Heading to Shangrili-la!
On the road: a guy sitting by the side of the road holding two live snakes in his hand, smiling rather maniacally and putting their heads into his mouth
- i have seen the wide muddy brown Yangzi River with my own eyes out the bus window
Shangri-La (actually called Zhongdian, but what better way to drum up tourism than to change the name to the golden city of legend) looks like any other modern small Chinese city when you pull into the bus station, but when you get in a cab and ask the driver to take you to the "old town", you get out at a crazy hodgepodge tourist ghetto of crap shops, restaurants, discos, outdoor gear stores, hostels, and guesthouses, all contained within a winding and tourist-ghetto-fabulous ancient wooden village.... Ironically, the "old town" of Shangri-La is in reality the "new town" having been constucted fresh and new in the ancient style of architecture within the past decade to drum up the tourist trade, with overwhelming success; tourists from all over China come to Shangri-La's "old town" to wear cowboy hats, spend their dough, and take painstakingly-set-up picures on tripods with giant long lenses of the quaint fake ancient streets.... What weirdness....
Heading to explore the village where Ritodhi had previously stayed outside Shangri-La, we were met on the entry-bridge by an old drunken man, who tried to get us to go onward to the lake, or back the way we came, but not to enter the village; as he was warning us away, a dog trotted up, proudly carrying a decapitated decaying goat head in ITs mouth.... Despite the old man's drunken warnings, and the surreally disturbing image of the dog with ITs rotting head, we continued on over the bridge and into the town....
The Dragon Wars: Conquering The Dragon
- In the seemingly-never-ending battle with my mild dysentary, i have been placed by Doctors Grell, Chakraborty, and Gluzman on a very strict diet of skewered rice circles and yak yogurt.... 3 to 5 skewers of two chewy circles each and half a bucket of yak yogurt per meal....
"Crouching Tiger, Grabbing Nipple"
In doing research on NGO's working with villages around Shangri-La, Ritodhi discovered the Thangka Academy, a Buddhist institution in Old Town dedicated to teaching kids and adults how to properly create Buddhist thangka art; students live, eat, draw, and paint on the premises, and we found out during our time in Shaxi that our buddy Ashley had actually spent three months there studying as well! We went there to check in and find out how they might be able to assist us in connecting with families to stay with and learn from in the neighboring Tibetan villages.... Outside the Academy building, we met Tess, a Dorset-born British girl who is on a study-abroad program with her university and associated with the Thangka Academy, and she invited us in to introduce us to....
Dakpa (actual name Gedan Zhaba, great-uncle to our buddy Kelsang) is a Tibetan Mafia slick businessguy who i think is Jeremy Kurn's Asian look-alike; he runs the Thangka Academy in Shangri-La & the local village Eco-Lodges, and was the "disciple" of the Academy's Master monk but became unmonkulated.... He owns lots of property around Old Town, and we can tell which properties are his because they're all called "Khampa" This or "Khampa" That.... He clearly has fingers in a lot of local pies, and we privately gave him the title "The Don Of Zhongdian".... Dakpa has an unforgettable hand-up-head-down-giant-smile signature greeting motion, and warmly uses IT whenever he sees us....
Before actually meeting Dakpa, however, we wound up having a wonderful random audience with the Buddhist Master monk Lobsang Khedup; in looking for Tess after she disappeared to go find Dakpa, the small child that we called The Master (in his little Buddhist robes) came to tell us that she was upstairs in the back and not busy.... We were brought into a little back room which was the personal office of the Master monk where Tess was having an audience, and he invited us to sit down and join them; i could understand little more than half of what the gentleman said, but i was very grateful for his willingness to speak to us at great length, in a stream-of-consciousness manner with him speaking and us listening respectfully, as he shared golden apples and bits of wisdom.... His little golden statue of Buddha had ITs head completely wrapped up in white cloth tied up with a red velvet ribbon....
.... IT is interesting to me that my Jewish grandmother had something in common with our Buddhist Lama friend: they both could talk for long periods of time to people without ever seemingly needing any input from the people to whom they talk....
