time to insert "foot warmers" into their boots.  Personally I felt a little out of place surrounded by all that marble and granite.  But it wasn't long and we were walking across the street towards the river and "Snow world".

There were a few hundred people on the river.  I should point out the temperature was about -10 degrees Fahrenheit, that's 42 degrees below freezing.  (I think 42 degrees above freezing is 74), so when I say "on the river" I mean people that were walking, running, and playing on ice.  I also saw a little marina near by with little boats in it's docks, all frozen solid into the ice.

On the ice there were dogs tied to sleds, horses, snowmobiles, six wheelers and four wheelers with sleds tied to the back of them.  There were people ice skating, playing games, people selling ice cleats, food, scarfs, hats, and everything else.  Then there were six of us walking slowly and carefully across the ice.

I was in the back of the pack walking the slowest.  The ice was smooth and slippery.  I felt like every step I took slipped a little.  After walking about a hundred feet my thighs and legs were already starting to feel fatigued from using my seldom used anti-slipping muscles.

I was starting to worry.  We had to walk exactly 1.0 km on the ice and I was already starting to feel it at 0.2% of the distance that I was planning to walk.  But thank goodness, after another hundred feet the smooth ice disappeared and was replaced with packed snow, a hundred times easier to walk on.  The smooth ice, behind us, had been cleared off for ice skating and stuff.  But I didn't know this when I started walking.  Thank goodness!  I almost back ashore and watch Star Wars in the IMAX.

 About halfway across the river the cold started to get to us.  I kept trying to take pictures but my hands would go numb so quickly, in seconds instead of minutes.  Thank goodness I had mittens so I could make fists inside of them to warm my fingers. We also started to realize that our phones weren't working.  It was too cold, the batteries were dying!  I guess the chemicals inside the batteries were not able to produce enough electricity because they were freezing.  One of our friends who had been around for a few years said we couldn't keep our phones in our outside pockets or they would freeze like that.  So I kept my phone in my pants pocket, which was covered by my big down jacket.

Keeping it there, in my pants pocket, kept my phone working.  But to actually use it I had to take it out, and I had to use my bare hands to operate the touch screen.  At one point during the day I tried taking a sphere photo.  A sphere photo is a camera feature of many phones that allows you to take pictures in every direction then, when you're done, it stitches them back together into a rotating sphere.  It's like being there almost.  It usually takes a few minutes to take all of the pictures to do this, maybe fifty pictures in three minutes, but my phone died completely right after the last picture and I lost all of the fifty sphere shots.  Which is too bad, I liked that one.

And with that sad note I'm ending this blog entry, I'm tired.  I'll add another one about Snow World later.

The Best Way Turn On The Lights

Maybe I'm just in a silly mood tonight, or maybe the word is crass... but I think I'll tell my blog about it.

Becky and I had just started walking down seven flights of cement chairs in an old apartment building when the lights went out.

Normally this would be a little scary, you'd want to slow down and make sure of each step, especially those last few steps when you either think there are no more and you fall an extra eight inches.  The other thing that can happen is that the landing comes up quicker than you thought.  Which feels weird, I think you could fall over if you are going too fast or something.

But we weren't scared because we are not in a normal place.  Either that or this place is normal and the place we're used to is abnormal.  But from the perspective of most people reading this blog, and the one writing it, we are in a fantastic, strange, and exotic place!

Becky stomped her foot loudly which turned on the lights.  The lights in most hallways and stairways are activated by loud sounds here, I'm not sure if it's a clapper.  I think the lights usually only give you about five seconds, maybe less, before they turn off again.  We went down another floor, but this time Becky made an explosive sound with her mouth which worked, the lights went on for another flight of stairs.

Maybe China brings down my maturity level, or maybe it's just me, or just the 12-year old boy in all men, but Becky's noises gave me an idea: what if I farted?  I planned to try it on the next floor.  Why not?  It was just the two of us.

But Becky stomped her foot before I could make any noise.  I quickly told her how she had ruined my experiment.  She understood immediately how important it was too me and slowed down to let me barge ahead.  But then, after half a dozen steps she pointed out that she was behind me and that she no longer wanted to be a part of the experiment.

So now I finish this blog entry with an untested experiment.

But stay tuned, it is just occurring to me that the lights just outside our apartment door are also sound activated!

Boxes of Garbage

Since we've been here, a little over a month, we've helped our room-mates accumulate boxes.  We've procured two air-purifiers, a humidifier, a queen sized memory foam mattress, a computer case, a computer power supply, plug strips, two sets of curtains, and two bedroom dressers.  Most of these things have actually been ordered online (taobao.com), the Chinese version of ebay, and delivered to us through a delivery service in big cardboard boxes.

For awhile we kept most of the boxes, you never know if you're going to need to take it back.  Actually we had to take the humidifier back. It burnt out after only one day of use.  Our apartment is pretty big, three rooms, and two bathrooms, with two couples living in it.

