Writing from Korea again, where the smallest things are shocking. The fact that people line up, in actual lines, rather than filling every available inch of space in front of (the cashier/the egg custard lady/the subway door/the ticket booth) with pushing and shoving and craning necks. There's toilet paper in the bathrooms. There ARE bathrooms, and these bathrooms don't have cranky old women sitting outside demanding a toilet fee for what always turns out to be a dirt-covered hole in the ground. Traffic lights mean something, and sidewalks are for walking, rather than for storing motorbikes, electrical wires, extra restaurant stools, and piles of steel beams.

We booked the cheap, slow, old train from Busan to Seoul (which takes 5.5 hours instead of the bullet train's 2), and people on the internet had nothing but complaints about how shitty and last-resort-esque it was. As such, we were expecting it to be cramped, dirty, and spartan, but no: it had leg room galore, reclining seats, internet stations, karaoke rooms, and an arcade. This would have been extra super first VIP class in both Vietnam and China!

My sole purpose in flying through Busan was to go to the Jagalchi Fish Market, which I promptly did the very hour we arrived. The guidebook billed it as 'the smelliest place on Earth', which was untrue: it smelled like an uncommonly clean and well-kept fish market. The first floor's floor was perpetually awash in sloshing seawater, and periodically the flick of a fish's tail would sent spurts of water onto my shirt. Crabs bigger than volleyballs climbed the sides of their tanks; fish species prone to fighting would choose one comrade to gang up on and nibble; eels writhed, molluscs never seen before or since lined the edges of tanks, and vendors did this strange thing where they'd roll their smaller crabs around in sawdust on the sidewalk to demonstrate... something... to potential customers. Look how well my crabs' shells absorb sawdust? See how what you're about to feed your family is actually touching the dirt, old fish juice, and likely urine of the sidewalk right now?

I had a set meal 'for one' (Korean restaurants are no different than Korean-American ones in that meals 'for one' usually can feed at least four) that consisted of a pile of halibut sashimi, four sea urchins, assorted banchan, a whole grilled fish, stacks of shiso and lettuce leaves, and soup made with the fish head and tail that had been encircling my sashimi like a watchman as I ate it. Julian had a traumatic moment when I began eating my sashimi a few seconds after the plate had been placed down and suddenly the fish head twitched, tossing a lemon slice. Even though its spinal column had been cut, it was so freshly killed that its nerves were still in throes.

We have four full days here in Seoul before we board a plane that arrives, five hours before it leaves, in San Francisco.

I'd been waiting to go to Hue ever since I first tasted the mi quang at Ngu Binh in Westminster, CA. This may seem like a silly reason to want to take a trip across the Pacific, but as it turned out, Hue was waiting for me right back with much, much more than mi quang.

It had that too, of course, but it made me work for it. A handwritten sign on an already out-of-the-way street pointed down a narrow alley that skirted a lotus pond. The sign said 'My Quang'. No mi quang in sight after 100 meters or so, only frogs and old motorcycle parts, I was about ready to turn around when I saw the sign again, posted outside someone's house. Only previous experience eating in Asia allowed me to semi-confidently walk into what appeared to be a family's living room while they were shucking cassava and demand that they feed me noodles at 2:00 in the afternoon. And yes, it was worth it.

The best food Hue had waiting for me, though, was something called 'com hen' – rice with tiny clams, pork skins, sour starfruit, banana blossoms, and assorted greens. I had heard tell of such a thing, but had to cross two rivers to find it. Passing deserted rice restaurant after deserted rice restaurant was discouraging, but it happened that it was just because all of Hue was eating lunch at the one we eventually found. The ladies serving it also got a good laugh out of Julian's attempts to explain vegetarianism. The word 'chay' that works everywhere else was lost on them. What do you MEAN you don't eat tiny clams?? Who doesn't eat tiny clams??

Appetizer-size banh khoai, like mini banh xeo, awaited us at every turn. Banh beo showed up on every menu, casually, like, yeah, this is something you just get to eat every day. There were nem lui, these spam lookalike pork sticks whose association with spam disappeared the instant the spices and sour mango accompaniment hit your tongue.

It was extraordinarily hot while we were there, too hot even for me, way too hot to even consider walking in the sun – hot enough for me to drink, in one day, three bottles of water, two sugarcane juices, a passionfruit smoothie, and two lemon sodas without even looking at a bathroom. The next city, Quy Nhon, was just as hot, but was also, mercifully, a beach town, and had the same Indonesian custom of just stumbling into the ocean at the nearest port of entry wearing all one's clothes.

Not being a big tourist center, everyone in the whole city was just shocked to see us. On the beach, we were preparing to go in the water and watching a flock of teenagers splashing each other when a Vietnamese guy approached and in strangely formal English demanded to know, in turn, about California's population, economy, landscapes, healthcare system, water conservation policy, and educational system. This burst the floodgates for the teenagers, who had apparently been wanting to approach us but hadn't the nerve to do it until someone else did it first. They ran over and squatted, giggling, in a circle around us, understanding nothing of the conversation on Californian medical insurance and not caring a bit.

