Flight Maps!

One of my main projects this spring involves conducting an analysis of airport traffic to see whether it makes a difference to have a rail connection to the airport. It's really fun and I'm enjoying the chance to construct and analyze my own personal dataset.

A byproduct of this is that the data I'm using to find out which airports are the busiest (the BTS Origin and Destination Survey) comes in origin-destination pairs, which I'm compiling to get the total number of airport users. But first, it offers me the chance to make my first maps with data!!!! I thought these were pretty cool, and they give me a chance to demonstrate my newfound prowress with Python graphics. First, an image of US flights in 2008:

This shows the top 500 or so actual trips made by planes. The width of the lines is proportional to the number of passengers traveling between two given airports. You can see the importance of hubs like Atlanta, Denver, and Dallas-Fort Worth, which are all really busy even though the cities they serve aren't that large. I thought it was neat to see all the airlines in one place, as opposed to the in-flight magazines which only show hubs for one or two airlines. When flying on Northwest, you would get the impression that MSP, Detroit, and Memphis were the largest airports in the country, and while that obviously wasn't the case, it was sort of hard to compare with airports serving other airlines. Still, it's pretty much what you might expect if you travel a fair amount.

The other map I made was a little harder to predict:

This one shows origin and destination pairs--where people are actually traveling to and from, not counting transfers. It only has the top 350 or so pairs, and I made a few changes to better illustrate some trends, mostly consolidating airports in cities with more than one, like New York and Chicago. You can see how different it is from the segments in the other map: it turns out that the main trend in US air travel is people going from the East Coast to Florida and the Southwest. It turns out that some of the busiest airports, like Atlanta, Dallas, and even Chicago to an extent, get most of their travel from people flying through them on their way to somewhere else. And whereas the flights give a fairly consistent net over most of the country (except Montana), the destinations are much more focused on the major centers of population and tourism.

Anyway, hopefully this info is interesting to other people. I know I had been curious about where people actually travel, and whether Atlanta really is that huge a destination. Now we know it's not, it's just the gateway to Florida (and most other places).

Whining about wine

When you get a chance, check out the "Environment" section of this month's National Geographic.  It's about the carbon footprint of shipping wine from major production regions to various major US cities, and you can see it here.  It's worth looking at for a few reasons:

1). The main point, which it makes dramatically, is transporting goods by truck, which is the most common way by far to move things in the US, is incredibly inefficient.  Moving a bottle of wine from Napa to New York by truck releases 4.4 pounds of CO2 versus just 0.9 to ship a bottle from Sydney to NYC.  It's roughly equivalent in terms of carbon to drink a bottle of wine trucked to NYC from upstate New York as it is to drink one shipped from Bordeaux.  

2). Also interesting is the backlash on some wine blogs, particularly those devoted to producing upscale wines in idyllic parts of California.  I googled the article to try to link to the graphic (they don't have it online! n00bs...), and turned up a bunch of  these blogs ranting about it, plus some very probing comments on the site of the guy who made it.  One of them even has a new graph that adds in the carbon emitted by sending a package of National Geographic magazines across the country :-).

It looks like they have some points--he wasn't entirely fair to California, assuming for example that all Australian wine started in Sydney instead of the countryside, and possibly assuming that wine shipped to the ports closest to its destination instead of checking where it actually goes.  I see their concern that now in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of slightly-informed National Geographic readers Californian wine is Bad For the Environment, while in real life it's less clear.  So I'm going to reconsider my initial impulse to chide them about pouncing on environmentalism the minute it touches fancy small-batch wine from California.  Mostly, though, we should stop flipping out about eating (or drinking, apparently) local for energy reasons, at least until we know what "local" and "far away" mean.  This was brilliantly expressed last year in Time.

I liked the original graphic mostly because of how it made the point that the distance food travels doesn't matter nearly as much as the way it travels.    If we really wanted to help the environment through infrastructure spending, and make ourselves much better set up for future prosperity, we would be seriously thinking about improving our freight rail connections. It's sort of crazy that we've let trucking overtake rail transport in this country, through a combination of auto/asphalt industry special interests and government policies that required railroads to run money-losing passenger trains (this makes me a little nervous about $40 billion high-speed passenger rail projects in California).  They had trains in the 40's that could ship food cross-country with less energy than we use today.  Families used to ship their refrigerators to their vacation homes for the summer, just because it was so cheap!  I really like the idea of taking a fast train from Minneapolis to Chicago, but I have to wonder if that option makes anywhere near the economic and environmental sense that investing the money in freight railroads would.

Specter and Swine Flu

Good reading:

On what to expect from the flu: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/opinion/28barry.html

And about the impact Specter's switch might have:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/specters-switch-more-insult-than-injury.html
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/why-specter-did-it----and-had-to-do-it.php

Drugs

Our topic in Latin American Politics this week. A bunch of recent developments, basically pointing to increased tolerance and possibly decriminalization of marijuana in the US, but continuing the main thrust of the War on Drugs in Latin America:

Marijuana now essentially legal in CA.
You can even go to school to grow it.
But our policy in Mexico is still more of the same, even under Obama..
Finally, a really detailed description of the whole process as of last summer.

