From OUTER MONGOLIA

A blackout in town today (Moron, if you have a good map of Mongolia, in the north central region south of the Khovsgul Lake area) caused us to have no water and I went spinning out looking for a good place to put down the prunes I had recently procured (try an all meat diet for two weeks or more, interspersed with cheese and bread and see if it doesn't happen to you too)

Finally, in a moment of brilliant desperation, I found the high school had an excellent outhouse sitting outside in the middle of what would be the playground, 'wired in series' so to speak....I wonder what the atmosphere would be like here during the school season.

And you thought you'd escape the usual traveler's tales of bowel movements, from the safety of the internet....

gotta cut it here, I'm on a 37.2 kbps modem....

And some more horsey shots here.

Are they wild or not? I suppose the term 'wild horse' in Mongolia is reserved for the horse's ancestor, better known as the Przewalski Horse - but it is possible that this is a group of Feral Horses, the likes of which can also be found in the western U.S., Australia, and Western Ireland...

If you look closely (click to enlarge) you can see the duct tape (undoubtedly Korean-made green duct tape) reinforcing the arrows and the bow itself of this ceremonial archer during the opening ceremony of the archery contest of Nadaam. I thought I had seen all the possible uses of duct tape, but it seems as if we never will.

Horsing around

Trying to deal with my equinophobia, as I prepare for a little horsing around here in Mongolia. The trick is to get out to the outback and rent your horses there, but without western saddles, I wonder how long I'll be able the hard wooden frames of the traditional setup.

Do you think my hat is big enough?

The Last Medieval Festival in the World

The Nadaam festival. Ulan Bataar, Mongolia
It's so incongrous, that I would be sitting here in front of a terminal, air conditioned room, sipping my fermented horse's milk, wondering what medieval viand I'll end up eating for dinner- Lamb Kebab, or roast beef....

I need to back up a bit, and give some background - after finishing my students grades and posting a copy to them, I hopped my flight Sunday, getting to the airport in record time. I even managed to get the 'bulkhead' seat - actually the emergency door aisle- that is so coveted among die hard air travellers. It seemed as if everything was going so well.

I surfed internet until the last boarding minute, then ran down the corridor and got into my spacious leg-room-enough-for-a-basketball-player seat, basking in the warm smiles of the Korean Air flight attendants, and started drinking my last Hoegarden beer. I had also brought a tub of homemade Shrimp Gumbo (in honor of Bubba on Forrest Gump) and some homemade cheese. It was going to be a great flight.

The man in the aisle across from me appeared to be Mongolian. At least that is what I assumed from the evidence: his skin was sunburnt and wrinkled, and he seemed to be uttering gibberish, from a Korean linguistic perspective anyways. Mongolian has that half-russian, half Korean sound to it, and is one of the aurally most dense languages I've heard in my travels.

He smelled of spirits, and strong ones at that. Fine, I reasoned...the man has a reason to celebrate...he's returning home in triumph after having made good money in Korea, and he's just in time for his country's national Festival - what better reason could there be to celebrate?

I assured the very worried looking stewardess that the worst was over, but he kept escalating the situation, getting louder and more belligerent, throwing things and finally grabbing my wrist in a death-grip, I reacted without thinking and bent his elbow around backwards and said quietly 'Stop!'

The man finished the flight handcuffed to a flight attendant's chair in the galley. The police were waiting at the airport and he seemed as amused as ever. I'm not sure what the moral to the story is, but I suppose I got off quite lucky, only having a slightly marred flight experience - at the same time, a friend of mine was 'attacked by a maniac with a tire iron' while enjoying Beijing and wrote me from the hospital. Yes, travel CAN BE dangerous.

Starbucks: Saturday Afternoon. Coffee Junkies in their usual garb.

Let's get a little closer - Hey! what's that girl doing to that Mac?

And a little closer...Oh my God, she's got a knife!...and she's disembowelling her laptop!

Wow! Nice RAM chips.....I mean, nice hands!

Dans L'Escalier

Two rather odd things happened on my afternoon out in Planet Itaewon. For those readers not familiar with life in Korea, I'll attempt to explain the phenomenon that is Planet Itaewon.