2-9 didn't derail us too much beyond most restaurants being closed for lunch and our being forced to eat crappy rice at a stall. Oh, and having to spend the night train ride to Saigon in a soft-seat Vietnamese train with Alvin and the Chipmunks movies playing at top volume. But by '3-9' everything was normal again, with the Ben Thanh market starting my Saigon adventure off right by feeding me incredibly delicious fried snails in garlic oil, accompanied by the old trusty standby, passionfruit juice.

The Nanning-Hanoi border-crossing train was full of Germans, Chinese, and one German-speaking Chinese, plus one sole Japanese tourist with the aim of visiting seven countries in two months. (He was on Country #3.) The whole lot of them, and us too, were unceremoniously dumped off at 5:00AM (instead of 10AM like the schedule said) at Gia Lam station (instead of Hanoi main station, like the schedule said). Walking bleary-eyed off the train while it was still dark out into a firestorm of taxi touts with maps that made stark the terrible, untraversable distance between Gia Lam and the Old Quarter was disorienting to say the least, but then, probably for the last time, Julian saved the day by being able to speak Chinese. One of our fellow passengers was a Chinese professor teaching in Vietnam, and after insisting that we sit down with him and drink beer and eat pho (not caring at all that it is perhaps not customary to drink beer at 5AM) he got us on a public bus to the city center, saving us probably $20 and a huge headache. We left the rest of the tourists helplessly cabbing in circles (as the cabs tended to only take them to the bus station: surprise!) but they waved away our beckoning, so we reached the city center alone.

Hanoi looked like I thought China would look but didn't: choked with motorbikes, shabbily clean, and tightly packed. There isn't as much street food as in China, and there aren't as many restaurants. The old people exercising around the lake were doing aerobics, not tai chi. Nobody cared that there were white people walking around with rolling suitcases at 6AM, whereas in most places we went in China, that alone would have guaranteed onslaughts of hellos.

I hit Hanoi running with the intention of eating everything in sight, but at first, and I can't believe these words are about to fall from my fingertips, the food didn't turn out to be that earth-shattering. (I'm writing this from Hue, where the food actually IS wonderful, but that's a story for another entry.) We had bun cha Ha Noi for our first lunch, and it was blandly pleasant. Bun rieu cua for breakfast the second day and while the broth was complex and delicious, the rest was just filler. Banh cuon for dinner the second night, and it was mostly rice noodle. There was one dish that just killed us with flavor and crunch and that was a dish of deep-fried eel vermicelli. The eel was like bacon, and coupled with eel porridge and grilled eel salad, it made my average-food-dampened spirits lift. We promptly put in another order, and almost (but didn't, but should have) got a bag of the deep fried eel to go.

The one touristy thing we said we'd do, we did: go see Halong Bay. Time constraints left us with no choice but to do a day trip. The interminable bus ride and obligatory 'bathroom' stops at tourist-geared souvenir shops didn't do a thing to make the boat trip not worth it. The day was hazy and it was even threatening us with typhoons, but they missed us and we got to cruise around the mountains in ships and kayaks. My dad's kayak had a leak and he had to book it back to the dock, and then Julian and I got stuck behind a houseboat, which was guarded by an angry dog, but these things, similarly, did nothing to make the kayak trip not worth it. The water was tropically warm and smooth as glass, and the cove we entered was blocked on all sides by massive island-mountains so that we couldn't hear any ship noise.

Ladies selling delicious rambutan and mangosteen on the side of the road have brightened each and every day, especially at the (probably technically rip-off) price of 75 cents a pound for rambutan and a dollar a pound for mangosteen. How many rambutan shells and mangosteen rinds have Vietnamese gutters gained because of me? Probably somewhere in the thousands. I can't even wait to get home and wash my hands before I start shoving it in. Incidentally, there is absolutely no reason I have not yet contracted typhoid. I've eaten fruit out of the dirty-nailed hands of vendors, drank nuoc mia and passion fruit juice out of pitchers with visible dirt streaks and the buildup of years of mold, retrieved durian I dropped on the ground, failed to wash any thin-skinned fruit I've bought, and then of course there are the meals upon meals of street food cooked in pots on the curb that I've had. My travel clinic nurses would be very angry.

So everywhere in Vietnam there are these giant red patriotic looking flag-signs that say 2-9. They became a running mystery, as they contained no other explanation yet were everywhere. We only found out when we were having lots of trouble booking train tickets from Quy Nhon to Ho Chi Minh City on the 2^nd of September that we realized 2-9 meant September 2^nd and September 2^nd was Vietnam's national holiday: basically the Vietnamese 4^th of July (that is, if we had signs up all over our country that said '4-7' in huge red and blue type). It is definitely possible that we will be stuck in a lazy beach town while the locals are too busy setting off fireworks and visiting family to feed and house some stupid tourists. Stay tuned, I guess. The next entry will probably be me fawning about Hue's food, but the entry after that MIGHT contain details on whether we starved and slept on a beach in Quy Nhon.