Best line of the whole thing is from the third article: '“By supporting the Calderon administration in their fight with the cartels, we’re keeping it from becoming a fight on U.S. soil,” [Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard] explains. It’s not hard to see why someone like [Mexican journalist Lydia] Cacho would find that rationale unappealing."

China topic, with normal cringe-inducing US behavior

I hope we don't embarrass ourselves again....
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904u/shanghai-expo-2010

Doga

I'll refrain from comment.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/fashion/09fitness.html?em

Change in style: link-dumping

So I am well ensconced into normal school life now, learning about Latin America, the US, and Probability. Part of normal life means not enough time to condense my thoughts into the beautiful prose that you were reading over the course of last semester. Instead, I think I'm going to start using this as a more traditional blog, eg a way for me to disseminate the cool/interesting/important things that I read without having to interrupt all my friends' email lives.

Highlights from my google reader today:

1. This seems sort of disturbing. Did you know that Wyoming and Nevada are huge tax shelters, and even more secretive than Bermuda or Switzerland? Last week's Economist

2. Visualizations! This person's coming to Swat next week :-D

Mourning Show

Originally when I made this blog I was planning to keep it going after I left China, figuring that there were a lot of other interesting places to go and interesting things to see, that are probably way further off the radar and way easier to get to than China.  I haven't been doing that, but I'm still sort of hoping to. 

With that said, today was the last day of the Morning Show, on MPR .  I'm not really sure I can get across the full significance of this event for Minnesota commuters, musicians, acoustic music fans, and public radio listeners to anyone who hasn't lived here, but it's prettty significant.  

The Morning Show has been around since 1969--it was founded by Garrison Keillor, before he started doing his Prairie Home stuff--and has had its current hosts since 1983.  It's pretty simple: eclectic but warm and funny folk music, punctuated by satirical ads for things like the Sherpa SUV from Intimida ("It's a Mighty Big Car") or Genway genetically engineered supermarkets, and interviews with personalities ranging from pirates to high schoolers to life coaches, all voiced by the same incredible voice, Tom Keith.  As far as I can tell, essentially every member of the enormous and brilliant Twin Cities music scene--Peter Ostroushko, Greg Brown, Ann Reed, Pat Donohue, Peter Mayer, and sooo many more--was featured on the show at a fairly important time in his or her career.  

Anyway, I'm really sad about this, since listening to it while I take my sister to school is one of the things I look forward to when coming home.  So I thought I'd at least make a tribute.  You can listen here to the opening hour of the final show, which was recorded live starting at 6am today to a packed house that had begun gathering three hours earlier and featured reprises of all the major characters as well as appearances by many of the artists who have appeared on it over the ages.  The first few minutes give an idea of the range these people have, or you can skip to minute 39 to hear my favorite ad, from Intimida.  Or listen to the music!  And Dale Connelly, the man behind most of the content, will start doing an online radio service tomorrow on radioheartland.org. I can't recommend it enough. 

BJ Day 2

I have now been in Beijing for over 24 hours, and I still have yet to see a building that was built more than probably five years ago.  Actually, most of the places I've been are about 3 months old: today I went to the airport to pick up my family (hoooray!!!!), and then we toured around the Olympic venues some.  

Here are the highlights:

Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital Intl Airport.  This is probably the single most impressive infrastructure building I've ever been to.  You take an Airport Express subway train that goes right up to the front of it, then branches up and down for departures and arrivals.  Then you walk into this GIGANTIC hall, all open air and really beautiful and absolutely huge, where, in my case, you get a sandwich and read a guidebook while you wait for your family to arrive.

Walking up the axis of the city towards the Olympic green.  Note how HUGE this thing is, and also the large number of people.  Also check out what the kid is doing: besides flying a kite, he's riding on one of these two-wheeled skateboards that are really common here.  You get on it and balance some, and then move your feet back and forward to keep from falling and to propel yourself.  They look like a lot of fun, though I would guess it's a little tricky at first.

The Bird's Nest!  We didn't know that it had lights on the same theme.  Cool.

More Bird's Nest.  This gives a little bit of a sense for how ENORMOUS this thing is.  That seems to be the idea of the city. 

The Water Cube, a little bit before it lit up. Very cool stuff.

That's everything for the moment.  Tomorrow my Dad's going to a meeting, while the rest of us go off exploring somewhere.  Hopefully we'll decide where exactly in the next hour or so.  I'll try to keep you updated.

