Singapore Slings and Philippine Flings

It’s the last week of my three week trip. Very sad… Sunday, May 27, 2007 This morning, I took the Singapore Airlines flight that I was initially supposed to take yesterday. It was pretty empty. But apparently, most Asian airlines have absurdly low weight limits for intra-Asian flights. As such, I was about 10 kg over, which cost me about $100. The only reason I had an extra 10 kg to begin with was because of all of the shopping that I did at the Silk Market. Oh well, I guess there goes all of those savings… I also didn’t have time or patience to argue with the attendant, and in retrospect, that was a bad choice in itself. I realized later on that I could have pulled stuff out of my bags and carried on a “personal” bag. Oh well – live and learn. In any case, Singapore Airlines lived up to its billing as the world’s most awesomist airline around. Sure they still fly you from point to point just as any other plane would, but they do it a little bit better (no, they don’t give you a happy ending – and yes, that was for you, Rupa). It’s just in the details – for example, there are at least 50% more flight attendants for your beck and call, the food actually tastes good, the orange juice was poured for you in a small glass instead of a flimsy prepackaged piece of plastic, the headsets came in Ziploc bags, the bathroom had aftershave and cologne in it, the flight attendants had an extremely large kitchen area, there were footrests at each seat – and this is all in economy class. After I got into the taxi in Singapore, I noticed a few things about this country that are shareworthy: 1) they must have been influenced by those smarmy Brits because they drive on the wrong side of the road, 2) it is indeed very clean here, 3) many of the streets are very tree-lined – not just little itty-bitty trees but really tall and lavish trees, and 4) there’s an awful lot of construction here too. Also, the sky was blue instead of smog-gray. I felt like Ahhhnold at the end of Total Recall when he on the surface of Mars outside of the space station sans spacesuit and he gasps and gasps for the fresh air as the atmosphere is just starting to be created. Or maybe like those people in the Claritin commercial as a layer of unclarity is peeled away from the screen and fresh air is abound. And there was much rejoicing. After checking into the hotel, I ventured out of the Sheraton Towers and onto the streets for a brief walking tour. I got about two blocks when I turned back to change into something lighter – it’s quite humid in Singapore. When I ventured back out, I was about to cross the street and I caught myself jaywalking – so I ran back to the curb and dutifully waited for the light to change. Fortunately, there weren’t any police around to take me to jail and cane me. Call me stupid (not that you needed a reason), but I didn’t know that Singapore was the shopping mecca that it is. There were a ton of shopping malls, and I was right near one of the major shopping districts on Orchard Street. Even though I hate shopping, I enjoyed walking by the storefronts. Not because I wanted to look inside, but because of the anticipation of the inevitable burst of air conditioning that would cool my feet. Twas nice. I also learned later on this I was there in the middle of the great Singapore shopping sale, and to top it off, sales tax was increasing by a few percentage points in a few months, so these ridiculously low prices would never be seen again. Our prices are insane! I decided to people-watch and had some dinner at an outside café. I ordered a pesto chicken pizza, which I later realized was my first real Western food in two weeks. But when it came to the table unfortunately, I realized that I had forgotten to tell them to hold the mushrooms. There was simply no separation strategy on this pie without completely obliterating the food. So, I closed my eyes and dug in. Yes – you heard it first here, I actually caved in and ate some mushrooms. Ewwwww – slimy fungus! But I will withhold further comments on acceptability of such fungus for daily consumption. Basically, I figured that after yesterday’s debacle with the sautéed 5” fishees, I couldn’t really refuse my food twice in a row. That’s just a wee little too picky. After my ice cream dessert, I headed back to the hotel in case my lactose intolerance tendencies should flare up again (it’s spotty, for whatever reason). Monday, May 28, 2007 I got up, ate breakfast, and headed to the subway to get to the P&G Singapore office. The hotel was at most 100 feet from the subway, and the Singapore office was only one stop away – very good location. Despite this, it was so humid that I was sweating when I got to the office and needed about 30 minutes just to cool down. I would have thought that 2 weeks in Beijing would have been enough to get acclimated to warmer weather. I would have thought wrong. The Singapore subway system is very clean and very neat, which is exactly what you’d expect from the sanitized existence in Singapore. The subway platforms themselves are enclosed from the tracks, similar to the way an airport tramway might be, and this keeps it quiet and air-conditioned as well. Jolly good. I stayed at work until 8pm – I had to finish up a Birkman personality test for an all-day team-building offsite that our plant’s leadership team has scheduled on the day I return from this trip. I’m not going to claim that I completed this personality test to the best of my ability – the questions were quite annoying – asking me to decide if a particular phrase mostly applies or mostly doesn’t apply to society in general, then the same 120 questions for me, and then asking me pick a first and second choice out of four professions about 50 times. I’ve done this test before, and I’m curious to see if the same results come out. I think your current state of mind can completely alter the answers that you give on personality tests. For example, my Broadway choreographer ex-roommate had filled out the personality survey on eharmony.com and was matched up with all of these biker dudes. Whereas all she was looking for is someone dreamy. Someone dreamy who she could then move in with and leave me hanging. No, I’m not bitter. P.S. I hate you Lisa. I ventured out a little bit tonight to grab some dinner – I went to Clarke’s Quay. I still don’t understand why people insist on using crazy spellings for very simple words – just call the damn thing Clarke’s Key. Every time I see or write this, my mind pronounces it as “kway”. Anyway, the Kway was chock full of bars and restaurants and would have undoubtedly been quite the lively scene had it not been a Monday night. I sat down and ate at Renn Thai, which my Singaporean co-worker Yogesh had recommended to me. The food was pretty good, but the service was terrible – a fact that Yogesh confirmed with me the next day. In retrospect, I’m not exactly sure why Yogesh recommended this to me after all. Tuesday, May 29, 2007 After a non-descript (for you) day at work, I spent a few hours this afternoon finalizing travel plans for the rest of the week. My co-worker Belle was leaving the office for the week this afternoon, the other team members who I could have met with were in training tomorrow, and Thursday was a national holiday – so it looked as though my services would not be needed beyond today. What does that mean? Another day of vacation! Yippee! I could tell you where I’m headed, but then that would spoil the fun of you reading all about it for yourself a few short paragraphs away. And that would just downright cruelness. In the evening, I joined Yogesh’s family for some authentic home-cooked Marathi food. For those of you who don’t know, my family is from Maharashtra State in India, as is Yogesh’s. Since Yogesh and my mom are both reading this, I’m going to decline any comparison between the two, other than to say that it was very yummy. In fact, I actually felt bursting-at-the-seams-FULL for the first time this entire trip. A completely random topic of conversation after dinner, Yogesh’s 9 year old son told me that Chinese people didn’t like the number 4 because the sound of the number approximates the sound of the word meaning death (or something like that). Then he told me that many buildings here (and in China) don’t have a 4th floor for this reason – immediately, my mind flashed back to that exact realization in the Sheraton elevator earlier in the day. But they do have a 13th floor. Wednesday, May 30, 2007 This morning, I headed to the airport to get on a Philippines Airlines plane to Manila. Yep – you guessed it, I’m going to the Philippines. For those of you keeping track, this is country #33 for me, so I’m well on my way to 100. Since I was flying business class, I didn’t need to worry about luggage weight constraints. Somehow I managed to book a business class ticket to Manila followed by another business class ticket from Manila to Beijing for roughly the same price as my initial business class ticket on Singapore Airlines straight to Beijing. Go figure. By the way, I thought it would be good for you to know that drug trafficking in the Philippines is punishable by death – it said so right on the customs and immigration form that I filled out on the plane. They mean business, folks. Personally, I think I’d rather be caned in Singapore for jaywalking than die in the Philippines for smoking some weed. Almost as soon as I stepped off the plane in the Philippines, I was frequently asked if I had a Filipina girlfriend – apparently, this is quite a common thing for foreigners to do when they come to the Philippines. In fact, the whole “marry a foreigner” seems to be a very common and very acceptable practice for Filipina women, if not a desired outcome. From what I could tell, Filipino men didn’t appear to have too much of an issue with this. In fact, they frequently espoused the benefits of Filipina women – beautiful, caring, sweet, loving, honest, loyal, and I suppose somewhat submissive. I suppose that for males with a strong sense of ego and with a desire to maintain the “traditional” roles in the household, this must seem like heaven. Indeed, if my dating acumen does not undergo a step-change in the near future, I might want to consider taking another trip to the Philippines. Beyond all of this, it appears that it is perfectly acceptable and perhaps even expected for married men to have “girlfriends”, though the reverse is clearly not okay. For such a seemingly sexist society, I found it quite odd that the country has freely elected two female Presidents in its history. Perhaps “sexist” is the wrong word. Regardless of what the right word was, this whole Filipina girlfriend thing was so pervasive that I almost felt bad that I didn’t have one and that I had no plans