Dakpa warmly and smoothly has arranged everything, and we shall be staying for four days with two different families in the nearby Bisong Village (two of us per family so as not to overwhelm them with four people at once)....
The Dragon Wars: Sending Mixed Signals
- Have added giant helpings of müesli to the buckets of yak yogurt to help the sure blockages from the giant rounds of sticky rice move through in a more expedited fashion.... Perhaps i will poop in less than ten days now!
Shangri-La Music House bar menu:
- Dudweiser
- Snake Foods
Cei Rang is a cool little mustached traditional-singing guy who owns the Music House Bar in Shangri-La; he is very polite and understated in conversation, and his singing is powerful and soulful.... We had the honor to attend one of his nightly performances, and were treated to an amazing contemplative evening of traditional Tibetan singing, accompanied by his ladyfriend singers and his light drum taps, in the silent and darkened candlelit Music House Bar.... The intent behind the songs was clear though the lyrics were not, and i felt cleansed, after a fashion, and thankful for the quiet period of sitting and breathing and listening and being.... Afterward, some downtempo electro was put on, and the meditative atmosphere was followed by mellow party mood, with Dakpa smilingly treating us all to gin & tonics.... The mellowness, however, only lasted as long as IT took to get a functioning acoustic guitar in my hands; Tiffany cut me a pick out of the plastic cover on her notebook, and as i started jamming, two other Tibetan guys jumped in on the two handy djembes, and crazy music ensued, moving from a jam to a highly-energetic "All Along The Watchtower" that had a bunch of folks up and dancing.... IT was good to get things moving again musically! Boy i love to play and help people dance! So much fun.... i was quite spent after that jam, however and gave the guitar over to the next player.... The music continued as a drum-circle jam, featuring an excited Cei Rang doing crazy gong-fu dancing to everyone's delight....
- Ritodhi, hyperventilating with nervousness, being escorted on a long walk by us all to try and get some action with sweet hydrogeologist Meuma at her guest house, since he hadn't made moves on her signals when he'd had his chance at the Music House Bar before she left for the night.... Her guest house was dark and locked up when we finally arrived, which Ritodhi considered to be a victory....
The Dragon Wars: The Dragon In Retreat
- Have shat slightly solider stanky poop after a day-and-a-half of only sticky rice, yogurt, and müesli....
ETTI (the Eastern Tibet Training Institute) is a place that invites teenagers from the Zhongdian area to come and live and be trained in the managerial arts.... We went down to talk to them about their local village programs, and met a bunch of their program directors and teachers, who were mostly very friendly and engaged with one weird and stand-offish exception (who graduated from Columbia, naturally).... The place has a really good vibe to IT and the kids seem to be very happy; ETTI seems to be doing good work, except in the sense that they are contributing to kids leaving their farming families and never going back again to their traditional way of life, in many cases with many kids....
What a fun powerpoint presentation on America by the ETTI kids.... American Cultural Dress pic is: two black guys in tuxedos, looking like Puff Daddy and bodyguard! Yes!
Kelsang Phuntsok is a way-chill cool NGO guy who is the first person ever to go to college from his village and is intent upon using his knowledge to give back to his community; he is creating local kindergartens, interviewing old folks to record their stories and songs while they're still alive to do so, and is generally focused on poverty alleviation for local villagers through education and creating financial incentives to maintain traditional lifestyles (he also is Dakpa's great-nephew as we later found out).... We met him as he drove us out to case Dakpa's Eco-Lodge villages, to see which village might be the most productive for our homestays; he spoke good english and was very candid with us about his work and how strongly he feels about ITs importance for the rural Tibetan communities he is working with.... Kelsang is for sure the coolest guy doing the best work that we've met so far on our travels in Yunnan, and is the kind of guy that is so straightforward and so good a guy that you just automatically want to say, "What can i do to help you?" He can use all the help he can get, too!
- Ritodhi's stolen paper Chinese army slogan: "We must train soldiers according to how we fight"
The Dragon Wars: The Illusion Of Victory
- Have eaten only giant helpings of yogurt and müesli with a sprinkling of rice; things are not quite right in there, what with all the gnarly gas, but damn i sure love that müesli!