北京

I'm back. Sorry about the extremely long pause there; I was finishing off things in Kunming and didn't have that much time/inclination last week.  But now I have just arrived in Beijing, so I will possibly be back in form.  Hopefully I'll have some reflections on Kunming to post at some point pretty soon, but for now I want to talk about first impressions of this city.

1) It's BIG.  There are a lot of people living here, but more than that the place is massive.  I'd heard people say things along the lines of Beijing is built on a superhuman, rather than human, scale, and I'm definitely impressed that that is the case.  All the roads I've been on are 4-5 lanes each direction, and the blocks are gigantic.  I went walking for about forty minutes earlier, in a straight line, and literally crossed one street. 

2) It's pleasant.  I know that the pollution here is legendary, but I didn't see it today.  There was a huge brown pall that we had to descend through (I think it made the plane more turbulent than normal), but on the ground the sky was blue and absolutely gorgeous, just a little brown smudge on the horizon.  And it was cool! I forgot how much I love fall, but the air was that perfect crispness and it made me very, very happy.

3) It's inhabited by pirates!!! No joke.  I'd heard about the Beijing accent--it's actually what we studied, since my textbooks were printed here--but I still wasn't prepared to hear it spoken, especially by people who were being serious. Essentially, they add R's to the end of many, many words.  Literally multiple times a sentence. It's pretty awesome.  So you get people saying things like "Ni zairrrr narrrrrrrr??" or "Wo zhu zairrr zharrrrrrrr"  I approve :-).

The other nice thing about this place for me at the moment is that it's back in civilization. Kunming was a big city, but this is definitely more equipped with cushy pleasures.  Illustration:

--I just took a shower after dark using hot water that was not warmed by the sun.

--Then I pooped, sitting down, and flushed the toilet by pressing a button (not pouring a bucket of water in) and all of it disappeared.  What a sight.

--My clothes are currently in a dryer (granted, I'm paying $5 for the experience).

--I'm using high-speed wifi and have not had my connection suddenly disappear for over an hour.

:-D.  This stuff isn't really worth rejoicing over for very long, but it is kind of nice... 

Also I finally learned how to use my Chinese typing software correctly.  Yay! 所以现在我能写更多汉字！ I typed that so quickly, too!!!

Not China-related: Obama for Obama!

Yimei just shared an amazing photojournalism site with me.  I thought this one was pretty cool: Obama for Obama!!  For the record, this is NOT how you should decide in an election where you can actually vote. 

Otherwise, this has been a good week, though with little that is particularly striking.  Been going to class and having great times and nice conversations, and progressing some on everything but writing (I'm not going to be able to write in Chinese for a few more years, if ever).  Then hanging out with friends!  This has gotten much more common over the last few weeks, which I am very thankful for, though I wish I could have done it sooner.  But I'm seeing a pretty nice section of Kunming life, or at least Kunming expat life.  From my host family and their buds, to Chinese students at my institute (mostly studying languages and language-teaching, with plans to study abroad in Thailand or Oklahoma) to lots of people from SE Asia here on scholarship, many of whom speak incredible Chinese (Thais especially for some reason, plus they speak good English, and sometime Korean, or French, or.. ), to my old classmates, who I now talk to in a mix of pidgin English and two-month-level Chinese.  

Then there are other Americans and Europeans, like the people at frisbee (though this is changing: we now have a bunch of Chinese players who started watching and got intrigued!  One day Kunming will be the leader of an All-China Ultimate League :-), and finally I've spent some time with the established Kunming Laowai, people who came here and have set up businesses and created lives.  I ran into the people who are sort of employing me the other day, and had a drink with them and the owner of a couple restaurants in town.  That was really interesting--he has an incredible Indian place along with a pub/library, plus he does runs into Laos to 'import' Beer Lao, which is widely known among expats for being waaay better than anything local (I liked it ok, but my beer palate is not particularly experienced).  It was sort of interesting to see how people adjust to this place long-term, and I'm curious to know how they end up here--was it some sort of plan, or were they just hanging around for a while and finally decided the hostel was getting old?  I definitely am impressed at the sort of hodge-podge of work that most people undertake: my employers, for example, run the GoKunming website as well as two or three others (China City Listings! Check it out!).  Then they work for Fodor's Guidebooks, keeping the chapters on SW China up to date.  And they do some consulting work for right now the China Economic Quarterly.  Plus they've been in several movies, frequently getting their brains blasted all over the TV. Basically if something comes up that looks sort of cool, they jump on it, even if it's different from anything they've ever done.  I kind of like that style.  It works is that the pool of capable people who are native speakers of English and also can get by in Chinese is pretty tiny here, especially people who are here long term and have free time.  But the random stuff it's possible to find doesn't pay on the order of first-world jobs, so you have to take whatever you can get. 

Beyond that, I'm reading a lot and relaxing some.  Not a bad time at all. 

Shilin

Yesterday morning I woke up bright and early at 5.45 for the earliest and longest day trip from Kunming yet: Shilin, the Stone Forest, which is a collection of upended rocks about 80 miles from here. Excellent day.