P.I. is a neighborhood, formally known as Itaewon-dong in Korean, that has been the traditional zone in which foreigners were allowed to conduct business. Now that Korea has pretty much opened up to the outside world, terms like 'foreigner's quarter' are pretty much historical - though it still does retain an international flavor that other neighborhoods now popular with foreigners, does not have.

Unfortunately, Itaewon is something of a ghetto, if not a textbook caricature of the same. There is a standing mafia, a pretty corrupt police force, substandard housing, and the collection of unpleasant characters that one usually associates with ghettos. On top of this rather unsavory structure is laid an American army base (the headquarters of the US forces Korea) with it's attendant prostitution industry, fist fights in the streets at midnight, and other general ugliness I'd rather not go into here.

Suffice it to say I generally avoid the place, which is actually quite difficult these days, as the place has gentrified somewhat since the nineties, sporting some nicer pubs with imported brews; I've also got some die-hard friends who seem unable to accept the idea that they live in a ghetto, and worst of all, it is the only place in the country that reliably carries my shoe size.

I was there this Saturday with my friend Peter, whose leg is in a rather sci-fi looking black brace, with knobs and levers and buttons that say "Don't Push!". Peter has lived here nearly a decade, the leg brace is a new affect, a gift of a recent scooter accident. He's a decent sort, so much so, that he's the only person I will befriend who has some yuppie traits, like hanging out in the Starbucks all weekend or complaining about Supersizing racism at the Burger King.

There was Peter, in his usual chair, swilling the joe and proofing his latest book about idioms, English Oxygen. There was a new character there as well, a voice talent named Andrew. He had a nice way with words, and we lost no time in verbally abusing the fashion sensibilities of the stream of punters who were filing past us to get their daily drug.

It was in this spirit that we found ourselves, taking the piss out of anything and everything, everyone and anyone, that when a comely young lass came in with a Mac Laptop (sorry, I know it has another name in MacSpeak, but I'm a hopeless PChead) and began disassembling it with a Swiss Army knife (called a 'McGiver knife here). SEE PICTURES ABOVE (clickable)

I mean, it wasn't so much the fact that she was kind of good looking, or a female, so much as of all the incongruous activities one can engage in in a coffeeshop, this has pretty much got to take the cake. I guess Mactops are pretty easy to swap RAM on, or the girl is something of an industry insider - I would never take my laptop apart with a knife in a public place, let alone in a private dust-free NASA facility - but that's just me.

Peter leans over and starts engaging in MacTalk, Backtalk, or something else, but he seems to be getting somewhere, most likely because he already has a girlfriend ( a beauty, at that). That must have been what encouraged me and Andrew, for I leaned over and started snapping the pictures above, but Andrew leaps out of his chair, rushes over and says 'Would you mind if I join you....in a relationship?' It was a kind of pickup line, undeniably, a little flippant, possibly crass to some - but certainly not what I would call a verbal assault.

The friend of the girl reacted before she could: "This is why white guys have a bad name in Itaewon" she intoned angrily, in what had to have been a native-speaking American accent. There was a lot of hostility which apparently had been built up over time, over similar incidents...

Not being a ghetto resident or frequenter, I shut my trap (for I had also been one of those caught snickering red-handedly at the boldness and audacity of it all) but there was a very, very thick silence which suddenly lay over that little region of the coffeeshop, like the moment in Western movies before a barroom gunfight. It was as though we were awaiting the inevitably deadly verbal fallout from this pre-emptive nuclear strike...

Later, mulling this over at home, it reminded me of something I once witnessed at a bar in San Francisco, a total stranger had come in and given this girl sitting next to me (also a stranger) a deep French kiss. It was so sudden, so unexpected, and so totally 'Not Found In the Manual' kind of situation that the girl actually had a beatific 'I enjoyed it' kind of face before she recovered and started protesting her rights, and shooting us at the bar dirty looks for laughing as a reaction, which she interpreted as encouraging such acts.

Yes, in some ways the two things were the same - cultural mishaps, both intra and intercultural in dimension.