No blog entries for poor Kunming, mostly because it was replete with laziness. Well, not it so much as me, but the reason stands, and there's only so much writing one can do about frantically trying to learn Vietnamese with an iPhone app and a Lonely Planet phrasebook before plunging headlong into Hanoi, or about playing even more pool, or about stumbling across a Chinese conference on homosexuality taking place in our hostel but unfortunately getting there in time only for the scintillating lectures on how to write professional emails.

We did hike at XiShan, a misty mountain a few miles west, but Chinese hiking mostly entails walking on the shoulder of the road getting honked at by tour buses. There was one side path with a woman selling pineapple on it, but aside from her it was mostly murderous stairs. Luckily, the climate here is completely unlike everywhere else in China. At an elevation of about 6500 feet, its air has trouble holding the pollution it forms (or something - it's clean, anyway) and its temperature is best described as 'room'.

On the way back from the mountain, we stumbled upon another frog-torture-esque night market (but perhaps less graphic due to high fish content and low everything else content) the difference being that this one had a lady standing off to the side spit-grilling whole fish wrapped in banana leaves and stuffed with herbs for RMB 12. I wasn't going to let the frankly hygienically appalling conditions stop me from getting a piece of that (really, when have I?) and it was delicious, especially eaten squatting on a stool next to Julian and some others eating makeshift market hotpot. The only reason he acquiesced to this hotpot was to get me a pair of chopsticks as quickly as possible before my fish got cold. (The fish griller didn't have chopsticks, but she offered me a glove to hold it with while I gnawed. I was afraid the herbs would fall out if I did that.)

Tomorrow we train it to Nanning, where we can catch a direct train to Hanoi instead of fooling around with the sketchy overnight buses and land border around Hekou/Lao Cai . This was the original plan, but one too many Internet horror stories about bag-slitting thieves, extortionate border taxis, unreliable customs procedures and bathroom-less eight hour bus trips had us searching for an alternative.

Assuming Vietnamese firewalls are as easily fooled by the addition of the Korean suffix to Blogger's website address as Chinese ones are, you will hear from me there.

Video of a year-younger Julian cringing and trying not to cry as a brusque Chinese doctor scraped the first layer of skin off his back somehow made me curious rather than terrified, and a couple days ago, in Chengdu, I tried the same traditional medicine treatment - guasha and huogua coupled with massage. (Guasha=scraping, huogua=cupping. They scrape your skin to get the toxins to rise to the surface, then massage the area, then heat the inside of a glass cup and use it to kind of suction your skin. Normally you can tell on the street who has recently been cupped because they have a checkerboard pattern of purple circles down their backs.)

Julian maintains they went easy on me, but then, he would maintain that. I actually didn't find it painful; I found it really therapeutic and relaxing, as it felt like a backscratch and a massage at the same time. I kept waiting for the pain that the video depicted and it never came. When I looked at the pictures of my purple and red back skin afterwards, I was very surprised. I was even more surprised when my back muscles actually, lastingly, felt relieved.

The doctor also told me the second he saw me lie down ("you don't lay down flat enough!") that I had a strange curve in my upper spine ("your back is like a child's!") that I couldn't treat or fix by simply correcting my posture (so THERE, well-meaning strangers everywhere who think it's appropriate to tell me I should 'stand up straight').

On the interviewing front (officially the reason for this whole trip) things took a turn for the fortunate on the Changsha to Chongqing train, when Sichuanese garrulousness and the novelty of our Scrabble-playing finally resulted in throngs of curious Chinese conversationalists. While it also resulted in Julian being tricked into eating spicy cow intestine jerky and a girl dumping a whole bag of fiery pickled dry hot peppers into my instant noodles, as well as my trying the spiciest peppercorn duck necks in all the land, some interviewing was actually completed. I'm not complaining about the peppercorn duck necks, though. Those were really good and they made my face numb, like I had been given a shot of Novocaine even. We are deep in the heart of hotness now, both temperature-wise (with Chongqing hitting 99 degrees by 9:30 in the morning when we stepped off the train) and food-wise (what with the spicy duck necks, the Sichuanese rabbit and chicken dry pot we had today in Chengdu, and, well, absolutely everything in Hunan).

Chengdu is stubbornly smoggy, like all the other cities were supposed to be but weren't, and we're staying in the kind of hostel we have mercifully avoided until now: full of Europeans drinking beer and eating grilled cheese sandwiches in the cutesy English-adorned lobby. It's funny, because there is bathroom graffiti urging resident tourists to avoid being insular, advising them to try hotpot, ride local buses, and go to the markets, but there everyone sits anyway, watching the Olympics and Facebooking on the VPNed public computer. Yes, I am aware that I am being too judgmental.

Anyway, today we explored Sichuan Normal University and learned to play what they call 'snooker' in the basement of the gymnasium. We've actually been playing a lot of pool, despite the impression this journal has given that we just eat exotica, get massages, and sweat.