The reason for the early departure is that the friend I was going with wanted to take the train, of which there are two a morning. But this was worthwhile, since I figured taking a train is an important China Experience. It turns out it was, too. To me, the train felt much more Communist than most of the rest of the country I’ve been seeing. It’s big and mechanical for one thing, and the conductors wear semi-military uniforms:

Taking the train.

Inside things are Spartan, but practical: the interiors consist of rows of slightly padded benches and tables, and are filled with Chinese people headed home. Plus it’s democratic: the 120 km trip cost us each a total of 8 yuan, about $1.10. And while we’re at it, might as well mention that this one at least was remarkably slow and stopped frequently (though these were planned, and we arrived exactly on schedule, three hours after we began). So all in all it was different from planes, which have been straight out of the first world, and buses, which remind me more of my trips around Latin America. This one was second world, in the old sense of the word.

Once we got near Shilin, we began to see weird lumps of rock sticking out of the cornfields (actually not corn, but ‘fields’ sounds strange by itself to me by now :-). This place is sort of Fountain inverted: instead of limestone sinkholes dropping out of the earth every so often, there are limestone towers sticking up from it. As we approached the park itself, they got bigger and bigger. On arriving at the park itself, we found we had been beaten by approximately eighty buses of tourists, but that the place had been neatly paved and sanitized for our convenience. We paid our 100 kuai (ouch! And that was with student discounts!) to get in, and tried to find a way out of the shouting throngs.

Sorry this is blurry, but I wanted to show what we were dealing with. At least everybody stays on the paths...

However, eventually we made it out of the crowds by turning off the main street. In that sense Chinese and American tourists are remarkably similar: they all want to be in exactly one place, and if you can put just one corner between you and them, you’re golden. We started to explore entirely on our own (still on paved trails! Though admittedly these ones involved some pretty impressive contortions.

Into the Woods.

The best way I can think of to describe the rocks is to imagine a cross between Bryce and Peek-a-Boo Canyons, only done in white instead of red. And two-dimensional: unlike Bryce, which forms the edge of a plateau, and Peek-a-Boo, which is basically a stream, this place spreads out in all directions, covering a huge area. It was just tower after gigantic tower, with tiny cracks between them that we climbed through. Here go some of our adventures:

Rocks rocks everywhere!

Looking up.... yes, that's the trail we're walking on.

Ooohhh...


This was NOT allowed, but he did look pretty awesome.

Pretty sweet, no? I liked it a lot. Unfortunately, we only had one day and couldn’t explore the whole thing. After extracting ourselves (a significant challenge!) and holding our breaths and noses through the front, crowded part, we made our way to a nearby town called Lunan, where there’s a market on Saturdays. That was great fun to explore—I bought a collection of the sweetest cookies I think I’ve ever had, plus a new type of fruit and some pomegranates—and afterward we got lunch at a noodle place. Hen hao chi: I got a bowl of cold, thick rice noodles, which a bunch of types of spices and sauces and veggies. It cost forty cents.

Then it was time to head back to Kunming. We approached a person on the street and asked where the bus station was. But instead of giving us directions and heading on her way, she said she would take us there herself. Then she called out to a friend who was about to bike away, and told us to get on the backs of their bikes. I got on the friend’s bike, and watched as the other two sped away. But I was a little heavier than my new guide, and after wobbling for a couple meters, she said it wasn’t going to work. So we tried me in front, which worked a little better (except that she almost collapsed under my backpack; I should work on lightening it a bit), but didn’t last us all the way. So eventually we had to walk; meanwhile the other two were nowhere to be found and she didn’t know where the bus station was. By the time we’d asked people and figured it out and actually gotten there, she was not amused with her friend.

We took the bus back to Kunming, and this was another highlight, because we had a really good conversation about everything from airlines to social economic class in Korea and the US to interracial relationships and multiracial children, which I was able to talk about for a while, possibly longer than she intended..

Eventually we made it back home, through rush hour, and to school almost exactly twelve hours after we left. Not bad at all.

The rest of Shangri-La!

These are terribly, terribly overdue--I got back from our trip exactly two weeks ago--so I'm sorry about that. But in the effort to actually get them up I think I'm going to cut back on narrative. Basically we went bike riding in a neighboring valley that was full of active Tibetan villages and was super beautiful and awesome, and then the next day we went to the monastery, which was awesome but discovered. Not bad at all.

----------------------

Here goes:

This is the valley we explored. You get an idea of lots of scattered houses, and big spaces in between.

A typical resident. Amazing, beautiful, possibly sad.

The northern end of the valley floods during summer to create Napa Lake, a huge shallow bird sanctuary.

Pretty cool, huh? We couldn't stay off of that causeway after seeing it from this angle..

Day two, we went to the monastery. Here we're looking back toward town. Gives a sense of the city. I liked this place.


