North Korea

A friend of mine went to North Korea in October. Apparently they do allow a very limited number of American tourists into the country now on strictly guided tours. You have to be with the group at all times and can only take pictures of designated sites or your camera is confiscated. So her pictures are limited, maybe, but it is still really neat to see images of a place so isolated, controlled, regimented, and behind. Here are the pictures if you are interested. What struck me most was how devoid of people public places seemed, as if normal life was so strictly controlled that people weren't even allowed to freely and casually be outside.

Bike trouble

Today, my bicycle suffered one of its worst traumas yet. Now keep in mind that this bike was purchased for about $12, has a flat tire every other week, and rattles constantly (imagine a rabid rodent trapped in a have-a-heart trap...that's what I sound like as I ride down the street.) Anyways: so it's been really cold here recently, and so today, for whatever reason (perhaps having to do with the subzero temperatures), when I went to stop, both of my hand brakes just ripped off in my hands. That is, the plastic part that attaches the wire part to the handlebars ripped through--now the completely unattached plastic brake handles dangle uselessly from the wires, and drag on the ground. So now, in order to stop my bike, I have to do the following: a) pull futilely on the wire portion of the brake cord sort of near where it attaches to the wheel, to limited effect; b) drag my feet along the ground in an attempt to slow my lightning-speed careen through traffic; and c) yell loudly in an attempt to alert those around me that I am out of control and have no means not to hit them. (unfortunately, this is usually a wordless "AY! AY! AY!" since in the heat of the moment as I am about to crash I do not have the Chinese language capacity to say, "Watch out! I can't stop! Get out of the way!")

feline feasts

as a follow-up to my last post, the NY Times reports that apparently cats don't have it so good in China either, haha.

This article contains such excellent tidbits as: "'Cats have a strong flavor. Dogs taste much better, but if you really want cat meat, I can have it delivered by tomorrow,' said the butcher, who gave only her surname, Huang."

delights in dining

Last night my friend Jill and and I went out to get some food at the end of the day. We usually hit the gym and then grab dinner afterwards at various hole in the wall "establishments" in the area. Yesterday we decided to try someplace new. We ended up at a regular-looking place, neither clean nor dirty, neither nice nor not-nice, where we ordered some eggplant, some cold cucumber salad with cilantro, some some stir-fried egg with unnamed "vegetables," and also some snow peas. Other than the eggplant tasting like feces and the the rest of the food being bland, it was a "great meal."

There's a point to the story, and I'm getting to it: it's not uncommon for DOG MEAT to be featured on menus around here. It's certainly not in all restaurants, but you wouldn't have to search far to find some tasty, well-seasoned, tender loin of puppy. That being said, this restaurant DID in fact offer dog meat on the menu, although we did not choose to partake. About 3/4 of the way into our meal, however, a waitress entered the restaurant holding a plump dog in her arms, and took him into the kitchen. I thought nothing of this. (Animals in restaurants? Who cares? Worse things have happened.)

BUT THEN this dog gave a few shrill barks from the kitchen, there was a scuffle, then all quiet. I still didn't think much of it....until 20 minutes later all 20 waitresses and chefs and managers all sat down to fresh, steaming bowls of soup and rice. What kind of soup, you ask?

You guessed it: DOG MEAT SOUP.

IMPORTANT NOTICE

I'm coming home in January! I'll be in the States January 14th-February 4th!

Get excited everybody

Blue sky today, and clear and cold. Finally, a reprieve from the pollution.

Tonight attempting to have a "dinner party" which will potentially include roasting chicken in a toaster oven and cooking vegetables in a rice cooker. Ha.

The Brown Cloud

Living here right now is like living in the middle of a forest fire. The coal smoke is so thick these days that the air looks like milk. You can only see a couple of blocks away, if that. It burns to breathe. Great...it's going to be like this all winter.

No wonder there's a brown cloud over Asia....

In other news, it's supposed to snow tomorrow. ACID SNOW!!!!!!!!!!! AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

word play

There are alot of words in Chinese that come from English, but this week I discovered three that really surprised me. They are: romance (langman), humor (youmo), and logic (luoji). Logic perhaps makes sense: this is a concept totally invented by Western philosophy, and the Chinese have there own way of saying that something is logical/reasonable/makes sense. Humor I also understand; having a "sense of humor" isn't a valuable personality characteristic here as it is in the West, and once again, there are other ways of saying that a person has an enjoyable/amusing personality. Romance I don't get though--doesn't every society have romance? Isn't that sort of one of the fundamental aspects of humanity?

The word Bingo (Bin-ge) also comes from English, in case you were wondering. As this is not a unifying theme from human history, I guess I can understand why they don't have a word for it.