The main street in Changsha, Hunan, right before it cuts a bridged swath across the Xiang River, divides town drastically. To the south, where we went yesterday, is the touristy area, insofar as it can be called such, with nonsensical English names for stores (Mychoice Cafe, dadstaff, and Sushi Milk Tea are three examples), Beijing-style cloth slipper stores (sizes inevitably topping out at a petite 39 cm instead of my required 44), and attractive cobblestone sidewalks (although insufficient to keep split-pants-wearing toddlers from crapping in the gutters). At the time we went, there was actually a TV crew filming two lacquered girls giggling and gesturing into shop windows as their heels wobbled precariously on the cobblestones.

To the north, where we wandered today, is the street market, where the locals shop for groceries. At first it looked like the average packed alley, with laundry hanging everywhere, doorways full of old tires, omnipresent baozi and noodle stands, old men sleeping in lounge chairs, and ice cream coolers steaming mist into the air. Then, we came to a crossroads. Julian asked me, “Left, right, or straight?” Neither of us were anticipating the impact my 'straight' would have, mostly on him, as we continued walking and found ourselves in the center of piles of cows' and pigs' hooves, plucked chickens split down the middle showing their glistening organs, mesh bags of futilely leaping green frogs, people picking up these frogs by the legs and killing them by bashing their heads on wooden blocks before sectioning them for dinner, live fish flopping off their mats onto the sidewalk, people peeling the shells off still struggling turtles, snakes coiled in boxes, cages packed full of ruffled chickens and ducks, boxes of claw-waving crayfish, oysters lined up on cardboard, and, perhaps the least shocking on paper but the most unavoidable to our senses, sheets and sheets of drying hot peppers, hot peppers hanging from clothes hangers even, lending the air a thick, oily, spicy snap that caught in our throats.

Julian, the vegetarian, was properly traumatized by this whole scene, muttering 'Hooves! Feathers! Frog torture! Get me out of here!' and I kept expecting to feel something gutturally, but never did. In fact, I stopped to buy an ice cream bar right across the road from a table piled high with intestines and when I asked Julian what he wanted he sort of looked at me in disbelief before saying, like it should have been obvious, that his appetite had been kind, sorta culled. I have an intellectual aversion to the mistreatment of animals and I certainly wish that nobody was, in particular, peeling shells from live turtles, allowing fish to suffocate on the sidewalk, keeping way too many ducks in one cage, or cracking crayfish exoskeletons without boiling them first. But it didn't make me... not hungry. I am probably (certainly) a terrible person, but in my defense (as though there could possibly be one), my viscera's apathy is not unusual.

Changing the topic entirely... here are some less disturbing snapshots of Changsha:

Playing pool in a three-table ground-floor hall that doubled as a couple's kitchen, so as we lined up shots, a lady stir-fried sheep offal behind us, sending out that chili-choked aroma and causing me to cough at the most inopportune times, shot-accuracy-wise.

Buying water from a couple of 80 year old shop owners, being invited to sit down while we drank it, talking about their parents, the Japanese war, how huge our feet were, and how Changsha has changed and sprouted skyscrapers.

Walking by a fruit stand, expecting boring old soft apples and hard peaches and mushy old stupid grapes, seeing rambutan instead, getting a discount for how excited I got.

Getting a recommendation at a restaurant for stir-fried fish from the waitress' hometown, receiving a plateful of tiny whole fish and bitter melon, it being one of the best and strangest things I have yet tasted and yet still quite reminiscent of whitefish on bagels.

(written 8/6, delayed publishing due to itinerant Internet)

Up until Hefei, we were shielded from the night noises: the constant, and I do mean constant, car/bus/motorcycle horns; the hawkers hawking; the screeching brakes. In Xi'an, we stayed on the 22nd floor, and the air was so thick and the windows so few that no noise made it up; in Beijing we lived in a dank, windowless basement (which, incidentally, made it very difficult to tell when it was morning).

In Hefei, seven floors is not enough to dull it. Everyone honks like if they didn't honk, they wouldn't exist. Motorcycles honk in lieu of using their headlamps at night. Buses honk as they turn left against an oncoming flow of traffic, cutting off absolutely everyone with the right of way in the process. Cars honk as they drive through alleys they have no right driving through, alleys that are 1 or 2 centimeters wider than they are, and this honk is meant to tell pedestrians to get out of the way. Well, whither, car? Would you like me to scale the walls of this grocery?

This is a provincial capital, but one without many attractions, and so the residents are constantly surprised by us. It doesn't help that a number if them seem perpetually to be indisposed whenever we enter their domains. At the provincial museum, every exhibit we went into we surprised some attendant eating noodles out of a Tupperware. And at the Botanic Gardens, the woman selling chime-stone smashing mallets was fast asleep until I jangled some kuai down on the counter, and the woman overseeing the park water bottles and ice cream bars was doing her makeup.