This is the monastery. It's something like the second or third biggest one, with about 700 monks there now (including some cute kid monks!). Unfortunately for us it draws a crowd worthy of its awesomeness, at least during National Day.

These are the kinds of houses that surround the monastery. Except for the occasional satellite dish, you really don't see much sign that they've changed in the last couple centuries.. Though I suppose that could be said about a lot of houses at home, too.


We decided to climb the hill overlooking the monastery, mostly because it was there and we didn't have any better ideas, but it turned out to be a good call.This is looking back towards the lake we had visited the day before. Pretty impressive from this angle..


This is what we found at the top. You might not be able to see, but there were two Snow Mountains on the horizon, absolutely amazing glinting in the sun. Gave us a glimpse into yet another world.

Day to day life

Let’s see.. Cool thigns that have happened recently:

--Yesterday night I went to a party! Two of my better friends—a Japanese guy and his Zambian roommate—had a giant “Riben Cai” (Japanese food) party. They invited more than 20 people over to their apartment, and cooked a huge pot of rice and soup. It was great food, but the really excellent part was the mix of people. For the most part they were foreign students, but hailing from all over. I was the only American, and then there were one or two English and Canadians, and then 1-2 people each from Costa Rica, Korea, Estonia, Thailand, Vietnam, Austria, Estonia, and Japan, plus several Chinese. And everybody was speaking a mix of English and Chinese, adjusted so that beginners could understand. It was really cool, and probably the most widespread crowd I’ve hung around with in a while.

--This is the time of year for grad students to plan out and approve their final papers. My host Dad is a management professor, and I just came home to find him interviewing two students.. it was sort of neat to see him in his teacher roll: I think of him as this funny and fun older guy, very friendly, very low key and easily pleased (hooray! You got a word right!). But here he was going over their ideas pretty thoroughly and asking them lots of questions and to explain things etc.

Similarly, both of my Chinese teachers are grad students, so yesterday and today they had their meetings with advisors to decide if they are on the right track. But the cool part for me was asking them about their topics. One of them is doing her report on really specific local languages in one county a little north of Dali. In that one place, a subset of Dali prefecture, which is a subset of Yunnan province, there are about six established minority cultures. So diverse. So she’s looking at their languages and how they are different in that one tiny spot. My other teacher is a literature major, so she’s looking at the writings of ____, who is basically the the second Daoist. But she’s not as into his ideas as his style, which is very distinctive and really beautiful. So she’s doing basically an analysis of why he chose to write like that and how it influenced future literature. It was really cool to hear about these, because they reminded me so much of assignments we might get at Swat. My Chinese teachers are intellectual academics too!

--On Tuesday I went over to the other university for a change of location, since it’s a lot bigger and quite a bit prettier on the whole. But it was cool because I met a random Bangladeshi guy and talked to him a bit. Apparently there’s 4-5 Bangladeshis in Kunming, all of whom are going to be here for 4 years, studying first Chinese and then other subjects. I was pretty impressed, and it was neat to talk to him about China, Bangladesh, and the US. He said that trade between the former two is growing like crazy, and I think that Bangladesh is starting to have factories—perhaps the next China? But as yet there are no road connections, even though it’s not that far overland. Burma and NW India in the way, though. I’m curious if that will ever materialize. Right now they’re just finishing a superhighway into Laos, which will make it possible to drive from Kunming to Bangkok in about a day and a half. Somehow that’s incredible for me to contemplate. I was also impressed at the effect of British influence on South Asia..

This is cool

Air Traffic Worldwide 24HR from kouko a on Vimeo.

Big Macs and late night wanderings

So this evening I met up with a guy who shared a room with us in Shangri-La.  He's on his 4th month out of six, and has been for quite the ride: started in Western Europe, made his way over to Russia and then across the Trans-Siberian Railway to Ulaanbaator, from there through China, and now tomorrow onto Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia before flying home from Singapore in December.  So that's cool, and it was fun to talk to him again, but it also furnished some new Kunming experiences:

1). We ate at McDonalds!! I normally don't really go for the "I've been out of the country for sooo long; I need a Big Mac now!" type thing, but his mind was made up--supposedly no McD's in Vietnam--and I have to admit that it tasted pretty good.  I'm not actually sure if I've ever had a Big Mac at home, but burger, fries, and coke were all welcome here.  And eating all of this sitting on the second floor of an absolutely franchised McDonalds, looking out over the downtown walking district with all of its neon signs and talking with this friend from New York was pretty surreal; I felt like I was in some random modern American city.  Globalization.....