to find one. When I arrived in the Philippines, it was much different than I had expected. Other than the immigration line taking about 15 minutes, everything else was actually pretty quick. Belle (my Filipina co-worker in Singapore who told me to go to Boracay) had scared the living bejeesus out of me, telling me that traffic is really really bad and that the airport lines required a 3 hour advance arrival. I needed to go from the international terminal of the international/domestic airport to the domestic terminal of the domestic airport. It’s really quite strange – both airports seem to share the same land, however the entry points are on opposite ends of the same field. I couldn’t figure out if they use the same runways or not, but I’m sure that they need to coordinate efforts, else air traffic controllers lose their jobs. The next leg of my journey was a short 35 minute plane ride on Asian Spirit airlines to Caticlan, which is a small town that basically serves as the main access point to Boracay. Boracay is a separate island in the Philippines, so I guess you could call it a singular Philippine, right? Asian Spirit only permits 10kg of checked in luggage per passenger, and I was about 20-25 kgs over. Fortunately, their rate/kg is very low and I only needed to give them an extra $20 or so to cover the penalty. The Asian Spirit plane that I was on had enough seats for maybe 150 passengers, yet there were only 10 people on board. And somehow, they still have a flight every hour. You would think that with such a low fill rate, they’d decrease the frequency of flights. Instead, they’ve artificially increased their fill rates by removing random rows of seats in the airplane. Initially, I thought that these were emergency rows. After looking around, I realized that there were three such rows completely missing, and the vacated windows were clearly not emergency windows. To top it off, the other rows were still “Asian-sized” – so you either had a ton of legroom or no legroom. But the best thing about this flight was their drink options – water or a wannabe orange Capri-Sun. I hadn’t drunk from a foil pouch in ages, and this just brought back good memories of my lunchbox in grade school: a Capri-Sun, a piece of Sara Lee poundcake, and a peanut butter sandwich (I’ve never liked jelly – it belongs to the same slimy food group as mushrooms). Lunch was almost as good as the staple breakfast at our house: three Eggo waffles in the toaster oven or a microwaved pack of Tennessee Pride sausage biscuits (we weren’t a Jimmy Dean family). After I arrived in Caticlan, I had to take a trike (standard Suzuki motorcycle with an elaborate side cab bolted on to it) from the airport to the boat ferry, then a boat over to Boracay, a trike to the street corner near the hotel, and then a 10 minute walk to the hotel. So let’s recap today’s traveling mechanisms: taxi-plane-taxi-plane-trike-boat-trike-foot. Exciting and new. My hotel for my stay in Boracay was a 15-room place called Turtle Inn. It was built about a year ago by a fellow named Troy, who moved to Boracay from his hometown Miami with his Filipina wife Mhalen. The inn itself was laid out against a mountainside and each floor only had two rooms so that each had its own balcony looking out over the island. Unfortunately, we weren’t high enough up a mountain to see the beach or the ocean or anything, but it’s the thought that counts here. There was definitely an art deco Miami flavor to the whole place as well. I was a bit pooped from the traveling, so I hung out with Troy and a couple of the other guests for a while. One of the fellows was a dive instructor from England, who had recently found a job on Boracay and was looking for a more permanent place to stay. The other fellow was a guy from Houston who worked on offshore platforms who was in the Philippines meeting with a lady he met over the internet, who he’s hoping he’ll get along well enough with to get married. She brought three of her sisters on this trip to Boracay too, so I think she was probably looking for a bit of family approval as well. And then there’s Troy. There’s lots to be said about Troy; he definitely falls along the thresholds of what is acceptable for a married man to do in the Philippines. As much as I disagreed with some of Troy’s choices, I had to admire him a little – he’s a seventh grade educated fellow who has built a beautiful place, has a wonderful wife, he knows what he wants in life and in his business, and he makes no bones about it. We talked quite a bit during my stay and learned of this travelogue – knowing that I wasn’t quite his breed, he wondered aloud what I’d write about him, and ultimately agreed with my assessment. After a local dinner at the hotel, Troy took me to a local hangout that he goes to called Red Pirates. It was a bit shabby with a makeshift roof, but then Troy explained that it was completely wiped out during a typhoon in January and the owner is still working on putting it back together. The owner is a British girl who shared that when it rains, her bedroom is pretty much under water. After a few beers at the bar, Troy and I joined a couple of Filipina girls staying at the hotel to go to the local hotspot called Cucamunga’s. There were a ton of foreign guys there with Filipina girlfriends or foreign guys looking for Filipina girlfriends – it actually reminded me quite a bit of Thailand where the same is seen almost everywhere. Thursday, May 31, 2007 Initially I had planned on starting my scuba diving today – the diving is the reason I came here and it’s supposed to be excellent. However, after I learned that Troy was renting a boat for the day to do some big fish fishing, to motor around some islands, and then go to a waterfall, I figured that I’d postpone the diving till the next day. So off we went at 5am to do some fishing. I think this was the first time this particular boat crew had ever gone fishing, because no matter what they did, Troy was at odds with them non-stop. 4 hours later, we hadn’t caught anything (or “we ain’t found sh*t” as the token black guy combing the desert in Spaceballs would have said). However, in that time, the boat crew had managed to screw up two of Troy’s reels and tangle a few lines as well. Troy’s brother in law John claimed that we weren’t getting any bites because the moon was bright last night which enabled the big fish to do their eating at night. Now, I don’t know the first thing about fishing and frankly I don’t want to know, so I have no idea if this rationale is legit or a bunch of malarkey. For all I know, he could have told me that all the fish went to McDonald’s last night for a Mac Attack and it would have had the same “umm… okay, whatever you say” effect on me. So I basically spent the first six hours frequently moving around the front of the boat to stay in the shade of the tarp to minimize my baking in the sun. What? A tarp? On a boat? Yes indeedio. This was a traditional bangca – a boat made completely from wood. Think oversized canoe with a box hut from the middle to the end of the canoe and a lightly colored tarp as cover on the front end. Such an overgrown canoe would have a massive tendency to tip over in the ocean waves, so they’ve installed two bamboo beams parallel to the canoe about 12 feet out from either side in catamaran fashion to act as steadying forces. And it works. Somewhere around noon, we stopped in Caticlan to grab some lunch in a dimly lit restaurant showcasing food in buffet trays that didn’t appear to be the freshest in the world – possibly due to the dimly littedness of the venue. I tried to pick the least offensive looking item and pray that I wouldn’t be afflicted with the Philippine version of Delhi-Belly. Mystery meat (beef surprise?) on rice with a bonus bowl of beef broth complete with random floating bone piece, to give it that authentic feel. Troy and John had a beer. I had a big bottle of water. My mouth was parched and all we had on the boat were sodas, beer, and a few fruit juice cans. I can’t fathom why you wouldn’t have water available on a torturously hot morning. I think Troy thought I was a pansy. And I can hear you all in the background muttering “Hell, I could have told him that.” Thanks for being a friend. You’re all great. Troy’s intent for this trip was to do some scouting with John – he’s trying to help John develop a one-day tour package that would be offered to his hotel guests, and the intent of this trip was to scope out the area a little. So, from Caticlan, Troy wanted to take a minivan to some waterfalls on the island. After a bit of discussion with our boat captain guide (who was from Caticlan) and a bit of problem finding an available minivan that could take us, we ended up boarding a public bus for 35 minutes. I caught up on some sleep since I was operating on only 3 hours and the motion of the boat was not conducive to a solid rest, especially considering the sun-evasive maneuvers. After passing out for a half hour on the bus, I awoke to the sound of us rushing to get off the bus seemingly in the middle of nowhere, except for a few food stalls and road headed into the hills. I guess we needed to take this road. There was a trike headed in that direction which at first glance appeared to be full – but the other passengers waved us on and somehow we fit four more people onto the trike. And no, these trikes are not that big. We were riding Asian-style, with a complete disregard for fire code and all those other codes that have been invented in our bubble-wrapped “civilized” Western society. Of course, we also weren’t able to go any faster than maybe 10 mph with all the passenger weight – I seriously contemplated getting out and pushing. After a 15 minute ride through alternately paved and completely unpaved road through some stunning mountain scenery, we stopped at a place called Hurom-Hurom. Troy had been mumbling that the area had looked familiar – the boat captain guide-dude had led us to where he thought we wanted to go, which was a cold water spring resort in the mountains that a lot of Filipino families frequent to swim and bathe in natural spring water. There were no waterfalls in sight. Yet somehow, Troy found it interesting enough to have us sit there and watch for three hours over four beers. I more think that he couldn’t peel himself away from gawking at some of the more attractive women and girls that were in their swimming clothes – he kept muttering “Oh lordy, I’m going to hell”. Towards the end of the visit, John and I finally caved and jumped in – the water was very cool and refreshing. Troy stayed out from concerns of shrinkage. After a half a lap, John and I were sitting next on the opposite end of the pool, and some random woman sidles up next to me and starts invading my personal space, which