Overall, though, the surprise becomes friendly, and almost everyone in Hefei is good natured, even as they scold each other. We had barely stepped off the 7am train when a beggar approached my plastic stool as I ate churro and soy milk breakfast. The woman who had sold it to me turned to him: "They are new friends to China! Why do you want to bother them?" She said it playfully, though, and the beggar wandered off grinning. Just moments later, a group of young policemen came by for what seemed to be the daily ceremonial ritual of telling the vendors their tables and chairs couldn't be in the street. One old lady vendor swatted a cop with her newspaper.

(by the way... I am writing these with the Blogger app, which has no formatting whatsoever, and Chinese Internet blocks Blogger itself. So I have no idea how any of these entries are showing up on a browser. If it's wall o' text, or worse, sorry.)

(written 8/4, posted at first wifi opportunity)

Beijing has dutifully shown me its many faces.

On arrival, the city was drenched and chilled, its residents dodging puddles via dislodged bricks. Our taxi driver craned his head out the open drivers side window to see the traffic on the freeway, since his front window was too fogged. (He was on his cell phone too, but that goes without saying.) Then, two days later, we sweated atop the temple at Jingshan Park and looked over a brilliant clear city. Beijingers, shocked at such a thing, flooded the lookout points, and even more choked the Forbidden City, which, luckily, we skipped, but could still see an aerial view from the hill.

We rushed through Houhai, a lakeside nightmare of overpriced lounges with pink velvet couches lining the 'shore' and rickshaw drivers screaming HELLO, trying to get back to Nanluogo Xiang, the 'artsy sector', so we could get some wifi, which we ended up just stealing from the backpackers hostel. Later, at the late night skewer bar down the street from our hotel (in a neighborhood with rather fewer tourists), I noted that the same price (35 RMB/US$5.50) bought either, in the touristy areas, one solitary glass of mango juice... or, in our neighborhood: 2 variously spiced chicken wing skewers, 2 shrimp skewers, 5 potato skewers, 5 eggplant skewers, 2 mantou skewers and 2 tofu skin skewers. Given that the chicken wings and shrimp especially blew the pants off any bar wings in the states, I'd say the choice is an easy one. The question of how on earth events in my life have come to lead to my traveling around Asia with someone who orders skewered BREAD in such a restaurant (as this is what mantou is) is another thing entirely.

Exhausted after a day of exploring the Terracotta Warrior Museum followed by street badminton made hilarious by a strong easterly wind, we sprawled lazily on our futon and perused a takeout menu. Julian started laboriously translating the menu line by line, and not too far down was the following choice:

"Old dry mother stir fried intestinal squares"

Too bad the restaurant turned out to be closed because that definitely would've been on order.

Oh, what's that, you want me to dedicate more than a brief reference to the Terracotta warriors rather than breeze by it on the way to an anecdote about food?

Well, the warriors are imposing in parts, piled willy nilly and cracked in others, and surrounded by the strangest touristy village filled with things like KFC and foofy pomegranate breweries right next door to one another, all housed in buildings crafted superficially to look village-like.

Probably the strangest part of the whole place, though, is in a corner of the gift shop where they're selling books telling the story of the farmer who inadvertently first stumbled upon the warriors while sowing his crops or whatever. They literally have the actual farmer, an old bemused looking guy, signing copies of his book and posing for pictures with cheesing families at the edge of the table.

I mean, has he had, and does he have, to do this every day the museum is and has been open since the 1970s? Doesn't that get incredibly tiresome? Does he have some kind of government contract? Does he have a choice? I guess his farm suddenly became a sprawling tourist attraction crawling with archaeologists, so it's not like he could just keep farming. But it just seems strange.

'Tchhh,' the foot masseuse clucked at me when I flinched my foot away from her roughly 10,000 pounds worth of pressure concentrated on my toe joint, like it was weird that this would cause me to flinch, and turned to Julian. 'If she slept more, maybe she wouldn't be so sensitive to pain,' she said in Chinese.

This was an off the cuff statement if I'd ever heard one, since I do have tons of problems, I'm sure, but none of them involve sleeping. And nobody has ever accused me of being sensitive to pain.

As she beat up my feet, she and the other masseur gossiped about Americans.

'Americans like to drive big cars,' they said.

'Americans want to invade Iraq,' they said.

'Americans always are coming in here wanting to know how to get to the Drum Tower,' they said.

'You should be careful what you say about Americans because Americans are listening,' cut in Julian, and luckily, even though China is the least sarcastic society on the planet, they took it as a joke instead of a threat.

Flinch by flinch, whimper by whimper, she also diagnosed me with heart and intestine problems before briskly punching me in the heels and sending me on my way.

Before I left, I asked to use the bathroom. In the back, there was a small bunk, a hot plate, and a squat toilet in about a 4x10 space - I was for some reason surprised to find they lived there, in the back of a five seat foot spa, even though almost every bathroom I've asked to use, restaurants and all, has revealed a similar setup.

In the body massage place today, for example, an off-duty masseur snored gently on the bed next to mine as a child ran between the beds and the owner's cell phone exploded into Disney knockoffs. My neck and lower back had clearly offended the girl massaging me in a past life because she elbowed and wrenched them into submission. I learned my lesson; I didn't fight her or yell even when she started trying to pry my skull off like a baseball cap from the nape of my neck or when she took her fists and aggressively knuckled my forehead from eyebrows to ears along the hairline until my face skin felt detached from my skeleton.