RITODHI: "i saw this white monk walking down the street today.... He had a little buddha-smile on his face, like he was enlightened."
TIFFANY: "Don't touch my what?"
One night out on the corner of our Shangri-La street, four yelling cops took the large black barrel-oven off of a guy's food cart; looking like a ridiculous bunch of Keystone Cops, the four of them shuffled slowly away around the corner with the cumbersome round oven, with the food-cart guy looking wistfully after them.... He turned around and got on his bike-cart and pedaled away with a little smile on his face....
Kevin is the local white-guy here in Zhongdian, a "Big Lebowski" Dude-man-about-town and one of the first white folks to settle down and live in the area.... He owns and operates Kevin's Guesthouse, as well as adventure touring in the area with rented jeeps and backpacks and crappy motorcycles that seem to need a lot of repair; he knows everyone in town, and modestly looks down towards the ground and grinds his shoe a bit as he tells us that he's "something of a celebrity here in town".... We have dubbed him "The Colin of Shangri-La" after our friend and mentor Colin Flahive back in Kunming....
The Dragon Wars: The Dragon's Revenge
- Have had the worst epic giant explosive diarrhea since Dongdezhong; will move myself onto self-diagnosed fasting for the time being
Rotem and i are staying together in a family's house right next to the house where Ritodhi and Tiffany are staying.... The two families seem to really be one big family in two large square Tibetan wooden houses, with much trading of kids back and forth.... We are given yummy yak yogurt cheese and round puffy bread for breakfast, along with the traditional butter tea, which is exactly like drinking a cup of melted butter! Very nourishing stuff.... Our dinners mainly consist of unspiced potatoes and rice with some pork fat thrown in for flavor.... Also very, ummm, nourishing....
Pussyking is the oldest son of Tiffany & Ritodhi's Bisong family; he, at the tender age of ten years, complains, cries, and screams with an extremely runny nose on an everyday consistent basis - thus Ritodhi has dubbed him with his moniker that he (fortunately) can't understand.... His intense frustration causes him to lash out at his younger seven-year-old sister, Wonder Woman, who then proceeds to beat him up and spin-kick him in his snottynosed head.... We were actually witness to his mother giving him a bath in the washbasin, where she held him over her knee washing him as he screamed and whined....
Commando is a tough-as-nails six-year-old boy, who looks like he's three, who comes from another family to hang out with Pussyking and Wonder Woman almost every day.... He always has one hand down his pants, playing vigorously with himself, and bounces back from any injury like a miniature super-soldier; he dresses in camo, loves guns and destruction, and does his best to beat up on Pussyking, who gets some of his only powertripping done by abusing the small child....
Wonder Woman is a spunky little seven-year-old girl who hangs with the boys and gets some shit for IT, but is not afraid to make full use of the smooth gong-fu techniques she sees on TV and in movies to make short work of her would-be abusers.... One swift kick to the head often seems to deter any boys (namely her brother Pussyking) from unduly lording IT over her....
Commando Boy, out on the street on National Day in Shangri-La, dressed all in camo and holding his Desert Eagle plastic handgun, whips out his penis and starts peeing on the street, while holding the barrel of the gun in his mouth.... so calmly
Commando Boy scoffed (a cough and sneeze combined) in my face.... from two inches away.... Soooo not okay!
Pussyking - he's only a man with a plastic gun in his hand
Commando Boy - A gun in his mouth and his dick in his hand
Pussyking: The Making Of A Fashion Designer
Rotem to Ritodhi in the cold house: "Would you mind sitting on my hand?"