causes me to shuffle over a little, and back and forth. She introduces herself as Kiki, and I try to limit conversation. I get a little freaked by personal space invasion, since I’m mildly claustrophobic (we’ll save that discussion for another day). And, truth be told, Kiki was no Salma Hayek. Actually – writing both of those names in the same paragraph is an utter disservice to all things Salma (I beseech thee Salma, please forgive me). Finally, Kiki made her way to the other side of the pool and took a beach ball and started tossing it at me (not to me, but at me). I try to be cordial and toss it back and continue a conversation with John. After 10 minutes, it gets old and I hop out of the pool. Troy’s words of comfort: “Well, it’s better to be found attractive by an ugly girl than by no girl at all”. This, of course, does wonders for my self-confidence. Thanks Troy. After a quick trike ride back to the main road, we try to get on the first bus or jeepney (see tidbit at the end) back to Caticlan. Then Troy gets seduced by a local to have a beer in his little shanty of a bar. It only takes a few minutes to realize that these two old men are completely wasted. Back on the side of the road after finishing a beer, one of the men tries to get my room number so that he can send me a Filipina prostitute. I tell him that I appreciate his concern for my sexual well-being, but that I’m diving tomorrow. And yes – that statement was completely devoid of logic on many levels. But he was drunk and I could basically say anything I wanted to. When we got back to the jetty and the boat, we found that it was low tide and we’d have to climb down to sea level and take a little canoe over to our bigger canoe. On the way down, I lost my footing and slid down 20 concrete steps on my ass, resulting in a bruised back side and pretty-well scraped up ankle. Boat captain dude felt horrible and kept trying to wipe the blood and wound with his dirty hand, while I kept shooing him away to leave it alone – the blood would keep it cleaner than his dirty hand. Amidst the hubbub, I lost my knockoff Oakleys – my superfly pair of sunglasses that I had tied my future coolness to. Superfly, wherefore art thou, superfly? Alas, I am destined to an existence of sub-coolness, mired in the silly dorkiness that you all love me for. After a chicken curry dinner at the hotel, I head out to the beach at night. The weather has cooled and the scenery is the epitome of perfect. The beach is mostly empty. The moon is out. There are a few clusters of clouds in the sky, but plenty of stars leaking through. And I’ve stolen a plastic lounge chair to lie back and soak it all in whilst listening to my odd mixture of oldies and has-beens on my ipod nano. This is just a perfect evening. I did try taking pictures, but I think I need a better camera – it was too dark and nothing would come out. So for all of you out there who enjoy these notes year after year, how about some payback and get me a new camera? J Troy was really worried that I didn’t have any fun all day – I spent a fair amount of time in quiet, but that’s just how I am. On the contrary, I thought today was great. I love completely random days. For as anal as I can get when I’m at work or at school, I love being the exact opposite in my personal life and on vacation – c’est la vie, que sera sera. If you plan all the details out, you’ll get so wrapped up in it that you miss the beautiful parts and you either won’t see or won’t be able to take advantage of opportunities that come up along the way. Of course, it also helps to travel during off-peak periods to permit this travel style. Friday, June 1, 2007 After some pancakes and juice at the hotel for breakfast, I headed to the beach to start my full day of scuba diving. One of the hotel employees had walked with me on the beach to compare prices on the first evening I was here, and I ended up just going with the dive shop that the hotel has a loose affiliation with called Dive Gurus – the price was about the same as any other shop and they were in low season and I’d be the only diver and they’d go wherever for however long I wanted, without charging me an additional “solo diver” fee. Last night, I had swung by and discussed with my divemaster Edwin what dives we would do the next day. After about 2 seconds, I realized the fatal mistake I had made in delaying diving by a day – all divers know that you’re not supposed to fly for 24 hours after your last dive. This would severely limit the number of dives that I could make. So we decided to try to get 3 real dives in on Friday morning and afternoon (pushing the 24 hour time limit slightly) and a shallow night dive in that evening. That’s not too shabby. I did, of course, take advantage of the opportunity to tell Troy that I had to cut my diving back sharply (which was the sole reason for my trip here) so that I could go with him to not catch any fish and to not go and see a waterfall. Everybody say “Thanks Troy”. Since I haven’t gone diving in 5 years, I took a quick refresher training just to make sure that I knew how to not die under water. As I expected, it all came back very quickly, so I ended being an apt pupil. Heck – Edwin and I both had a problem coming out with the same answer on the answer key on a few questions that use a table to figure out the residual nitrogen in your body – everyone uses computers nowadays so the tables are outdated. This dive shop actually gave me a computer to use for all of my dives, and you divers out there know that this is not typical at all. At 10:30am, Edwin and I joined another divemaster Jung Eon with her student Gaylord (who was taking classes for advanced certification). We took a bangca boat to a dive spot called Angol Point. Edwin and I were in the water for 52 minutes and got down to 17.1 meters. The water was quite clear (~20 m visibility?) and very warm at 30C. Even so, I opted to wear a wetsuit to protect me against scraping up against any coral. Any diver knows that an inadvertent scrape against some fire coral will remind you of your mistake for many moons. We saw lots of pretty fishees and stuff. Actually, for all three of daytime dives, we saw lots of pretty fishees. Describing fishees is not all that easy, but here goes the list of what we saw on this dive: a blue ribbon eel, black frog fish, porcupine fish, nudibranches (sea slugs), and a bunch of standard tropical fish. The porcupine fish reminded me of a pufferfish – I’m not sure if I’ve actually seen a pufferfish before or not, but my memory flashes back to an episode of the Simpsons where Homer adamantly demands a pufferfish meal, even though most of the fish is deadly to consume other than one small sliver in the middle; and the cook is freaking out pleading to not have to try and get that small sliver. I did quite well during this dive – I was impressed that I was able to control my buoyancy and not have to constantly inflate and deflate my BCD to keep from floating away or sinking (for those of you not in the know, this is a very common problem for beginners). As a result, I was able to hover in any physical orientation I needed to in order to get a view. In fact, later on in the day, I took advantage of my perfect buoyancy and started doing somersaults and cartwheels and backflips – I, of course, tried to do this when Edwin wasn’t looking, lest he realize that I’m a freak. We returned to the dive shop for a lunch break, and I went down the beach to Mario’s and had a pizza and a mango shake. The shake was huge and was unbelievably delicious. It was by far the best thing I’d had since I had arrived to the Philippines. Super yum. The pizza wasn’t too shabby either, and it was actually kinda comforting to have some Westernized food for a change. We did the second and third dives back-to-back with a 45 minute rest on the boat. Edwin asked me if we could do this instead of returning to shore, and my only concern was whether or not I’d have to use the restroom in between. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. By the way, when wearing a wetsuit, you are not able to freely contribute to the ocean as you might be able to when merely wearing a swimsuit (stop pretending you’re grossed out – you’ve done it before). Wetsuits are not easily water-penetrable. Dive 2 was at a dive spot called Balinghai, which is basically just a large coral shelf. The water was still crazy warm, and we dove for 45 minutes with a maximum depth of 21.6 meters. At the beginning of this dive, I started getting a little panicky – remember how I mentioned that I am mildly claustrophobic earlier? Well, try putting a constrictive wetsuit on with flippers and a BCD and oh yeah – you can only breath through this mouthpiece. That can trigger a little bit of a panic attack, which increases oxygen consumption pretty dramatically. I think I would probably do much better without the wetsuit. I took Edwin finding some interesting fishees to snap me out of my minor panic attack and relax me enough to enjoy – I’m sure he didn’t even realize that he helped me by doing that. Over the entire dive, we saw lots of neat stuff: 2 blue spotted stingrays, lionfish, yellow goatfish, bigeye fish (named so because they have very very large eyeballs), a moray eel, long nose emperor fish, blue fin trevally, and lots of standard tropical fishees. Lionfish are really really cool looking – so go and google it so that you can see. Go on, I’ll wait. By the way, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I keep referring to standard tropical fishees. I don’t really know how to describe them better – think of little fishees in all sorts of colors, some yellow, some red, some orange, some rainbow, some blue, some Nemo fish (yes I know they’re called clownfish), and so on. On this dive, these standard tropical fishees hovered all over us and we got to play with them. If you were still enough, some of the fish would venture right up to your facemask for an up close and personal view. ‘Twas very cool. The third dive was at Friday’s Rock, so named because it’s straight out from Friday’s beach resort. At this dive, a speedboat from a larger dive shop called Calypso Divers with 8-9 divers and only one divemaster came by and went in a few minutes before we did. They weren’t the agilest of divers, so we tried to keep our distance from them. However, Friday’s Rock wasn’t the biggest rock in the world, so we kept running into them. As you can tell, I like not diving with a whole lot of people much better. It lets you focus on the fishees. On this dive, we saw 3 small bamboo sharks underneath a rocky outcrop, big red reef snapper, mantis shrimp underneath a rocky shoal, a school of large golden trevally, a school of large barcheek trevally, 2 lionfish, and lots of standard tropical fishees. The key