That said, when I was face down in the circular head pillow, I was also powerless to stop a torrent of snot (or some kind of miscellaneous head fluid) from flooding out of my nose onto the floor after all her kneading suddenly released something in my sinuses, as my arms were being pinned by her thighs, so I guess I got my twisted revenge in a way.

There is a lot to like about Chinese massage places, not the least being the price: if an hourlong massage cost between $4 and $10 in the States, I would certainly get one more often. But beyond that, I actually like the frenetic atmosphere. It's convivial. I don't need to be ensconced in some velvet-curtained shakuhachi den. It's not that serious. I feel a lot less... catered to when everyone's just massaging and chatting away the day together rather than me having to feel like I'm enslaving someone in my relaxation enforcing cave. That's all I'm saying.

Before the massage today, we all found some pool tables just hanging out in an alley along with a bunch of noodle stands, a dumpster, and someone's laundry. We had to go for a little bit of a search to discover who the keepers of the cues were (the phone store proprietors, of course, who else?) but at a comfortable dollar an hour, we played away the hottest part of the day. The sight of three foreigners playing pool in a residential alley was way too crazy for passersby to ignore, so we had a silent but swelling audience for all four games. I won some favors when I found that there was a tree in the way of my pool cue for a particular shot, but I tilted the cue near-vertically and made it anyway. The sweat pooling in my thumb crook in the 95 degree heat made all my shots smooth. Clearly I've been missing out on the secret to being a pool shark all these years: extreme heat.

Going on the fourth day in China, I have to admit that people are right: Chinese food in China is nothing like Chinese food in America - even the supposedly authentic places like the ones up in the San Gabriel Valley.  This may have more to do with the regional differences in immigrants' origins than with a generalization about a giant country gleaned from experience with the old imperial capital only, but I'm going to go with the generalization here for the sake of making a point.

Sometimes the difference is a good thing - the noodles are a billion times better and fresher here.  My noodles yesterday were hand-tossed from a pile of dough three feet from my table before being tossed in the wok and fried up with some pork, mushrooms, and red sauce.  The omnipresent mutton skewers and their curious cumin rub are all but absent in the US so far as I know, apart from a mere shadow at Feng Mao Mutton Kebab in LA.  The yogurt here is outrageously tangy and delicious, sold out of stalls in the heat, but somehow not spoiled, straws puncturing the foil tops of their bottles.  

Sometimes it's not so good.  The baoze here have been disappointing - bitter bread and a droopy filling of sad boiled vegetables.  Tales of exotic fruits have proven to be inaccurate, as mushy apricots and rock hard kiwis have been the norm.  There is a mystery vegetable that the cooks in the Muslim Quarter of Xi'an put in just about everything - pancakes, buns, soups - that numbs the sides of your tongue, up and down, and is very disconcerting.

In both Korea and China, I've had much more luck with street food than with restaurants, possibly because my preferred method of dining is grazing.  I'd much rather wander through a market popping fried quail eggs off the stick in my right hand while gnawing on the carrot-sesame pastry in the other than sit down in a restaurant and try to finish an entire bowl of mutton and wheat noodles in broth with absolutely no help from my stubbornly vegetarian companion.  Food trucks in the US do nothing to compare to that grazing experience.  The Taste of Chicago comes closer if you ignore the overpricedness of it all.

I am now in Xi'an, China, after a series of both extremely unlucky and lucky events at various Chinese airports, opposing but equally dramatic.  Suffice it to say that telling passengers to retrieve their baggage from a baggage check, go through customs and immigration, re-check in for a new flight, and go through security again during an hour layover is not really feasible.  To successfully complete this task required some cajoling in Mandarin and an all-out sprint through the terminal, in addition to the wholesale ignoring of the long security line.  Basically, had anything - an untied shoelace, a line at the toilet, the security guy choosing to scold me for the full bottle of water in my carry-on rather than just shaking an admonishing finger - gone wrong, we would still be in Dalian right now.  I mean, lots of things DID go wrong.  I just mean, anything in addition to the things that already went wrong.  Like the fact that the 'Transfers' sign at the airport pointed down a dark deserted dead-end hallway with a piece of paper taped over it saying 'CLOSED'.  Or the fact that the 'Departures' sign at the airport pointed out onto the highway.

But my reward for all the airport sprinting and sign-ignoring was worth it.  Julian's choice of shady airport cab actually got us home.  (There was a line of identical official-looking green cabs and he went straight for the seedy black car, of course.)  And in Xi'an there were the most delicious mutton skewers I've ever had the pleasure of closing my teeth upon, and some deep-fried winter melon with some delicious and hotly garlicky spices piled on top.  Also, mangosteen on the street!

