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.

Spent today in the market staring at dead squid eyes and cow skins. Studying how things look whole. Living in the states, I forget. I forget that fish aren’t swimming, glistening fillets, and squids aren’t disembodied legs, or naturally breaded into calamari. I caught a glimpse of what I thought was sausages, and I was excited, because sausages become available maybe once every two months, but they turned out to be tamarinds, the only fruit in the world that looks exactly like lots of little pieces of poo.

This is good for me. Not the pieces of poo. Seeing how animals look before we render them unrecognizable. I’ve always said I won’t eat anything that I would have a moral problem with killing myself. (That’s one of those confusing sentences that’s impossible to repair, so I’ll leave it.) It’s harder here. You become faced with it. Here, I’ve been offered dog. I turned it down. I couldn’t kill a dog. I’ve been offered deer. I could kill a deer. I ate it. It was delicious. And someone probably shot it wild. Not that wild means much where I live. Deep, dense jungle fades abruptly into city. The city is built right into the crannies, until it’s too steep to be built anymore. Deer emerge from behind one tree to dart to another tree, to dart to another tree, and find themselves in the middle of the main road. I never picture deer as a tropical animal. Do you?

Things I Didn’t Know One Could Eat Until Papua:
Cow backbone
Raw sea urchin

The list is short, but it’s intriguing.

Friday, January 13, 2007
Have you ever dreamt that you had been shot in the head, and then felt an enormous sense of relief that now you knew what it felt like to be shot in the head? (Like a lightning strike of terrible stinging, but at a safe distance, at maybe a memory’s distance, and then a cocoon of fading, like beginning to dream.)

Last night it was the Catholic bishop in my Level 10 class who shot me in the head. He shot me because I was gathering stolen diamonds from the common room floor to pile in his arms. He shouted through a megaphone for everyone to drop the diamonds. People were trying to make off with them. I was trying to consolidate them so that they could be easily returned. I said this to him as he approached. He shot me anyway. It must have had something to do with his English listening comprehension.

I woke up to someone outside blaring his car horn through the rain. He blared it for a good half hour, at unpredictable intervals. He was probably blaring it for someone to come out who most likely wasn’t even home, who most likely was unaware of any plans to pick him up. Don’t ever make plans with Indonesians. They aren’t plans. They’re vague ideas, what-ifs, and they rarely, if ever, come to fruition.

The man blared his horn anyway. He was persistent. Nick rolled over and opened his eyes.
“I dreamed that Father Y. shot me in the head,” I said.
“Mmm,” he replied, and rolled back.

A few weeks ago Dyah went into the bathroom at school to find the toilet closed and festooned with three little firecracker-shaped packages wrapped in newspaper. By the time I got there, there was a crowd of women, staring into the open bathroom door, everyone afraid to be the one to go in.
“What’s the matter, are you all in the qway-way?” I asked Dyah, because awhile ago someone’s student was late, and he wanted to impress his teacher to make up for it by using a hard word, so he used his dictionary to look up a synonym for ‘traffic jam’ and found ‘queue’. “Sorry I’m late,” he said to his teacher, “but I got caught in a qway-way in Entrop.” This has circulated. Now we say qway-way whenever possible. It never gets less funny. I don’t know why.
She didn’t laugh, though. “Look,” she said, pointing at the firecracker-shaped objects. “Maybe it’s bomb.”
Nobody touched them.
“I really have to go,” Enny said.
“So?” Dyah said, gesturing toward the bathroom and its possible bombs. “Go.”
Enny didn’t move.
“Ike?”
“Not me.”
“Hannah?”
“Never.”
The objects sat there, menacing. Students were starting to notice. Someone went to get Michael. He strode upstairs and opened one of the packages over the sink, wincing. Everyone’s hands strayed near their ears.
“BOOOM!” he shouted. The entire hallway shrieked. It was a tube of lipstick. Another. “BOOOOM!” It was a rolled up comic book. The last one. “BOOOOOM!” A plastic flute.