thing that I remember from this dive was the very large schools of fish that kept swimming by – where were these fish yesterday when we were trying to go fishing? Overall, Edwin told me that I was diving extremely well and that I should have done the advanced diver course so that I can go deeper and see more things. I think he was comparing me to Gaylord, who was having some minor issues with buoyancy and equalization, and just thought that I would have had a much easier time getting my advanced certification. I suppose I should probably do that next time. Maybe one of these days, I’ll actually take a vacation where the focus of a good bunch of the trip is to go diving. For that, I’ll need to have someone with me who wants to go diving. So, all you’uns out there, let me know if you’re interested. We had a few hours before we had to go out for our evening dive, so I went back to the hotel and showered because I felt disgusting from all of the salt water. The shower was so refreshing that I was extremely tempted to cancel my night dive. In retrospect, I probably should have done just that. At about 6:30pm, the sun had set, and Edwin and I loaded put on our gear in the dive shop and walked into the ocean from the beach and swam out a few hundred feet. The deepest we got on this dive was about 3 meters and we stayed down for about 35 minutes. Because we were so shallow, I was having a terribly hard time establishing buoyancy, especially with the waves whipping me up every once in a while. Because I couldn’t get my buoyancy right, I kept inadvertently whipping up sand and mucking up the already-shoddy visibility. We still saw a few interesting creatures – Edwin found an octopus that was trying to avoid us and kept playing with it, then he started bothering a squid, which sprayed some red ink and swam away. There was also a wasp fish, a big hermit crab with conch shell, and a Spanish dancer. This was all neat and such, but because of my aforementioned diving issues, I signaled to Edwin to call it quits and we swam back ashore. I just wasn’t having any fun and being out there was more of a chore than a joy. After paying up, I headed up the beach to find some sushi. It had been 3 weeks since I had some good sushi, and I figured that being in the ocean, we’d probably get some good sushi here. Well, it wasn’t all that great unfortunately. But at least it was cheap. That’s really no consolation though. Saturday, June 2, 2007 I slept in this morning – I honestly don’t remember the last time I was able to do that actually. It felt good. The weather today was hot in the sun, but nice and cool in the shade. I don’t like weather like that because you’re either sweaty or chilly, and that’s just plain weird. I took a stroll up the beach – my only objective for this morning was to get some cash. My destination? A place called D Mall, which is a collection of stores like an actual mall. I don’t know if there’s an A Mall, B Mall, and C Mall. I hope there are though, otherwise it would be tricky to explain why there’s a D Mall. By the way, I must say that the mango shakes on this island are really something else. I spent more on my mango shake than on my pancakes, but it was still just a $5 breakfast. But the mago shake was huuuuuuuuuuuge. And it was oh so good. Come to think of it, you would also probably spend more on a mango shake in the States than you would on a couple of pancakes. So maybe this isn’t as strange as the initial glance. At around noon, I began the journey back to Manila. First was taking the trike back to the jetty, then a boat over to Caticlan, and then to the airport for the flight back to Manila. This plane was the precise opposite experience as the previous Asian Spirit flight. This was a turboprop plane that was fully booked and reeked of mildew from a damp interior. The A/C didn’t work too well, so it was extremely stuffy inside and when we were airborne, the A/C kicked in and quickly began to drip on me from all the condensation. The saving grace was the wannabe Capri-Sun. I even got two of them because my neighbor didn’t want his. Yay. My hotel was in Makati City, one of the safer sections of Manila that is a big commercial center for the city. I think P&G may have their Philippine headquarters there or something and they had some unbelievable rates with some top-notch hotels. So I went out of my travel norms and stayed at the New World Renaissance Hotel for what’s got to be less than 50% of normal price. Security at the hotel was nuts. Before they let the taxi in, there were armed guards who looked into the vehicle and had mirrors on poles to look underneath the vehicle. I asked the guards later on if they had ever found anything, but they just smiled and responded to an entirely different question – I don’t think their English was very good. And I figured that since they had guns, I wasn’t going to probe any further, so I said thank you and smiled back. Before I could even walk into the hotel lobby, I had to walk through a metal detector, my entire luggage had to go through the standard airport security luggage car wash (also known as an X-ray machine), and there was even a K-9 unit on hand to sniff out for drugs. After relaxing for an hour or so, I decided to venture out for some food. The area had a lot of very Westernized shopping malls. Prices were pretty solid, and if I wasn’t completely shopped out from China, it probably would have been a good idea to spend a few hours browsing. Come to think of it, I’m never really in the mood to shop. So I continued on to find some food. I passed by a nice looking place that had a nice picture of a steak on the little menu board thingamabob, and boy that looked enticing. So I went into the W Grill, which was modeled after a Texas roadhouse – it had a mechanical bull inside, and all the menus had country or ranch type themes. The beer came in a few sizes: Bottle, Big Ass, and Pitcher. I definitely didn’t want a pitcher, so I ordered the big ass. When I got the beer, the plastic cup was a mold of a guy from waist down with his pants pulled down in the back exposing his very rotund backside. I kid you not. I ordered a porterhouse steak, medium rare. I didn’t really get a porterhouse steak. I don’t know what it was, but it was very thin and very tough. That probably serves me right though – when traveling to the Philippines, it’s probably not the best idea to order a steak if they’re not well-known for good steaks. So I left a wee bit on the disappointed side. But the beer glass made it all worth it, without a doubt. I had a few chores to do before I called it a night. First was to find the Hard Rock Café, so that I could get a Manila shot glass for my friend Rajesh, who collects them. I think he’s got to have at least 50-60 by now. Heck I have four sitting on my shelf here that I still need to give to him. Next stop was for my friend Julia to Max Brenner’s, a chocolate-themed restaurant with a slogan of “Chocolate by the Bald Man”. I had a Venezuelan hot chocolate and a piece of cake for dessert. The hot chocolate was very tasty. The cake was not the greatest. I actually wanted the chocolate soufflé, but that would have required a 30 minute wait. And I’m not really a waiter, I’m an engineer. Sunday, June 3, 2007 Today was a long long travel day. I got up at 5:00 am to leave by 5:45 am to get to the airport by 6:15 am to get on my 7:30 am flight to Beijing. I asked the hotel to get me a taxi, so they booked an airport transfer. When I was checking out, I found out that the airport transfer runs 2100 pesos (~$45), whereas a metered taxi would run about 100 pesos (~$2). Granted, the metered taxis were absolute crap-mobiles that probably wouldn’t pass any Western car inspection, but that’s just a huge differential. So I asked for my metered taxi instead. The taxi driver kept refusing to turn his meter on and was trying to charge me 300 pesos for the trip. I told him that I’d pay 150 pesos max, or to take me back to the hotel. He muttered something in Tagalog and proceeded. After a relatively uneventful flight from Manila to Beijing, we landed and I had to retrieve all of my bags, go through Chinese customs, and then check back in at Continental. I was a full 3 hours early for check-in, yet there was still a line at the Continental booth that was about 45 minutes long. Apparently, Chinese labor is too expensive for the idiot Continental tightwads, so they installed 3 kiosks that they expect everyone to use to check in. Nutty. In the waiting area about 15 minutes before boarding, Liang and his girlfriend/fiancée/wife Chenlu arrive and we start swapping stories about our last week. Originally, we had booked our flights online and selected seats so as to be able to sit next to each other on the plane ride back. However, somehow Liang and Chenlu were moved. We asked the fellow next to them if I could swap with him, but he was for some reason being really paranoid about being separated from his carry-on. Not very friendly, methinks. We were stuck on the runway at Beijing for 2 hours before they let us take off, presumably due to weather and traffic. The pilot was unbelievably candid about this, and it was clear that he was irritated with the tower because they wouldn’t give him an estimate on when we’d be able to take off. And he kept mentioning every 5 minutes that flight time was 12 hours and 25 minutes, and that he’d try to make up time in the air for those with connecting flights out of Newark. Once we finally land in Newark, we’re stuck waiting for another 30 minutes while another plane moves from our gate. Again, the pilot was not very happy and shared his frustration with us. After going through customs and then an additional agricultural screening, we took a cab back to Liang’s place and he dropped me off at about 9pm. In total, that means that I was in transit for about 27 straight hours. Fun fun. Okay – that’s it for this trip. I hope you’ve enjoyed following along. My next trip? I don’t know. Since my school is virtually up, I have a lot more leeway in specific timing, but I think I have a week or two that I might be able to take this fall. Last year, I had mentioned that I was planning to go to Kilimanjaro this fall – since this time, my brother-in-law Chris told me that if I waited a year, he’d join me. So, I’m postponing that plan for a little bit (will that still work for you, Hemangi?) and I’ll have to pick somewhere else this fall. If anyone is up for some nice hiking and camping, I’d be more than up for that. Chile anyone? Heck – I’d even go back to Peru again if someone’s interested. Toodles! Tidbits: 1. Philippine Airlines accommodates for Asian-sized passengers by providing a step at each row of seats to help people reach their luggage. 2. Why is it that the country is the Philippines, but the people are Filipino? Can we please standardize the spelling of the “ffff” sound in this nation? 3. Around the Philippines, a common mode of transport is by what they call a jeepney – it’s basically a scrappy old Jeep Wrangler front end with two long bench seats running on either of the extended cab in the back. It probably seats about 12-16 people. Beyond this, most of the jeepneys are lavishly and cheesily lined with shiny metal, and painted with caricatures and random phrases or whatever. It’s the poor man’s version of a pimped out ride. About the only way to make it better would be to give it a Dukes of Hazzard horn. 4. A lot of places in Asia charge extra if you use American credit cards. The upcharge is sometimes more than the 5% that you’d normally expect. Because I was paying in Philippine pesos, the hotel bill came down by about 8%. Moral of the story – always pull out money from the ATM, which has no fees. 5. About 10% of the Filipino workforce works abroad and sends money home. In fact, money coming in comprises of a significant portion of national wealth. Working abroad is so pervasive that overseas workers even have their own line in customs at the airport.