And now, I've been suprressing the whole reason why I wrote about this incident. The title of this post refers to a borrowed French idiom which means literally 'On the Stairs' - it refers to verbal retorts, which never seem to occur to one in time, clever answers to a remark only occur to one as they are leaving, or 'on the stairs' on the way out.

Here's my 'dans l'escalier' then, it's not all that brilliant, but at least I can shout out from the safety of my blog, and of the time past:

IT'S GIRLS LIKE YOU THAT ALLOW TIRED STEREOTYPES TO LIVE IN BIG HOMES AND DRIVE FANCY CARS!

Actually, I should say 'Remarks like that' instead of 'Girls like you', because otherwise I just participate in the Stereotype Slaughterhouse Circus, but I can't help but feeling miffed at this sort of Bobbitting behavior which threatens to emasculate any male showing any attention to a woman whatever.

I know from my own experience, from receiving unwanted attention from Gay men among others, from being the recipient of suggestive comments that are unprintable here, that someday we will all be grateful for the attention now long gone. When we are all old, wrinkled and alone (I've already got 2 out of 3) we will pine for that shining moment of misplaced affection, which doesn't make us any smaller, doesn't cost money, or bring us under crosshairs of any kind. They're just WORDS, after all, for chriminey sakes!

Sticks and Stones will break my bones...

But the IRS can really hurt me.

Ciao, Pax everybody as I go to discover Mongolia and the deepest lake in the world.

Do you see anything strange about this young man about to get on a bus? (my bus from Vang Vien to the Capital) - Look closely. Then scroll down.

Now do you see it? Look at where his right hand is in his jacket pocket. Now look below. It's an AK-47 (I think), and he's been assigned to protect the bus from bandits. Cool, isn't it? On this road there hadn't been any attacks this year (yet).

flip flops, anyone? a market stall in one of my haunts near Chun-ge-Chun

LINT

Yes, this represents a new, all-time low in the ephemeral and irrelevant world of blogging- posting a picture of your sock lint.

You see, this lint has come to symbolize my life. Let's just back up for a minute and reflect on where lint comes from:

Lint comes from your skin rubbing your clothing, or your shoes rubbing your socks, like my Doc Martens did to my socks. In case you don't wear 'Docs', the leather uppers are stiff and cardboard-y, so from the action of my heel slapping, tiny, individual fibers are pulled away from the warp and woof and they fall to the bottom of the shoe, where they join other fibers and are matted by the hammer of my heel into lint.

Although you could look at my overpriced Docs as little lint factories, pounding out their products across my foot-miles, another way to see lint is to consider what the bhuddists like to call the Precept of Impermanence - all things must pass, all beings are mortal, even rocks give way to time, etc. To put it simply, lint is clothes death.

As I rushed around on this Friday, the last day of the semester, all the final tests safely behind me, I was determined to get out of this country for the 10 days between now and the next class of Summer Session. I had it all worked out; I would pop over on the boat, getting my visa enroute - or then I had option B, pop over to Bangkok with the stub-end of a ticket I returned to Korea on, essentially costing me nothing.

So I'm rushing around, making plans, breaking plans, forming new plans, formulating ideas, checking the weather, verifying prices, and all the while busily making lint (see picture above). And as it turns out, Sock Lint is all I have to show for all my rushing around; once again, there are no tickets available out of Gilligan's Island-Korea; no affordable destinations (other than Thailand, which sort of bores me now) and no visa possible from the Chinese Embassy in reasonable time (I love the Chinese government and their impossible, thieving, murdering ways, because it gives me something to hate more than my own government)

The travel agent just called. Guy says they can put the fix in for me at the embassy so I can hop tonights boat (the next one is in four days) to Beijing if I want. They ask for 300,000 won (about 300 dollars).

"Is that including round-trip boat fare?" sez I
"No" sez they
"What! 300 for a freakin' visa? It was supposed to be a shopping trip, just there and back in a week" shkreamed I

I guess I'll be here, then. The plus side is I can start blogging again; in China this would have been impossible, as most blogging sites are blocked by the Chinese gov'ment. (gotta love'em, right?)

I'll dish up some more lint later on.

Homage to Lewis Caroll or O Henry? Definately not the most appetizing name for a food establishment -what's all that Business School nonsense about the importance of Branding?

