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China Travels One

December 30, 2014 by L. Bane. Leave a Comment

Well so much for live blogging since the Chinese government has done it’s best to rob every bit of fun that they can out of the Internet.  I write this passage using a bit of light technical chicanery that allows me to remote on to my home computer.  Otherwise, Google, VPN sites, Twitter, and others are outright inaccessible while other huge swaths of the internet crawl since no one bothers to set up distributed caching servers on the other side of the Great Firewall.  It brings to mind the description that I read of this book where the author puts forward the idea that China will be perpetually bottled up in a no man’s land between the third and first worlds due to their government.

Along those lines, one might be afraid of police in America since they’re so citation happy, but Chinese police, oof, I don’t care for those dudes eyeballing me at all.  It may be better for clueless natives, but I can feel those dudes sizing up my organs whenever I walk by them.  I should point out that one needn’t come to the Far East for such a fun experience though!  Before getting on our flight bound for Toronto, (where the connector to our China flight was located), some U.S. stormtroopers stood in the terminal tunnel interrogating citizens as to how much money (specifically) they had on them.  These are the jackasses that shouldn’t exist: State troopers who can take your cash for laughs under the guise of trying to stop drug money laundering (something which has obviously been a rousing success).

The flight?  Ah yes, fifteen hours in an aluminum tuna can.  Mrs. Sandmich expected the usual spartan airline experience and packed about ten pounds of food (I exaggerate of course, it was probably only 9.5 pounds).  Little did we know that Air Canada serves two and a half meals along with a rolling beverage service (I sucked down four beers without much thought before my bladder told me that I should probably hold off).  As usual I couldn’t sleep, so I hit the ground ready to pretend whatever time it was supposed to be.  So let’s make with some photos, presented in no particular order:

$100 water pots, a basic requirement due to water quality.  I remarked to Mrs. Sandwich that we go into our American appliance stores and find inexpensive Chinese appliances whereas in China they have crazy expensive Japanese appliances.  Anyone in the mood for a $200 electric rice pressure cooker, or perhaps a $700, 50 liter hot water tank?  I have the store you then.
A major intersection in town, note the lack of any traffic signs
Part of a typical, Chinese construction production.  I don’t know enough about large scale production to know if their approach (which appears to be heavy with the use of wood staves) is good or bad.
Sally’s dad’s new house.  The construction is glass and concrete.  Even small houses are built this way so I guess cement is easier to come by than timber.
Older ladies exercising in the evening in the city’s main square (it’s a “town” by East Asian standards, but would be a major metropolis anywhere in America).
Santa is everywhere
A winterized scooter (some are electric jobbies that are completely silent)
The arrival area of the Shanghai airport.  Maybe I don’t travel enough but I’ve never seen that many people waiting directly outside of an arrival gate.
In what at one point in time was probably a fishing village.  Every spare piece of dirt in this area had a vegetable of some sort growing in it and the gardens were quite impressive.

Well that’s enough of that.  It took me all day to crank out this post over my painful faux vpn connection and I doubt that I’ll have the patience to do more until I get back, sorry!

Filed Under: china

Drunken Airport Blogging

June 3, 2014 by L. Bane. Leave a Comment

As if there was any other kind of ‘airport blogging’.  I recall the famous professional skeptic James Randi remarking about how he never drank because he did not ever want anything clouding his mind.  Now that’s some dedication, bordering on mental illness in my mind.

When I was at my departure airport (and not sauced, not good for business to show up drunk despite what Bill Clinton’s memoirs might say) I again thought about my love of the airport.  There’s the term ‘future shock’, and I would think that airports would be a perfect manifestation of that: being able to near-instantly transport to anywhere.  It’s a credit to the human race that many people who sit in airports wonder where their stinking ‘space ports’ are; and if there were space ports, nothing less than trans-dimensional gateways would do!

The view from the Timberline restaurant at DEN

Yes, with airports the fact that I could show up and go anywhere, anytime….
Well almost anywhere.