It's really hot here (it was really hot in Korea too, but the bad air in China makes it more palpable) and I am loving every sweaty droplet of it.  Cold fruit juice and smoking street food on a steaming hot day is what my body begs me for (for no evolutionarily sensical reason at all).  People shuffle languidly by with parasols, fanning themselves, being less physically pushy than usual just to avoid brushing body heat.  They cluster under the sparse trees and the more widespread bank awnings.  Even the hawkers don't get off their shaded benches to yell at you that their buns cost less than their competitors' buns.  The A/C here gives a lukewarm breeze and not much more.

It's a completely different headspace moving from traveling in a country where neither me nor my companion knows the language and bumble through gestures and confusion together, to traveling in a country where I don't know the language, and would certainly be bumbling if not for my utter reliance on him.   I actually know much less Chinese than I do Korean - Chinese sounds like complete nonsense peppered with the occasional xiexie (thank you) and that's it.  Whenever something puzzles me (which is always), I just summon his aid and the befuddlement evaporates.  I even summon him preemptively now.  It's certainly more comfortable, but much less of an exciting challenge.  I feel like I'm one step removed from everybody we see. 

Last night at Gwangjang market, I found myself being hand-fed by two different old ladies.  The first one had boxes of kimbap and samples ready on toothpicks.  When we tried to take the toothpicks, she shook her head, pointed at us, and said, 'ahhhh!'

'Ahhh?' we responded, really more inquiringly than acquiescent, but in the kimbap went.  Her tactic worked, and we walked away $3 poorer with a bulging plastic container of rice, seaweed, pickled ginger, carrots, and a mystery yellow sauce.

The second one was serving what I guess you'd call Korean-style sashimi out of portable tank.  I had my slight doubts about eating raw fish served out of a tank on an 85 degree day in a bustling, dusty, dirty market full of display platters of raw chicken, buckets of flopping sole, motorcycles rigged with about 100 extra pounds of support structure, and old drunken men with platters of blood sausage, chicken feet, and soju - but my doubts were much slighter than my desire for sashimi.  Plus, a Korean-Australian couple sitting at the stand's benches heartily recommended this lady's fish.  Starved for English,it probably wouldn't have mattered what they said - I would have sat next to them anyway.

The fish came out on a bed of either noodles or a very starchy and crunchy vegetable, flanked by both chili sauce and a soy/wasabi mix (but pre-mixed, and mostly wasabi - after all, this is Korea, the land of spice).  There was salmon, a variety of white fish, some hamachi-like yellow fish, conch, octopus, squid, and scallops.  I started out eating it the way I knew how, the Japanese way: chopstick up a slice, dip the edge in soy/wasabi, pop it in mouth.  But apparently this was incorrect, because the lady actually came out from behind her stall, shaking her head.  Opening the package of roasted seaweed slices I hadn't noticed next to me, she came up next to me, speared a fish, rolled it in sauce, plunked it in the seaweed, wrapped it up, dumped it in her hand, and shoved it into my mouth before it (my mouth) was even all the way open.  Then, satisfied, she marched away.

At the end of the meal, I couldn't really chew my octopus, so I had to hide it under a pile of noodles and mystery leaf (shiso, mint, citrus... if something could be all of the above, that's what this would have been), pay her, and lose myself in the bustle of the market before she noticed I had left it, lest she chase after me and shove it in my mouth.

There's nothing better than collapsing into a king-sized bed after two days of totally sleepless travel, and then waking up twelve hours later to a kindly hostess placing a foil-wrapped tuna kimbap on the kitchen table. This particular hostess, Julian's great aunt, speaks little English, but doesn't let a minor thing like the inability to communicate stop her from doting on us in every way possible. This morning we actually had to escape the house early lest more peanuts and yogurt and mochi and eggs kept finding their way into our hands. She also likes to speak to us in almost entirely Korean sentences, just peppering them with an English noun every so often when one comes to her.

Thus, opportunities for awkwardness have certainly abounded (tonight she thought we threw our forks in the trash) but one bullet we dodged was with the house bidet toilet. I thought not going to Japan would relieve us from having to deal with overly complicated robot toilets with hundreds of buttons and descriptions in indecipherable script, but apparently not. Julian spent about ten minutes trying in vain to find the button for 'flush', only to, embarrassingly, have me come over at the end of it and find the flush knob exactly where it is on Western toilets – it wasn't a button at all. I still feel pretty lucky that it ended like that and not with us having to explain in pantomime to an old lady that we couldn't manage to flush our own toilet.