Paraag 2: Even More Cultural Learnings from China for Make Benefit Glorious Village of Hoboken

Folks – so sorry for the delay. But I’ve been living it up here in Asia. But I’ll not bore you any longer with superfluous prologue. To the journal! Sunday, May 20, 2007 We woke up this morning to the fresh smog of Xi’an permeating everything. Deborah fell a bit ill over the night and opted to catch a few more hours of sleep, so Liang and I headed out for a local breakfast and then walked around the Drum Tower and Bell Tower. We learned that the Bell Tower is sounded every morning, and signifies that the city gates would be opened. In the evening, the Drum Tower is drummed and the city gates are closed until the following morning. So we watched the 9am morning ceremony, whereby a group of 10-15 traditionally dressed Chinese bellsounder-types paraded around the circumference of the Bell Tower until coming to the bell to sound it. That’s really about it. Traffic continued around the Bell Tower as if nothing special were happening, so I suppose it’s just a show for us tourists. From there, Liang and I went to visit the Muslim temple. The streets leading to the entrance of the temple were these small alleyways festooned with shopping booths with owners calling out to us to buy this piece of crap or that piece of crap as we walked by. It felt like that one scene in Jesus Christ Superstar where Jesus gets upset that there are a bunch of shops at the temple – “…but you have made iiiiiiiiiit a den of thieves. Get ouuuuuuuut, get out.” Thank you, thank you very much. Next show in a half an hour. At 10am, we went back to the hotel to get Deborah and check out of the hotel. Liang’s uncle’s cousin’s brother’s ex-roommate’s grandmother’s postman’s teacher’s cousin-in-law was the hotel manager of the place we were staying at, and offered to have his personal driver take us around today and then drop us off at the airport in the evening. We also had no clue what to expect as far as cost for the hotel room, but it appears as though we got something close to a 70% discount from the normal room rate. Folks – we were experiencing the magic of guanxi before our very eyes (re-read last week’s if you don’t remember what guanxi is). See? It’s always handy to have your own private Chinese friend-turned-tour guide handy. Everyone say “Thanks, Liang.” No really, say it. Out loud. The first stop this morning was at the City Walls, where we spent a few hours in the scorching heat riding rented bikes atop the Walls around the periphery of the old city. It was mighty exhilarating to get some fresh smog in the lungs. Ahhhhhhhhhh… But, what I don’t understand is that if the Chinese people were going to go through the trouble of building such a massive wall to keep intruders out, why wouldn’t they go one step further and build some shade? I don’t understand these people. For all the pollution in Xi’an, the government has made some effort towards energy use reduction. For example, most of the buildings in the area had thermal water heaters on the rooftops – apparently, these things will heat the water to 90C during the day. Also, all taxis and buses run on compressed natural gas or something (we learned later in the week that it is a biofuel, made from wastes of some sort). In the taxi ride to the hotel on Friday, After the city walls, we went to a local restaurant to get the best steamed dumplings ever known to mankind. This is where having our own local personal driver came in extremely handy. He knew where all the good places were that the tourists didn’t know about. After lunch, Deborah wanted to see the Muslim temple so we went back to that area. However, we were a bit sidetracked by the shopping. I’m not sure if I mentioned it yet, but in China, almost all shopping is by negotiation. The vendor usually starts with a price that is about 5-10x too high. You counter with an obscenely low number, which they then tell you is way too low and accuse you of stealing from them. Then they ask for your “maximum price” and your “best price” numerous times, even after you’ve theoretically already given this price. Frustration abound for folks not seasoned in this. By the end of the week, what worked best for me was saying a price, maybe coming up a tad, stand there until they come down, begin walking away, which elicits a price lowering, and then repeat as necessary. If they don’t chase you as you leave, that might be a good indication that you are toooo low. Each vendor has an absolute minimum price, and they know exactly what it is. Typically, it matches up precisely with others’ minimum price. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are all colluding together to begin with, or even if they all work for the same parent company. So, after much negotiation, Deborah ended up with a red 3 piece Samsonite luggage set and I ended up with a Swiss Army computer bag for about $125 USD. At the time, we were very happy with this purchase. The bags appear to be VERY sturdy with good material, stitching, and zippers. Yes, zippers. A quick indicator of a cheaply made bag is how the zippers look and feel. These were good zippers. Later in the trip, I realized that we probably overpaid a good 30%, but this was our first set of negotiations and I at least felt like we got a decent deal upon leaving the store. Essentially, we had talked them down to about 30% of the original price. Sounds decent. Next was sunglass shopping for me. I figured I’d use my immediate access to a female perspective (Deborah) and a metro perspective (Liang) to find me some fly shades (yes – I said “fly”, this will be repeated so get used to it). Initially, they were both steering me towards these designer-like shades that were completely not me at all – way too fancy and preppy and cool-looking. After trying on about 20 pairs, I found some Oakley-knockoffs that fit my fat head pretty well. Deborah gave the thumbs up, so I bought two pairs in different colors. I figure that once you find something that works, stick with it, right? Deborah liked them so much on me that we kept saying “Super-fly!” whenever I wore them for the remainder of the week. Good times. Yes, I know I stole this phrase from legendary wrestler Jimmy “the Superfly” Snooka, who by the way never really seemed to be all that super-fly. I was really putting the “super” in “Super-fly”! You’d better recognize. Fo-shizzle. The last stop of the day before going back to the airport was to the Forest of Stone Tablets. When I heard about this place, I guess I kind of imagined a big tree-ey forest with some large stone tablets sticking out of the ground from time to time. I was wrong. These stone tablets were from the olden days, and were essentially the grave monuments for old dead Chinese people. Each monument had script manually engraved into it and so basically we got to spend an hour or so walking around looking at this stuff. But when you can’t read Chinese, every tablet looks the same after you’ve seen about five of them. So I figured that maybe I should ask my friendly neighborhood Chinese interpreter to do his job (you know, since I pay Liang good money for this) and start telling me what it all means. Unfortunately, it’s all written in old Chinese (which is kinda like Olde English, without the completely unnecessary ‘e’), so he couldn’t really do much for me. After a couple hour delay and a quick flight back to Beijing, we finally arrived at the hotel. Immediately I felt a difference in air quality (we went from ludicrous-smog down to ridiculous-smog). Also of note, the good people at our Unisplendour hotel finally caught on and activated the second elevator – we had a huge improvement in elevator wait times from this point forward. Monday, May 21, 2007 Last night, I think I had the perfect sleep. I took ½ a sleeping pill. So, to recap on my sleeping pill experimentation, it goes like this: ½ sleeping pill = good; 2 sleeping pills = very, very bad (with Seinfeldesque finger wag). This morning, we had a class on something or other. I don’t actually know what the title was, but it was by a Chinese guy who used to work in the US and now works in China, who similar to previous presenters refused to follow his own slides. He was sharing with us his experiences between the two work cultures, and he was fairly direct from his observations. While I’m always more than happy that someone shares with us the truth (regardless of whether or not we can handle the truth), this fellow could have afforded a little bit of discretion on how to share certain things. I am by no means Super-PC Boy (geek squad computer repairman by day, and enforcer of political correctness by night in bright red tights, furry unibrow, and Rollie Fingers mustache). But this fellow could clearly use some help on how to get his point across. He was basically telling us that business gets done by old Chinese men at the spa where they engage with prostitutes. When someone asked about women, the presenter said that women will join for dinner but basically don’t go to the spa with the men. Liang was not happy about this, since he made it sound as though ALL business is done this way in China. I’m sure it happens in the US as well, and I’m sure the frequency is probably higher in China, but certainly not all business is done this way. I was bored and tired of listening to this guy, so I played hangman with my neighbor. Good use of tuition funds indeed. In the afternoon, we went to another corporate visit at CNC, which is a Chinese telecom that is one of the primary sponsors for the Olympics. We were entertained by two young fellows with extremely