2). I have to mention this because I'm an economics student: Big Mac Index!!!  And I can confirm that in real life, I paid 22 kuai for a Super Sized (well, not really by US standards, thank goodness) Big Mac Meal.  By nominal exchange rates, that's just under $3.  I'm having trouble finding American prices online now (probably because they vary from state to state), but next time you visit the Golden Arches you can see for yourself if the Yuan is as undervalued as everybody likes to claim (if it's undervalued relative to the dollar, the Big Mac will be cheaper--in dollars--here than at home.  In a perfectly 'flat' world, the Big Macs would cost the same everywhere, since they're more or less identical no matter which country they're produced and consumed in.  If currencies are all valued 'correctly,' a given amount of money in one currency should always buy the same amount of stuff as its equivalent in another currency, since they're worth the same amount.  But in real life things don't always work like that.. ).

3).  After an interlude of ping pong and movie, I ended up walking home pretty late at night (why I'm still up writing this even though I have class in 7 hrs).  That was a sort of good experience: I was kind of nervous, but even at midnight there was lots of activity on the streets (more than any American city during the day, hah), and tons of policeman on almost every corner.

4). However, when I got to my university, I found the gate closed and locked!! Aaaahh!!  Luckily, that was only the main one; they have an interesting system of locking some gates, keeping attendants at others, and leaving still others wide open.  Whatever works, I guess.  After some scared wanderings, I called my host dad and he came to get me (felt bad about this, esp since he tipped a guard on the way back). So everything worked out ok, but I think the lesson is to check the curfew before you leave in the future.

Weekend, Part 1!

The weekend! It ended up being pretty awesome, though through no real fault of my own.

Starting with Saturday, I woke up around 10 with no real plans, a little nervous about being bored all day. But then I got a call from my English teacher friend, who said that some young friends of hers were interested in going to the movies with me! I assumed that she meant the teenager who went to the park with us last time, but I got to the entrance of the university with my bike and found two people waving back at me who I recognized not at all.

But we had a great time! They were both highschoolers, and led me downtown while talking about school, Kunming, my plans, etc. Then we went to the Brothers Jiang for lunch, which is a chain of guoqiao mixian restaurants. Yum yum. After that, a run to the grocery store for beer (China = no drinking age), and then to the movie theater, where we saw Painted Skin. It’s a movie based on an old legend about this demon who stays in a house disguised as a beautiful woman in the hope of coming between a general and his wife. She causes tons of trouble and lots of deaths, but in the end even though he loves her he is faithful to his real wife, and in the end she give up and turns into a cat and brings all the main characters back to life. It was advertised as a horror movie, and when I saw the posters I was not excited at all (most of it was taken up by this woman who was entirely white and crying blood out of her eyes), but it turned out to be more about action and jokes than terror. Good deal.

So that was one really fun positive experience out of the blue. Another one, slightly less unforeseen, came a couple hours later. I got a call from my Macalester friend, asking if I wanted to get dinner so I could give him back his movie and waterbottle. We ended up going to a Muslim place (there are lots of Hui, Chinese Muslims, here), where we got a dish called Hui Mian, “Muslim Noodle.” That what it is, and the singular is correct. It’s basically a tomato soup with some veggies and beef and other things at a good level of spiciness, and one long, long homemade noodle (my guess would be it was 5 feet by half an inch). It was cool: we could see them making the noodles at the table in front of us, and they were probably the best I’ve ever had (that’s not saying a ton coming from me, but they (it, I suppose) were excellent).

We got talking to a guy who was sharing our table (friends with really really good Chinese skills!) and ended up hanging out with him afterward. He took us to an arcade! This was my first experience with Chinese arcades, and I’d say it was pretty positive. Mostly, it was a lot like American arcades, with lots of videogame machines spread around a room. Even a lot of the same ones: they had House of the Dead, which I think was pretty much required for an arcade license (if such things exist) at one point. Then a lot of the late 80’s/early 90’s 2D fighting and shooter ones. The one major difference that I noticed, though, was that EVERYTHING WAS FREE. I’m still not sure how that worked, but we went in looking for where to get tokens etc, and our friend told us that they don’t cost money, and in fact none of them did. A pretty nice deal.

After that, we went back to the movies and saw the beginning of Wanted, which a lot of friends at Caltech loved this summer. I didn’t know much about it, except that it was about a Fraternity of Assassins (they saw it while I was watching WALL-E). I was impressed, though we had to leave early bc someone wasn’t feeling well.

Thoughts on Chinese movie theaters, since I didn’t say that above: mostly, lots of variation, if the two I saw were any sample. The first one, downtown, was pretty much what I expected from the US, the only difference being that it had six floors and that we had assigned seats. But the second one was a little different. The room was tiny, with seats maybe for 20 people. The seats were basically just cushy chairs covered in red fabric, arranged in rows. One thing I thought was pretty clever: in addition to normal, one-person seats, they also had two person love seats, perfect for snuggling up close to someone. And they thoughtfully put those in the back rows, with singles up closer to the screen ;-).