I demonstrated today that I have magical culinary honing powers! Reading my guidebook, I decided I wanted to try soondae – a blood sausage with noodles stuffed into pig intestine. When I was actually in the city, however, I couldn't manage to hold the characters in my head long enough to look for them on a restaurant sign, so eventually I just gave up in exasperation and hunger and chose the ramshackliest looking restaurant possible in an out of the way corner with no customers just because the old ladies inside were friendly and smiling and the plastic chairs reminded me of warungs in Indonesia. Then, I couldn't read the menu, and the ladies spoke no English, and we didn't know what we were going to do, but just at the right time, a customer came in and asked us in heavily accented English if he could help us. When we asked him what the restaurant served, he said something that initially sounded like 'folk balls dish' but turned out to be 'pork blood dish' – soondae! And it was delicious. It came in a big bowl of soup with pork ears and fat and tendon and green onions and regular onions and a side plate of salty shrimp that I spooned into my broth until the waitress shook her head at me and said what I'm sure meant 'stop!'. I was just trying to rescue Julian, who was trying to subtly not eat meat as the waitress vigorously gestured for him to add shrimp to his soup full of pork slices. Needless to say, this rescue mission failed.  Being a vegetarian in Korea has been a futile endeavor for him.

Bragging time!... because this is my blog and I can brag if I want to, brag if I want to, brag if I want to.

I managed to fit everything I needed for two months into one little rolling suitcase and a purse!  Goodbye, slogging around foreign countries weighed down like a beast of burden with strap marks on my shoulders.  Conversely, hello, skipping spryly... or something.

The most vivid memory of my whole drooping life being on my back is from Mexico, setting bravely off on a journey of undetermined length in a direction we thought was the ocean, oozing with sweat, camping backpack so piled with towels and books and bathing suits that it reached above my head.

Luckily, some teenagers came by and gave us a ride in their pickup, so I was able to soon toss my life-in-a-bag onto a mosquito-netted hotel bed.  But I wasn't looking forward to repeating that feeling in August in tropical climes.  And now I don't have to. 

Julian is another story, with his Travel Scrabble and his computer and his PSP and his actual physical stacks of physical CD's.  Oh yes, there is one person left in the world who still listens to a discman and that person is Julian.

But that reminds me that, really, I shouldn't be attributing my amazing packing talents to anything but the wonders of smartphones, seeing as how my iPhone encompasses my music, my camera, my books, my computer, my games, and my notebook.  What else is there after that?  Clothes, shoes, the toothbrush family, a passport or two...

Since I didn't document my experience getting vaccinations last time I went abroad except to refer indirectly and sarcastically to the fear of death that travel clinics pound you over the head with, I failed to recall my previous adverse reaction to the Hepatitis A vaccine, round 1, and thus failed to report this to the nurses at the UCI clinic, and thus got blindsided with a fainting fit in round 2 yesterday.

It was embarrassing because in the middle of a sentence in which I was bragging to the needle-wielding nurse about how I don't mind shots or needles and hardly ever have adverse reactions to anything, I started feeling very strange.  Namely, my lips started tingling.  In a vain (and somewhat random) attempt to counter this, I asked her a question about the nursing school she attended.  In the middle of her answer, I interrupted: "I'm sorry, I'm dizzy, I'm going to put my head down.  Go on, sorry for interrupting."

And then in the middle of her repeating herself, I suddenly realized that I was going to pass out.  I don't remember too much after that except that suddenly four nurses were in the room trying to cajole me into transferring myself into a wheelchair before I lost it completely, and I was mumblingly arguing with them that moving meant vomiting and vomiting was out of the question.

Have you ever greyed out?  It's very distinctive.  Your eyes are open but everything is turning white.  Your ears are open but everything is turning tinny.  I didn't actually go all the way, possibly out of sheer stubbornness.  I made it onto a cot and lay there until the world came back.

I am told I spent the whole time apologizing for being rude.

In happier vaccination-related news, being vaccinated against typhoid fever means street food is a go!  It's too bad that they only serve silkworm larvae in the cold months in Korea, because any food that 100% of the people I've asked describe as something along the lines of "the most taste-bud-unfriendly and olfactorily insulting snack imaginable" deserves a hearty try.  

The only place I draw the line is at that live baby octopus dish.  You know, the one where people die every year because the still living tentacles grasp at their esophagi while trying to escape.  First of all, octopi are too smart to be eaten alive without massive amounts of totally justifiable guilt.  Second of all, death by tentacle-grabbing-esophagus.

New impending Asia travel means dusting off the old Asia travel blog, I guess.

Never mind that this new trip has nothing to do with Indonesia, or being newly anything... well, apart from the fact that all the countries I visit will be new to me.  Not that this blog had much to do with Indonesia after 2007, anyway, but that didn't stop me from continuing to write in it about office water coolers, the sociology of being hit on, and the terrors of domestic plane rides!

For those who prefer specifics:
I will be in South Korea from July 18 to roughly July 23, in China from then to roughly August 20, in Vietnam from then to roughly September 4, then back to South Korea until September 14.

For those who prefer official reasons to specifics:
I will be doing research on how Chinese people conceptualize free choice and whether it is at all in line with how the World Values Survey implies it.

For those who prefer underlying motivations to official reasons:
It has always been odd to me that there is a globe full of wonders (in the 'I wonder at all I am seeing!' sense, not the 'everything around the world is fantastic and beautiful!' sense) that I can acquire the means to travel around, but have not yet done so.  In other words, I have not done anywhere near as much traveling as my brain tells me I should.

For those who prefer unchecked emotions to underlying motivations:
Holy shit!