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!