Old paths revisited

I've been off the writing for quite some time, and although I can use the excuse that I have been busy moving into a HUGE palace of a place, cleaning it, planning a housewarming party, catching an unidentified skin disease, healing the same, replanning the housewarming party, and re-cleaning the house again, all 70 square meters of which had somehow managed to gather a huge amount of dust - in fact, if the dust has the right pH level, I can save it up for my roof farm later in the summer....

I want to describe two things; the amazing writing of a popular blog I just discovered, actually a constellation of related blogsites called Festering Ass - so cleverly and realistically written that it blows everything else out of the water. The writing style owes much to the late Bukowski, not only in the imaginative treatment, but also in the gritty nature of the subject material. It is not quite as unpleasant as the parent website domain name would have you think, but for you guys, I'd recommend Tucker Max or Hoo-Ah, whereas women may find a sympathetic node at SlowChildren-AtPlay.

I spent most of this weekend cleaning up for and cleaning up after (no more phrasal verbs please , English Teacher!) my house party, and the rest of my time feasting on Slow Children and Tucker Max. I can't remember having cackled at writing on the Internet in some time.

It even inspired me to dust off my keyboard and make another stab at narrative, and at describing my less-than-drab existence in flashier prose. Tucker Max, for example, has a gift for dialogue - but the man takes no chances, carries around a small voice recorder even while getting shit-faced. That certainly is the kind of dedication (and brazenness) that I need to get my act together.

So in that spirit, I've decided to dig up some of my oldest blogrolls from my times in Beijing, to let you, dear reader, decide whether Korea and my cushy existence here have ruined my prose style or made it slightly better. Here's a sample:


Thursday, 24 June 2004

cat follies
Yuen Lao Shi is the landlord of our courtyard house (in Chinese, four corners house), or is related to the owner of our house, and he lives in the first half of the courtyard, separated from our little foreign enclave by a round Chinese arch/doorway.
He is quite the entertaining sort, by that I mean we have come to love his unique blend of Chinese expressions "Fei Shang Hao! Fei Shang Hao!" and English expressions (he loves to trot out an idiom he's been studying recently), his entertaining way of suddenly bursting into song like some sort of South American Latin romanticentric, and his extreme, often painful love of animal and plant life of every kind.
The pride of his menagerie currently seems to be the cat family he has nurtured from the rooftops to the courtyard floor. There appears to be a floating population in this hutong of anywhere from 2 to a couple dozen cats, depending on whether you count tails or midnight moanings. As the last metaphor implies, the Cat Family is busily reproducing itself into our little ecosystem.
The most recent litter was about two weeks ago, just four days before I got to China. The mother cat apparently had chosen the birth spot to be in our Television Lounge room, in a pile of comforters used by our Weekend visitor Maurice. Apparently she didn't like the cardboard box that Yuan Lao Shi had rigged up for her with blankets and pillows. She scratched the door all night and was apparently all but unapproachable.
Yesterday I came home to find Yuan Lao Shi in a bit of a state. The mother cat had one of the babies in her mouth, and was going around the courtyard in a highly agitated state. According to him, she wanted to move them to a new nest, and was looking for a place.
The problem was, she had already hidden two of the kittens and we didn't know where...they were too small for us to hear our cries, so there was nothing for us to do except watch and follow the mother to find out where they were.
She headed straight for our roommate Joel's room. Joel sleeps on a platform elevated two meters above the floor, accessed by a spindly ladder. The mama cat kept jumping from floor to bookshelf, bookshelf to bed platform, each time an entire meter, wiyh a kitten in her mouth. Then she prowled the parameter of the mosquito net, looking for a way into the bed and cushions.
She did this several times, and finally she gave up. We searched the bed but found no babies. Just in case, I left the mosquito net open and tried to let her go in, in case she had actually hidden some babies where we hadn't looked. But she didn't come back.
Normally I'm not involved in the lives of cats....but this one certainly has even me guessing.

To be continued....The House Party and the Salsa Nazis...

This is basically how I picture my dream retirement scenario. I'm not talking about staring at my hairy, knobby legs, but rather the whole tropical dream thing, the hammock being the archetypical symbol of the same.