broken English (I don’t remember their names, so I’ll call them Darryl and Darryl), who basically read from a script and acted out scenes to demonstrate how communications will be revolutionized at the Olympics for visitors and support personnel. Riveting stuff. On the bus, our trip admin quickly acknowledged that all of the corporate tours were nowhere close to what they were expecting either, and asked that we write our frustrations out on the feedback form. On the way back to the hotel, the bus stopped on the side of the road at the Olympic Stadium, called the Bird’s Nest because it resembles a bird’s nest (duh). It was a comical scene to see 60 random people wandering around the side of a road taking pictures. Some of the local construction workers were so surprised that they started snapping pictures of us with their cell phone cameras. A number of us hailed cabs from the side of the road and went down to the Silk Market, which is a multi-level mall filled to the brim with these shopping kiosks pawning fake goods. Think Chinatown on steroids. I ran into a group of my classmates who were going back and forth between two tailors attempting to get the rock bottom lowest prices, and using quantity as a leveraging tool. Eventually, we got one shop to come down to 80 yuan (about $10) for a button-down shirt and 300 yuan (about $40) for pants. With some help from Ken, I picked out fabrics, got measured, and paid a deposit on 4 shirts and 2 pants. When we were done, there were nine of us about to hail taxis, when a lady runs up to Ken and starts negotiating for a single flat rate to take us all back to the hotel in a van. We finally get a rate we like and hop in the van. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she pulls out a bag of Polo shirts and Beijing 2008 T-shirts to try and sell us. I ended up getting 2 Polos for 30 Yuan each ($4). Ken bought her entire stash of 12 T-shirts for 200 Yuan – not because he needed the T-shirts, but more because he wanted to see how low he could get her to sell them for. After we unloaded at the hotel, we headed over to a local bar for a happy hour with MBA an IMBA students from Tsinghua. The nice thing was that our tour admins were handing out free drink tickets. They didn’t have any wine, so I was sticking to my Jack and Ginger. After an hour or two, one of our classmates walks in with about 15 kids from Swannee State in eastern Tennessee – he bumped into them at McDonalds and convinced them to join us. I was happy – these were seemingly my people. So I tried talking to one of them and explained that I was from nearby Eastern Kentucky. She wasn’t amused. Then I realized that here’s this 18 year old who is traveling in China with 20 of her closest drunk friends and is being talked to by a random brown guy who must be twice her age. Sure, I would have appreciated some discussion of the coincidence, but I decided to let it slide. At some point in the evening, one of the guys gets us to pitch in for a bottle of Absinthe – this stuff is apparently illegal in the states. I’m not sure why, but I can say that I blame them. It tasted like Yaeger, only more Yaegerish. The music at the club was real old school stuff, so I was pretty happy. Somewhere along the line, the Absinthe kicked in and I started seeing the little fluorescent green fairies. And miraculously, thanks to Nate, I made it home in one piece somewhere around 2am. Thanks Nate. Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Somehow I managed to get up early today and thought about going for a run, but it was very rainy. It’s probably for the best that I couldn’t go, even though I had very recently sworn off alcohol. Two full bottles of water were consumed in rapid fashion. Today, we didn’t have classes. Instead we were taking a trip to the overhyped Ba-Da-Ling section of the Great Wall. With the rainy weather, we knew that we had clearly lost to the gods of chance. The first stop on the way was to the Ming Tombs. As we neared the tombs, we got stuck in a pretty heavy amount of traffic. Owing to the two bottles of aforementioned water, I really really had to go. So our bus admin Gabriela discreetly mentioned it to tour guide Tony, who then exclaimed “W.C.?” and told me to go on the side of the road. I opted not to and instead Tony dwarfed me as he escorted me under his umbrella to a side street. One of the folks there told Tony that I could use the side of his building. Very kind indeed. You know, when you really gotta go – the relief from actually getting to go has got to be one of the greatest sensations ever. Try it sometime. I think you’ll be forced to agree. After my escapade, we finally made it to the Ming Tombs, which is where a bunch of people from the Ming Dynasty were entombed. I’m completely guessing here, since I couldn’t hear anything during the underground tour. The vast spaces seemed to make it very difficult for a voice to carry at all. Basically, this section of the tour was quite useless. The great thing about it is that each of us had shelled out an additional 200 Yuan so that the whole group could go. About the only good thing that came out of going to the Ming Tombs is that the bathroom arrived sooner than it would have otherwise. Lunch was at a roadside place catering to tourists that, surprise surprise, had ample floor space dedicated to selling us stuff that we didn’t need. So I escaped directly to the tour bus after lunch and took a nap. In a few hours, we finally made it to the Great Wall. Since the weather had turned sour on us, a very large subsection of the group was looking for warmth. Warmth reared its ugly head in the form of “I Climbed the Great Wall” sweatshirts, which a number of classmates bought for between 115 and 25 Yuan, depending on bargaining skill. Undoubtedly, the Chinese folk among the group scored the cheapest prices. The wall itself was quite magnificent – as far as we could tell at least. The weather was so bad that we could barely see 50 feet in front of us, so we weren’t able to see the Wall as a huge never-ending structure as the guidebooks made it out to be. We were forced to use our imagination instead and recreate the postcard pictures in our head from the cloudy grayness surrounding us. The Wall itself is actually not the original wall – it’s a restoration of what used to be there, so there is definitely a bit of a lack of authenticity. However, they did keep some of the unnecessarily steep climbs and the abnormal step sizes for added effect. There’s got to be a ridiculous number of poor souls each year who tumble to their doom trying to get back down. In the end, the Great Wall was unable to live up to its stated amazingness. Instead, this was perhaps the Merely Acceptable Wall or the Bologna Sandwich Wall ($10 fake bucks to first person who correctly identifies that reference). I think I’ll need to make another trip back to China if only to go far away from the crowds and see the real Great Wall. In fact, Quoc did this exact thing on this very day – he skipped our tour and took a bus several hours away, then a 70 km taxi ride and a 2 km hike to get to a deserted section of the wall. Had I known that he was planning to do this, I would have certainly joined him. Wednesday, May 23, 2007 I don’t know what the class this morning was specifically on – it was kind of devoid of learning. I actually missed the first half of it owing to a bit of stomach queasiness. But I heard that a battle had ensued during the missed portion between a few of the students and the teacher. This afternoon’s class was much better – it was given by a fellow who is the China Representative for The Economist. To me, at least, this title gave him instant credibility, and he lived up to my lofty expectations. I don’t really remember what he talked about but what I do know is that is was extremely interesting. I would look up my notes for a refresher, but that would mean that I need to continue typing, and I want to finish up this update and send it out. After all, I’m on frickin’ vacation. At 5pm, we hopped on the bus to go to an acrobat show that was at 7:30pm. We ended up getting there a full hour or so early, but tour guide Tony had told us that “we will surely suffer” if we leave after 5pm because of the bad traffic. This use of unnecessarily dramatic verbage resulted in countless jokes and laughs from the rest of us. The acrobat show was downright awesome. Think Cirque du Soleil without all the crazy music and lighting effects. And with all Chinese people. We saw crazy Chinese leapers leap through rings. We saw two sets of two people in Chinese dragon gear balance opposite each other on a huge bouncy ball and roll it up and down a seesaw – no one was directly on top of the ball, both dragons were to the side, offsetting the weight of the other to manipulate the turning of the ball. We saw a crazy contortionist lady balance something like 18 little ornamental trees on her body (feet, knees, hands, elbows, face, neck, etc.) while twisting and turning around. We saw 15 Chinese ladies ride a single bike around the stage in extended-cheerleader-pyramid formation. We saw these crazy strong dudes go up and down a staircase while doing a one-hand handstand. It was bongos. Since I had partied hardy the first week, I figured that I’d give my tired old body a break the rest of this week and not go and be social all night long with my other classmates. So I headed home after the acrobat show. Back on the first day we arrived, Liang and I had gone shopping for some necessities at a local department store. Among those necessities? Beer. I couldn’t resist. They were selling a 40 oz. of Chinese beer for about 60 cents. And how could you turn down the prospect of drinking a 40 in China? Well, both of those bottles had remained in our fridge. Until tonight – I drank one. Thursday, May 24, 2007 I got up this morning to go for a run. That makes three bouts of real exercise in two weeks. It only goes downhill from here, unfortunately. The class this morning was on the financial systems in China, and was taught by the professor who served as the overall coordinator for this DBI course. A couple of interesting points that he shared are: 1) corporate debt is not widely used in China because it requires special approval and the money is restricted in use; as a result, corporate debt levels in China are ~8% while they are ~35% in the US; 2) the Chinese SEC (CSRC) was set up as a response to the “8.10 Incident”, which occurred on October 10, 1992, when a very desired stock was about to be offered up as an IPO – buyers waited in line for more than 3 days only to be told on the morning of the sale that the bank had already allocated all of shares (mostly to themselves); the result was rioting in the streets; 3) the Chinese stock market is split into