———–

Mrs. Sandmich and I used some frequent flier miles to purchase round trip tickets to China for “Sally’s” sister’s wedding.  After moving miles around, etc. it ended up setting us back $200 for the tickets.  Okay, not bad.  However, what is bad is the $200 per person fee plus four pages of documentation (per person) for a travel visa in order to enter the ‘peoples paradise’.  I saw that and thought “why doesn’t China just pull the trigger and ban travel outright?”.  As documented by The Sandmich, they’re already recalcitrant about letting their own people leave, but what does it say to a two week visitor when there is a novella worth of information and a flight-worthy fee just to get in?  Compare this to places like the Dominican Republic which has signs at their airport that basically say “Got money?  Come on in!”.  If it wasn’t for a friend of the family getting married and the fact that I might be missing out on the biggest party that I’ll ever attend in my life I’d tell those ChiComms to screw off.

———–

On that note, how about some language?

While traveling in Colorado on my latest spell I thought of my hour long travel both ways to my brother’s family’s place where I stay, to the plant where I work.  I thought that I could stay at a hotel instead and be there in fifteen minutes, and then since I was by myself I could drive up to see my brother’s family and drive back that night and…well that doesn’t make any sense, best just to stay an hour away.  I can’t complain much at all since there’s someone who actually works at that plant who makes that drive every day of their lives.  The drive I could do, the $60 a week gas bill I could not though.

Anyway, while driving I feel like I should expand my mind by listening to language classes from iTunes U.  Last time I tried to relearn some Spanish (especially helpful in Colorado), but my mind begged for mercy and a return to A State of Trance.  “No room in the inn” I could hear the gray matter screaming.

Not to be deterred completely, since I scheduled the trip to China I decided to do some Chinese audio lessons.  What a cluster-F of a language.  In the past, while listening to Sally talk to her dad it sounded like she was constantly asking him questions (the tone most typically heard in English when someone says “Really?”).  It turns out that is one of four vowel accents used to differentiate vowels and words.  For instance, the words (as pronounced in English) “pa”, “pa?” and “pa?!” are three different words (there’s a forth that’s barely different from the first).

“Okay” I figured, I get it, nothing too bad.  Then I listened to the lesson that taught how to count from zero to ten (which is actually irrelevant when it comes to East Asian languages).  But I remarked to my brother that if I listened to that lesson all week to and from his house that I might be able to count to three.  It’s odd since two of the numbers are the same as Japanese.  It’s almost as if the Japanese said “nice language you got there Chinamen, we’ll take these handful of words and you can keep the rest of that hot mess”.

———-

So I of course purchased the HD version of Final Fantasy X (review forthcoming).  I played it all the time at home.

Back into the…whatever it’s called

Also of course, when visiting someplace as scenic and interesting as Colorado I would want to do something more interesting than playing any silly video game…until I learned that my brother who turned me onto the game more than a decade ago was playing it as well.  I’m sure my sister-in-law was amused to no end to see her husband and ‘future version of husband’ sitting around for hours on end playing a redux of a twelve year old video game that we’d both played already a couple times between us already.

———–
‘Beautiful People’

Just to wrap this back up before I wolf down a steak at the Timberline that isn’t past due, I thought I’d make another airport remark.  Most, I would say north of 90% of the people, dress and prepare themselves as if flying is still something special.  I recall a whole article in United’s Hemisphere’s that detailed how men should properly dress for transportation via air flight.  I can’t say as I follow any of the advice (typical jeans-dockers-untucked dress shirt hipster look), but it’s nice to know that somewhere in the universe, some level of standard is being maintained.

Thankfully they didn’t mention anything about the proper sobriety level as I get ready to stumble to the gate; ready for a three hour flight of illegal bootlegs of amazing BluRay rips of Cowboy Bebop and trips to the bathroom…

Filed Under: Booze, china, Japan, travel

Exchange Student Notes: Final Edition

June 10, 2011 by L. Bane. Leave a Comment

[2020 addendum: it turns out that the immigration issues I note in the last section were not related to me correctly.  It looks like it was actually the U.S. government (under Obama no less) that was putting the smackdown on the travel visas.  Apparently someone in the U.S. government can do math and figured that allowing anyone and everyone from China to come over whenever they want would result in the U.S. becoming a Chinese duchy.]