We have a third room that we've been using as a workshop.  Dave has all kinds of tools, a few dozen wood chisels that he ordered on Taobao, a few funny looking saws, a weird looking hammer, and a few other things, just no power tools.  He even built a workbench without using any nails and attached a couple vices to it (also ordered on Taobao).  (Sometimes he tracks sawdust and wood shavings onto the big brown shag rug that sits in the center of the apartment with his socks.)  He also shares his workshop with all of our boxes and packing materials.  That is, until recently...

Recently Dave and Irene moved the workbench to the end of the room, cleaned up all the last remnants of wood shavings, and put that foam mattress they ordered on the floor and made it up as a bed.  We're expecting a guest soon.

For a majority of that day, or maybe it was two days, we had two big boxes next to our door stuffed with packing materials.  Throughout the day extra garbage from the kitchen was added to to boxes since they had the same destination as the kitchen garbage anyway.  I think I threw an orange peel into one of them.  They were getting full fast.

Eventually I had to go somewhere for some reason, either that or I had just been somewhere, and I grabbed one of the boxes, all that I could carry, and carried it down four flights of cement stairs.  There are two smallish garbage cans outside our "lobby" door on the sidewalk, the box was much bigger than either of garbage "cans" so I just set the box next too it, still full of garbage.

I wasn't entirely sure that it was "cool" do do that, to put garbage next to the garbage can instead of inside of it.  Even though I would never describe China as a clean place I assumed that they have rules about these types of things.

One thing that confused me, as I was doing this, was the size of the garbage cans.  There were two, and if I put them together they still wouldn't be as big as only one of those green plastic garbage cans that they have at every house in the U.S.  But these two little garbage containers were for the residents of an entire 15 story building!

But the funny part happened after I got the second box.  I hiked back up four flights of stairs, checked out some network cables on the third floor that were hanging out of the wall, (I think I found where our Internet connection is piped into the building) Then I grabbed the second box of garbage and huffed it down the stairs again.  I used the stairs because I assumed anyone who might be in the elevator wouldn't appreciate sharing that tiny space with a box of garbage, even though it kinda already smells like it.  When I got outside the building to set the second box of garbage next to it's brother, it was gone!  The box of garbage, big enough where I couldn't wrap my arms all the way around it, had disappeared.  Someone "stole" our garbage!  Either that or I timed it just right and the garbage had just been picked up by the Chinese garbage trucks.

Fifteen minutes later I had returned to the apartment, via the elevator, and we were leaving to go somewhere to buy something, or eat something, or whatever, and I looked over at the garbage cans: no box.  Someone had pilfered the second box of garbage too!

I mentioned it to my wife, and whoever else was with me at the time, and we all decided that it was probably taken away by the people we occasionally see going through garbage cans apparently looking for things to recycle.  I've certainly had much slower service at restaurants.  Maybe next time I'll leave a tip.

Sidewalk Games

When I walk the sidewalks of this huge city, this boundless Chinatown, I watch people's eyes.

I don't watch out of curiosity about what they are thinking, but out of self absorbed curiosity about whether they will notice my foreign face or not.  I guess it's like a game I play, trying to catch someone staring.

But this has proven to be a disappointing game, no one looks at me or seems to care about my face.  Maybe the locals are used to seeing foreigners, (which is weird because I never see any), or maybe their eyes don't rove around like mine, or maybe I'm just not quick enough!

But I've been doing something a little different lately: I've been covering most of my face.  At first I thought no one would look at me at all because they couldn't see my foreign features under my black face cover.  Which, other than the cold, was one of my reasons for wearing it, to hide my face.  But, to my surprise, I got way more stares and double-takes walking along the sidewalks.  I couldn't figure out why.

Now that I wasn't playing the game anymore, trying to catch stares.  It bugged me.  I was supposed to blend in.  Why were people staring at me?

Then after a few days of sidewalk double-takes I looked at my refection in a window.  I was kind of surprised by what I saw, by what I looked like peering out over my black shroud.

I looked kinda scary.  My eyes were deep set, peering back at me under the shadow of my pronounced eye-brow-ridge.  The bridge of my nose accentuated my oddness even more, dividing what little was showing of my face in half like a fantastically steep mountain range.  It's a miracle that I can see things directly in front of me!

Of course I might be exaggerating and being a bit dramatic about what I saw in that reflection but keep in mind that I've been looking at almost entirely Asian faces on the sidewalks for the last month or so.  Asian faces tend to have smoother faces, shallower eye sockets and nose bridges, than the average Irish-Norwegian like myself.  But when they see my whole face it must just look like a Westerner's face, a common and not unusual thing to see here on TV, on billboards, and every now and then on the side-walk.  But when you cover the rest of the face and show only the part that differs the most, the eyes and nose bridge, it seems to throw people off when they get close enough to see it.  It all happens too fast when you're walking towards them.  You get a lot of double-takes and stares.

Then again I don't know if I've seen anybody else wearing black fabric over their face like I do.  Maybe they're just staring at the weirdo dressed like a ninja terrorist.