That was Saturday. I’m going to pause now and read some (big excitement of the past week was finding all these used book stores) plus maybe study a bit. I’ll fill in about Sunday, hopefully with pictures, in the somewhat near future I hope, and I also still owe you the second half of Shangri-La…..

Shangri-La

Yes, it’s real. Now. This was definitely the climax of our trip, to the point that prior to leaving we were both viewing Dali and Lijiang almost as things to be endured in order to get here. Definitely wasn’t fair in retrospect, but I think our excitement was pretty much justified.

This started on the bus ride up from Lijiang. The road was definitely one of the more spectacular I’ve ever driven (or rather, been driven on, thank goodness). Basically, significant portions of it involved climbing up the sides of what must have been almost as deep a gorge as the one we had visited the day before. This twisty road snaking up amazingly deep and steep and spectacular valleys, with our bus feeling slightly to large for the job.

A view out the bus window. Whoa.

To add to the thrill we saw not one but four accidents on the 150km journey, including one car that had flipped completely. Scary.

Once we got to the city, we dropped our stuff at our hotel, thankfully booked long in advance—the entire city was full, to the point that they had set up a checkpoint on the road and were turning back anyone without a reservation. Then we started our explore.

The view from our hotel window. I liked our spot a lot.

Two defining features of Shangri-La: 1) it is at 3200 meters, more than 10,000 feet above sea level, which means that it gets chilly quick but also that the air has that special, high-altitude feeling to it that I love. Though it doesn't translate into gigantic snowcapped peaks directly overlooking the city, as you might assume from the name it has adopted. 2) Even though it’s still a couple hundred kilometers from the border, it’s more or less a Tibetan city. This means all the signs have a third language (and a third alphabet :-) on them.

I thought that only tiny towns in the interior west did this!! I was pretty excited at the Tibetan version :-).

Tibetan also means that yak—literally, “plateau beef”—meat, milk, and butter is easily had everywhere. This was how we started our exploration: headed to a recommended restaurant and ordered a big pitcher of butter tea. Those of you who’ve had this delicacy before may know what’s coming. Basically, we saw the much larger pitcher available for only five kuai extra and figured we’d try it—we’re pretty thirsty, right? I know I can drink a fair amount of tea. Little did we know how serious the ‘butter’ part of it is. The tea is great, sort of sour at first but then quite creamy. Quite, quite creamy. After two cups each, we were both stuffed, to the extent that we had to force down the excellent dishes we’d ordered and couldn’t even contemplate another sip. Uff.

After that adventure, we actually walked around some. Both of us liked the town a lot: it somehow felt (perhaps inaccurately, but I don’t think so) much more like a real place than either Dali or Lijiang. Our hotel was two blocks from the central square of old town, but still the road more or less disappeared about 20 ft further on and turned into a grassy track that climbed a hill up to a pagoda.

Looking down on the city from the hill right above our lodging.

On the other side were lots more old houses in a sort of village, with cows and pigs wandering around and people doing farm work in Tibetan clothing (big pink headdresses). Futher up the hill is a another pagoda with a commanding view of the town, and beyond that is a real live monastery/temple, complete with prayer flags:

Yeah, this is how they work in real life. I’d like to see you do that in your dorm room.

The first day we just walked around old town buying souvenirs (our standard first day on this trip; it’s convenient but I still don’t know how I feel about buying the stuff before you’ve seen the place). But at one point we were walking through the square and I heard someone shout “Robert!” Turns out it was a couple of friends from Frisbee, who had amazingly also decided to go to NW Yunnan for the fall break. So we spent most of the evening with them, in large part because among their ranks was one person with not one month but two full years of Chinese under his belt, who thus could order confidently from restaurants, ask people not just for directions but recommendations on what to do, and a whole host of other incredibly useful things that we probably would have benefited from on our journey. He’s also a cool story because he goes to Macalester and had the same thought process as me: “Wait, we have to pay full tuition to study abroad? How about I pay the $1000 Chinese tuition instead, and go to Kunming because it has better weather and less pollution?”

Anyway, in their company we went to a plateau beef restaurant and had an amazing meal consisting of yak prepared in a variety of ways with a variety of vegetables. It was a good time, not just because of the food and company but also because the restaurant was a far cry from the ones we’d been frequenting. It was a little hole in the wall that didn’t have menus; you just pointed at the specific vegetables you wanted and said which ones you wanted yak with. And then they cook it all up for you, and it ends up costing 22 kuai a person for a gigantic meal with eight or so plates, and butter tea. Awesome.

Following that, we decided to get a movie. We had a pretty involved search for a DVD store that was still open, but these are the kinds of things you can do with a decent command of the language! I got there a little after the first people, and this is what I found in their hands:

Yes, Harry Potter VS. Lord of the Rings. Tell me that’s not worth coming to China for.