A shares and B shares; A shares are in Chinese denomination and are only available to Chinese investors; B shares are denominated in USD and are only available to foreign investors; the result is that the two shares are completely identical but the share prices are completely independent because they trade in separate markets (no arbitrage is possible); 4) because Chinese people have a very high savings rate and they don’t have too many options in which to invest their money, the A-share stock market is very over-inflated and appears to be a bubble that is about to burst – most investors are very short-term looking to make a quick buck, as a result, annual share turnover is 500% (each share is sold on average 5 times per year), whereas the US average is about 100%. The class this afternoon was focused on overall economic mega-trends and China’s place in the global economy. It was taught by Professor David Li, who had some extremely interesting conclusions. He was probably one of our best professors during the course, and immediately engaged us – this explains why almost everyone in the class sat still while he went nearly an hour over his time limit. The professor explained that his family was “educated by peasants” during the Cultural Revolution when Mao Zedong sent everyone in the cities back to the farms, then he was in the first class at Tsinghua when the Reform Era began and the schools started back up, and then he went to the US to get his Ph.D. and worked in the States and internationally for a number of years before returning to Tsinghua as a professor. It was just really cool to hear first hand how someone’s life was dramatically shaped by the history of the country. You know, if any of us had gone through something similar, we would have told the story extremely differently with some clear resentment and bitterness – but this man talked about it openly with grace and with a smile, and described his experience with gratitude for having the opportunities that he had. Now I can see why he has the outlook that he does – he’s an optimist and he knows that others around him didn’t have the opportunities that he did. Even so, I couldn’t help but have an absolute tremendous amount of respect for him. Back to the class, a couple of noteworthy points: 1) China’s share of world GDP was 20-30% in the 1700s and 1800s and dipped to 5% during the Cultural Revolution and is now in the high teens and on an upward trend – so there’s nothing to fear about the economic growth in China, instead think about it as China returning to its rightful place in the world economy; 2) compared to the volatility of the economic boom of the US during the Industrial Revolution (late 1800s, early 1900s) and in Japan during the same period, China’s economic boom has been extremely steady – the professor attributes this to an actively managed monetary/fiscal policy in China today; 3) the Chinese government’s debt is expected to get to about 120% of their GDP in 10 years (US debt ~60% US GDP), this is not of major concern because the Chinese government still owns 60%+ of many strategic companies, which is valued at between 125-150% of Chinese GDP; 4) the regional disparity in income levels is about 2x in the US and between 4-6x in China because of incomplete market reform in China – only certain areas have been permitted to participate in capital investment and many people in China are required to live in the region they grew up (their huko). Okay – everyone except the business school graduates are probably bored out of their mind right now, so I’ll move on. We went back to the Silk Market this afternoon to pick up our tailored clothes. I had left one of my favorite shirts behind for them to copy the collar and cuffs from – unfortunately, they did a complete copy of this shirt instead. While this was still okay for me, I still don’t understand why they took measurements. The pants puzzled me even more – the waist was about 2 inches too wide and the length was about a ½ inch too long. Okay – the length I can understand, but the waist? I also took this opportunity to buy some other staples. Earlier in the day, I had dropped off some laundry at the hotel to get cleaned. When I took a look at the price list, I drastically reduced my laundry load. It seemed to me that I could probably buy new clothes at the Silk Market for a little more than what it would cost to wash them. My suspicions were confirmed: Price to wash 11 pair underwear + 11 pair socks = 132 Price for new 11 pair underwear + 11 pair socks = 150 I continued my shopping spree by buying 6 white shirts and a pink Polo. I had tried to buy a pink Polo from the van lady on Tuesday, but Andrew grabbed it before I could. Normally, I’m not the type to buy pink, but every female in the van thought that the color looked good with my skin tone. So dammit, stop calling me a pansy. This evening, I stayed in again because I needed to work on our final presentation for the class. More on this in tomorrow’s blurb. Oh yeah, remember the 40 oz. story from the night before? Well, I drank the other one. So fret not, fair maiden – no beer was wasted in the writing of this story. Friday, May 25, 2007 Today was all class presentations. Each group of 4 had to give a presentation on a company that should enter China, and discuss how it should do so – preferably using the material that we had learned earlier in the course. Our group chose Dunkin Donuts, mostly because we couldn’t understand how Starbucks could possibly be so successful charging their outlandish rates. Essentially, it seems that most US fast food companies have come into the country charging the same price as they do back at home. I understand that they can certainly charge a premium, but Starbucks’ price is already outlandish in the US, let alone after conversion into Chinese yuan. The presentation went very very well. I had a few people come up and tell me later on that ours was the best prepared. However, since the class is Pass/Fail, this basically confirmed my earlier suspicion that we should have cut the time spent on creating the presentation in half, and go bowling Thursday night with the rest of the folks instead. Believe it or not, I was actually the one in our group advocating for having fun instead of working on the presentation – I don’t think I learned anything by creating the presentation, it’s all stuff we’ve done before in other classes. And even so, we were so pressed for time that we had to skip about half of what we had prepared during the actual presentation so much of it was for naught. After lunch, I headed back to the Silk Market to pick up my re-tailored pants. While I was there, I went ahead and picked up a large Tumi suitcase for 300 yuan, a nailclipper set for 35 yuan, and some iPod headphones for 30 yuan. I probably could have gotten all of those for even cheaper, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle of the additional bargaining. It just wasn’t worth the price difference anymore. We had our Farewell Dinner this evening at the Beijing version of Tavern on the Green. The meal was extraordinary and each plate was decorated for added effect. We even had an appetizer of rose petals – it was pretty good. After the dinner, most people were headed to an expat bar or to a suite in a fancy hotel that one of the other students had booked for the evening. A few of us wanted to actually experience a piece of Beijing in our last evening there together. So, Chris, Chris, Quoc and I hopped in a taxi and headed a little Korea area about 15 minutes from our hotel. Our plan was to barhop and see where the evening took us. The first bar was a Korean place where we paid 10 yuan for a 40 oz of Yinjang. That’s dirt cheap. The second bar was not really a bar at all – it was a group of plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk that was getting service from some street stalls. The area was packed, so Quoc befriended another group of tourists so that we could crash their table. We met these four people from Africa (one from each Central African Republic, Kenya, the Gabon, and Seychelles) – they were in Beijing attending a seminar on forestry at the Beijing Forestry University. Actual quote from Quoc or one of the Chris’ – “I have no idea if I’ll ever be in the Central African Republic, but if I ever do, I’m glad I know this dude”. Here, we got 8 fairly large mugs of beer for 32 yuan ($4). On the street, we ran into some random people that we had met at the Tsinghua happy hour on Monday night. Charles (an Tsinghua IMBA student from Montreal) sent us a few blocks away to Peppers, where we each had Tsingtao beer and a Patron tequila shot. The bartender there wasn’t paying any attention to us at all, even though we comprised 4 of the total 7 people sitting at the bar, and the bottle of Patron was literally right in front of us on the bar. So every time Quoc turned to his left to talk to me, Chris refilled his shot glass. I think he may have had 3-4 additional shots. Serves Peppers right – that place was expensive. We kept walking down that street from Peppers and onto a street that was all torn up, presumably to be repaved. The street stank like a squatter, so we ducked into a random bar when we saw a foozball table in it. We played a few pretty-evenly matched games of foozball, despite the lack of a second level defender on one of the rods (I don’t know what this is called, but one of the two defenders on the second to last row were missing, giving that team a severe handicap). And, of course, we had another 40 oz of Tsinghua. Chris wanted a massage before he got on the plane tomorrow, so we walked and then taxi’ed over to an area that Charles told us would have a good massage parlour. We couldn’t find anything, so we went into this big glitzy building that said “spa” on it. From first glance, it was clearly pricier than we had planned, but this was no deterrent to complete the night of total randomness. Somehow, we ended up getting stark naked with a bunch of old Chinese men for an unnecessary long time - first was a shower followed by a rest in a hot tub (still naked). Then Quoc spotted another small pool and jumped into it. Turns out, this pool had little fishees in it – once you were in it for a little while, these little fishees would start nibbling on you – a really strange sensation. And since we were still stark naked, all parts of us were being nibble. Someone mentioned that they think the fishees eat the dead skin. I have no idea, but I do know that the water was really gross with fish feces. After 10-15 minutes of feeding the fish, I took another shower. Then we had a guy come up to us barked orders and pointing to a price list. We presumed that this was for the massage, so we pointed to something that looked like a 1 hour massage. After an