Anyway:

  • Sally has a pretty nifty phone that had a very adept translator on it. During her first week with us she had that phone out all the time punching stuff into it. I don’t think I saw her use it as much her whole second year combined as that first week, so improved was her English (and whenever she did use the translator it was on rather horrid words with multiple meanings. “Circumcised” comes to mind, yeah that was fun to explain).
  • Sally is looking at going to a U.S. college next year and she seems to mostly be looking at schools in the Midwest. What’s interesting is that international students have to pay the ‘rack rate’ for college tuition, in other words, they have to cover all the tax subsidies themselves. Now the ROI on higher end four year schools in general is fading away, and that’s at the tuition rates citizens (and illegal aliens) pay. Imagine if you would, paying $40,000 a year to go to a state school in Ohio. I’ve told her on more than occasion that money may well be gone, never to be seen again. My analysis is highly dependent on what field she goes into and how well she does. My guess would be though that, since she is pretty bright, she would make just as much money in her career with a $5,000 associates degree in computer programming from the local community college as she would if she blew upwards of $150,000 to get a degree in the fields that she’s looking at.
  • Sally has taken to watching one of two shows that we watch with dinner (bad form I know, perhaps our table will be cleaned off one day). One show is the British Top Gear and the other is Bizarre Foods. On more than one occasion Sally’s two dimensional English abilities have let her down when those shows inevitably bring up awkward terms. It’s not very comfortable being put in the place of having to explain what ‘rooster ball soup’ or a ‘wedding vegetable basket’ is.
  • So last year she went to a public high school and this year she went to a private high school. This year she heard some of her classmates debating about where to get their prom dresses and she inquired to Mrs. Sandmich why they didn’t have a used prom dress sale like they did at her school last year. I’m guessing that the Chinese commies have been lax in relating tales of horror of the bourgeoisie versus the proletariat.
  • Speaking of lax education, before staying with us Sally didn’t know that a number of her countrymen spoke a language (or dialect) other than her own (her’s being Mandarin). Likewise, every time I bring up the geography local to China, she seems not to believe me (like how Kazakhstan is close to China, etc). I’m guessing Chinese schools teach music and math lessons, then lightly touch on physical fitness and leave the rest up to chance. On a semi-related note, I was further aggravated when I asked her what they do in China on someone’s birthday: “I dunno”. Being the smartasss that I am I then related that, since she was from China, I kind’a depended on her to know stuff about her country. The actual answer was, that apparently birthdays aren’t that big of a deal over there.
  • We’re in the third year of gardening and in the last two years only one person in the house has come out to help me….
  • For the past two years I’d made it a point to buy snacks and unhealthy treats in an effort to put a pound or two onto that girl. Alas the effort has failed as a weigh-in at the mall put her twenty pounds under the target weight for her height (as for the other members of the Sandmich household…).
  • I never watched Sponge Bob until Sally stayed with us, and I must admit that somehow I didn’t watch it with her the first year that she stayed with us. I caught myself watching some episodes this year though and have decided that if Sponge Bob is on, it’s highly doubtful that there’s anything better on. Likewise, I could not fully appreciate the movie Final Fantasy: Spirit’s Within until I watched it with a teenage Asian girl. And no I’m not kidding, the finer moments of the film escaped my attention when last I saw it a decade ago (she was quite amazed when I told her it was a box office bust in the U.S. and instead of being a mainstream hit, was relegated to the anime shelves at Best Buy).
  • There was a dark moment earlier in the year when Sally’s parents were supposed to visit the New York over Chinese New Year. Although they were taking a ‘canned’ tour, our hope was that some sort of meeting could be arranged. What followed next brought to light something that puzzled me from the “exchange student get-go”. Whenever Sally was in China and needed to come to the States, there was always a coordination of paperwork between Mrs. Sandmich, Sally, and…the Chinese Embassy. “Odd” I thought, “what would the Chinese embassy care about legal entry into the U.S.”. I figured it was some sort of crossed wire and that she was getting her passport or such from the Chinese Embassy while going to the American Embassy to make sure that her papers were in order. Her parents case cleared that confusion up for me, for when the goons that run the country found out that both their daughters, a sister, and niece were all in America, their exit visas were denied to them as they were deemed a flight risk. Sally was distraught on two fronts, the first obviously being that she wouldn’t get to see her parents, but the second feeling some level of shame and anger towards the homeland that she is rather proud of. As John Derbyshire has noted, national pride is a natural and respectable feeling, and I often reinforced some of the positive points of her homeland, while playing down some of the negative (she was more than aware of negatives than I, and thus found it not worth playing up). The level of helplessness was copious on all sides, and I have to say that I hope that the jackbooted thuggery that’s currently tearing across the U.S. is squelched and that the prison planet doesn’t make a full, ugly debut here as well.

And that’s enough of that. If I think of anything else, I’ll throw it in the comments!

Filed Under: china

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