Everybody was pretty pumped, but the problem was that they weren’t going less that 15 kuai. That was a little more than we were willing to pay, but the concerted efforts of six people weren’t enough to drop them below ten. We tried every trick in the book, even invoking our status as students to get it down to seven (I later used this to great effect on a ‘yak’ leather belt, even bringing out my Yunnan Normal University ID to get the last 10 kuai off), but they weren’t budging. So eventually we counted out 9.50 in exact change, gave it to them, and headed for the door. They laughed and let us go, but not before trying one last time to bring it up to 9.80. Definitely a good bargaining experience. The movie itself didn’t live up to its case unfortunately, and turned out to be just a compilation of a bunch of the films, no real combat involved. Still, the concept alone was worth it.

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I think I'm going to leave off there for now, because this is already getting long and it's already getting late. More on what we actually did coming up in the hopefully near future.

An afternoon

So today had some good experiences:

1)  I voted!! Or at least have the ballot and am ready to vote and mail it off tomorrow.  Yay!!! I went with Minnesota, which means that I get to vote for Obama and Franken and Tim Walz (tipping my hand here; oops :-/), so I'm pretty excited.  I'm slightly pessimistic about whether my vote will make it because: a) There's a decent chance it won't make it to Minnesota by the 4th, given that I'm still waiting on a package here that was sent more than three weeks ago; b) even if it does, you're supposed to put the same passport/drivers license/SSN that you gave them in the application, and I don't remember which one I used; and c) I printed out the ballot on 8x11 normal letter paper, but it's supposed to be bigger and it's an optical ballot.  Also I don't have a black marker to use with it.  So we'll see, but this is still exciting.

2)  I got a new thumbdrive.  Not particularly great, but what was cool about this one is:

--It's 4G, so 8 times as big as my old one.

--It will mostly likely work, even without being propped up into the USB slot.  And it has a cap!

--I bought it from some random stand that appeared this morning beside (on?) the railroad tracks by my school.

--I paid 70 kuai for it, about $10.  I'm glad I didn't end up going for the 8G $80 one at Best Buy last summer.

3) I got to hang out with some of my former classmates, which was great fun and consisted of a nice mix of English, Chinese, and Vietnamese (which was cheating since only two people could understand it, but...).  At one point this involved this Japanese guy lighting a cigarette, putting on his paper boy  hat, and scampering up a nearby tree to impersonate a monkey.  Great fun :-). AND I met a new Chinese friend who is cool and just started university here.  Also, we were hanging out later with one of her friends and I ended up looking through their English text, and one section was on "Writing Emails."  It was awesome: covered the use of all caps and emoticons to emphasize points, and lots of parenthetical statements.  And then for the exercises they had to take letters and change them to sound more like emails.  Very nice, and actually I think a pretty useful lesson (see this blog post).

4) Said Chinese pengyou took me to a used bookstore because she wanted to buy English books to read.  I was pretty pessimistic: looking at the racks, it was alll Chinese and mostly textbooks, except for one copy of Bass Guitar for Dummies. But the owner started digging and pulled up 8-10 English books, mostly from the 70's (a biography of Getty, a discussion of the future from a Cornell prof written in 1970, the third Space Odyssey book..).  But then he whipped out from nowhere Longitude, which I liked a lot and recommend highly, and Complications, the one book I started and wanted to read this summer, but couldn't for a string of reasons.  I sort of jumped and exclaimed when I saw it, which they laughed at, and then bought it for $2.  Nice.

So yeah, a good afternoon, even though the frisbee people switched locations and didn't tell me so I ended up missing that.  We'll see how the rest of the week develops......

On toilets..

Kate just put up a post venting about squat toilets (she's pretty much on target by the way; I still can't balance properly in a squat that leaves an opening without using at least one hand for balance, and I've been told that people of European descent are literally not flexible enough to hold that position for any length of time. I'm not the person to test that out on (Nastia Liukin, maybe?), but it's definitely true in my experience), and seeing it gave me the opening I've been looking for to discuss a different feature of bathrooms that I discovered on our trip: the no poop toilet.

This was not something I had anticipated. Basically the state of plumbing in many restaurants here is such that the pipes can’t handle anything more solid than urine, so they have screens over the drain and signs warning you off. The first time I saw one of these—it was along the lines of “Please No Defecating in Toilet”—I was a little puzzled (“Are you shitting me?” hahahah). But later ones made it more clear: “No Shitting;” “Our plumbing is old and will not last if subjected to stool;” “Please do not poop in the toilet”. Wait, what? Don't poop in the toilet?? Where are you supposed to poop then?? Even Salvador’s, the nerve center of Western life in Kunming, doesn’t take any crap from its customers--you have to pay 50 yuan if you accidentally poop in their toilet.

I guess what you should take from this is that you shouldn't necessarily go for restaurants in China if you need a quick dump, but rather stomach the half kuai and go for a public trench-type establishment. Also that I'm more amused by this kind of thing than I should be.

Ok, I've done two posts a day for two days straight. You people are going to get spoiled.