hour, our massages were done and we met in the lobby to get back home. Quoc didn’t look too good – later he would share with us that the combination of the multiple tequila shots and the relaxation of the massage resulted in him yakking on his poor massage therapist. When we went to pay, we quickly learned that we didn’t have enough cash. We tried charging it, but they didn’t take any American credit cards. So, Chris and Quoc were held hostage while the other Chris and I were escorted to an ATM to pull out more money. The first ATM didn’t work, which scared the living bejeesus out of us. I was worried that they would make us clean up the fish feces to pay off the debt. Instead, Chris and I were led to another ATM, which ended up working. Somewhere around 3am, we stumbled back home. Saturday, May 26, 2007 Getting up was difficult this morning. I’ve had a cough for the past week, and I often can’t fall asleep because I’m coughing too much – somehow, lying horizontally makes me need to cough more frequently. I’m sure there’s a physiological rationale for this, but Princeton Review didn’t cover it in the MCAT class I took a decade ago. After three hours of sleep, I went downstairs to get my free breakfast before they took the food away. Most everyone was leaving today to go home or some other location in Asia. In fact, I was supposed to head to Singapore this morning, but changed my flight to Sunday to see if I could get some additional Beijing sightseeing in – I had been hoping to figure out how to get back to the Great Wall, but that will have to wait until another trip. I sat down with Edouard for breakfast, and he convinced me to join him for a quick jaunt to the Emperor’s Summer Palace. I had been planning on doing this anyway, but had wanted more precious some sleep first. But Edouard was leaving this afternoon and had a sense of urgency. So I showered and changed in 5 minutes and off we went. The first thing that I can tell you about the Summer Palace is that it’s very hot there. Of course, this is probably more a function of the weather than the location, but even so. It’s hot there. Since past a certain point, heat and enjoyment have a negative relationship, I wasn’t enjoying myself very much. Edouard had befriended a English-speaking tour guide who promised to give him as much as he could possibly get in 30 minutes before he had to leave. I, on the other hand, wanted to get my money’s worth, but also wanted to get some shade. So I suppose I should tell you something else about the Summer Palace: it’s very very large. It’s not just a palace, but more like a massive palace grounds, almost the size of a city-state. Interestingly enough, there were a ton of local Chinese people just hanging out playing cards or eating lunch as if this were Central Park. I suppose if I lived in Beijing, I might do the same – the grounds are very beautiful with lots of trees and a man-made mountain that was built from dirt shoveled out for the man-made lake. In two hours of walking around with very little stoppage time, I probably only covered 1/3 of the place. In the blistering heat, it felt like I was walking around for 4 hours. I think I probably went through 4 bottles of water in that time. After a few hours, I caved in and escaped back to my hotel – complete with air conditioning and filtered air. You can tell that the air must be filtered as soon as you walk in. We had learned earlier this week that Beijing is China’s 28th worst polluted city, and it ain’t no Singapore. My guess is that Xi’an is much higher on the list. I still had not figured out my travel plans for my return from Singapore – I had no idea where I was going to go and how I was going to get there. After a few hours on the internet, it felt like every idea I could come up with awash with issues – flights not available, flight times mismatching, not enough layover time, you name it. My mind started drifting towards calling it quits – it was really hot, I was out of sleep, I kept coughing up my right lung from the smog, I didn’t know how or where to pick up airline tickets (not always e-tickets), I could barely communicate with anyone in this country, and on and on and on – I had 150 reasons to just try to find a way home after Singapore instead of venturing anywhere for a few days. I even played through a conversation with my mom in my head, who undoubtedly would commiserate with me and make me feel like less of a schlep for throwing in the towel. My thoughts went to one of my core beliefs: “things always have a way of working out”. Where was this belief now? Just as my faith was shattering, the solution dawned on me like a light from the heavens with the angelic voice background music. My faith was quickly re-established. I was making this whole thing way too complicated. I’ll just rebook my fully refundable fare from Singapore (P&G’s) and book what I need to book and pay the difference. Very simple. Of course now I need to figure out how to make a collect call from China… The only other thing I had to do today was to meet up with Quoc for one last Peking Duck dinner. He was also leaving tomorrow, but had opted to find a new hotel for a single night because he was tired of the same place. So, our plan was to meet at a particular subway stop at 7pm. Since I had never taken the subway alone and I wanted to walk around a bit (and the housekeeper was urging me to leave so that she could clean the room), I left really early and got to the pre-arranged subway stop at about 4:45 pm. On the map, I found the Drum and Bell Towers close by so I figured that I would take in another tourist site if I could. As luck would have it, I got there right as it was closing. So, I just walked around. The major streets in Beijing in this area are pretty far away from each other – in between are just back alleys. I probably spent about 45 minutes walking through back alleys, which was a far cry from the store-lined somewhat-sanitized existence on the sidewalks of the major streets. I’m glad I took this detour. In the last two days, suddenly my trip to China was very different from what it had been. I finally saw some of real life in Beijing, and I remembered why it is that I like traveling in developing countries to begin with – it has a profound ability to put things in perspective. All of a sudden, things that I thought were important weren’t quite that important: which movies and shows I haven’t seen, the discrepancy between my salary and the market salary for equivalent skills in NYC (we don’t get cost-of-living adjustments for being in NYC), trying to figure out how to get my Alfa repaired, wondering if my team is staying focused while I’m away, losing 0.50% interest on my savings account by not switching banks – suddenly, a lot goes into perspective. It’s not that these things should be ignored – it’s just that these things aren’t the crises that we have a tendency to make them into. Perspective is really a wonderful wonderful thing. I saw a little girl in one of the small alleyways skipping rope and a little boy tossing rocks – both of them lit up with a huge smile as I waved and said “Ni-hou” in my best feigned Chinese accent. Some of the adults that I passed by also wore big smiles and were very happy to see a complete stranger this deep in their neighborhood. Other adults passed without even a glance. You know, it’s an amazing thing to see someone who seemingly has nothing, living in the small of a back alley with foul odors about, sharing a latrine with 5000 of their closest neighbors – still somehow this person understands the power of a smile. That’s someone with perspective. At 7pm, I met up with Quoc and his so very cute friend Florence to go to a nearby restaurant. Apparently, I was distracted by Florence’s cuteness and neglected to mention my distaste for cooked fish. This neglection became quite apparent when a huge stir fry pot of little 5” fishees (that would be the complete fishee, not just merely meat of fishee) arrived at the table. Attempting to show some sort of bravery, I offered to share it if the little fishees didn’t taste too fishy, but was told that the fishees were indeed quite fishy. So I stuck with the Peking duck, some tofu, and the yummy the cucumber appetizer. Then I headed back to the hotel to pack up and finally get some sleep. My apologies if I got too sappy a few paragraphs back. Bite me. But no worries – there is one more week to go! So you can look forward to another note in the coming week. Rest assured that I’m actively working on increasing the number of stamps in my passport. Tidbits 1. The Chinese language is really hard for a foreigner to learn. A different intonation of a word will be a different word, so you can’t really attempt to try to communicate out of a guidebook. And the Chinese characters are unlike anything that you are familiar with (unless you’re Chinese, Japanese or Korean). It’s a total feeling of helplessness, especially when you didn’t even bring a guidebook to begin with. My pointer here is that when traveling in China, bring your friendly neighborhood translator (also known as Liang). 2. You know you’re addicted to the internet when you log in to your work e-mail, just because you can. Some would say that it’s that I’m addicted to work – I honestly don’t think this is it. After going 4 years without knowing how to hook up to work from afar (this was on purpose), I finally caved and placed the phone call to IT support to reset my password for my SecureID and have them walk me through VPN (external access). And now I can’t stop checking work e-mail whenever I’m online checking my personal e-mail. I think there’s a reason I don’t normally take my work laptop home or on vacation. 3. Inner Mongolia is a state/province in China that coincidentally borders Mongolia. Outer Mongolia is the actual Mongolia, or as Quoc puts it, the part of Mongolia that China hasn’t gotten off its ass yet to go over and conquer. 4. If you’re interested, Quoc maintains his own blog on the web. His is shorter, but it has pictures. You can read about his off-the beaten-path trip to the Great Wall, and get Friday night’s story again. Or you can be loyal and just read mine. J www.quoctran.us/blog 5. I’ve seen two female taxi drivers in China already. I can’t remember the last time, if ever, that I saw a female taxi driver. Someone told me that Mao had two positive things that he did for the country: 1) women are treated much more as equals than in other Asian countries, and 2) he standardized the Chinese script being used around the country so that different dialects could still communicate. India could have learned from this. 6. Buses and planes are “Asian-sized” here. Even my knees touch the seat in front of me, and you all know how short I am. I’m glad my brother-in-law Chris isn’t here.