Chinese Communist Ninjas versus Japanese Fascist Ninjas - the greatest epic episodic drama show ever badly filmed! Starring Bubba, the baddest-assed Chinese Ninja of them all, and when he looks pissed, and i mean REALLY PISSED, you know someone's going to meet their maker with five bloody finger-marks in their skull, and you also know a lot of grenades will get thrown and a LOT of shit is going to blow up.... The best scene is when Bubba hasn't killed anybody hand-to-hand in maybe five episodes (only killing about half of Tokyo with his giant-explosion grenades), when suddenly he's all alone and fifteen Japanese Ninjas come jumping out at him, whirling their weapons in the air; cut to Bubba's face in close-up, looking REALLY REALLY PISSED, and you just know this is going to be a truly epic Ninja battle where Bubba is going to graphically wipe the landscape with the blood of all fifteen Ninjas, and just when IT's all about to go down, the scene cuts to a bridge blowing up and soldiers shooting at each other, and never ever cuts back to the Bubba Ninja Massacre.... Episode after episode goes by, and we never see the Bubba Ninja Massacre.... We're pretty sure the show is called "The River Kwai And The Bridge That Goes Over IT"....
"Once i remember his name, i'm going to give you some books to read." - Rotem
Nice to feel like an educator again for a day! On my walking way to meet up with Tiffany and Ritodhi, who had ridden back into Shangri-La with their homestay family on their tractor for National Day, i was given a ride into town by a kindly government family (Tibetan mom in the customs house, Han dad in the local government) whose daughter Laura (Yom-Zi Zhuo Ma) is studying english in Chongqing; i told them about my teaching background over lunch at their place (right in the same housing complex as ETTI!) and Laura invited me to come meet her the next morning and help her with her holiday homework, which was to go to a local Shangri-La high school and sit-in and critique two english classes, and then tout her Maple Leaf International School at a third middle school english class....
i woke up before dawn at our homestay house in Bisong Village the next morning, and walked in the wintry cold for two hours: first gropingly in the dark fields and the muddy roads, shining my dim lights on the ground in order to not step in deep mud in my sandals and socks, and then more confidently in the growing gray light towards the main road.... Once on the main road, the walking was easier, but my socks were soaked through with the night's rainwater and i had to continue walking with soppy steps to keep my feet somewhat warm in the cold mountain air....
The dad (Shi Dingxiong) picked me up as planned, by the giant white roadside stupa as IT turned out, and drove me to the beautiful shiny high school where Laura was waiting for me.... Once inside, i got my wet socks off and we entered the first classroom to the thunderous applause of seventy psyched Chinese high school kids; i guess IT was considered something of a celebrity visit to have a white teacher come to visit the class....
The classes were large by my standards, and needed more sectioning out, team-building, and individual interaction, along with more emphasis on pronunciation and cadence.... i was surprised that i was asked to get up in front of the class to offer my critique of the teaching style; at first, i was worried that this might be embarrassing to the current teacher, but Laura assured me that IT was the teacher that had requested the public critique, so i gamely went along for the ride....
The kids in both successive classes loved seeing me in action up front and hearing my thoughts on their classes; my main metaphor about the importance of smaller teams within the class was about trying to play basketball with fifty people on each team.... The kids seemed to appreciate this metaphor....
Only at the middle school class did i fully appreciate that i was basically doing Laura's homework for her.... Not only did i do most of the talking in the critiques, but she hastily prepped me on the details about her school for twenty minutes beforehand, and then had me do all the main speaking to the kids as though i were one of the teachers at her school, translating my words into Chinese as i went along.... Sort of cheesy, but the kids did love IT, so again i gamely played along....
The family was very thankful to me for the morning's shenanigans, and before lunch (back at their place), they went in the garage and came out with a North Face shoebox, having noted that i was wearing sandals in the wintry weather (and having given me another pair of socks earlier).... The hiking shoes in the box were brand new brown shoes that i would have been stoked to wear, and with gratefulness and excitement, i looked under the tongue to see the size.... 9-1/2! With me being an 11! Oh, so close.... The story of my life! i tried them on, and even though they didn't fit, considered taking them anyway and just making do.... because IT just seemed so perfect! Until the dad tried them on and they fit him perfectly....! That reminded me that somebody else would make make much better use of them than i could.... So they offered to take me someplace to where i could get a cheap pair of shoes.... After trying five different places while the whole family sat in the running car, none of which had shoes in big people's sizes like 48 cm, and Ritodhi warning me away on the phone from buying the one pair of grandpa shoes i found in my size in old town, i apologized and asked them meekly to drive onward down the road to the village.... After they kindly drove me the whole way back to my homestay house, through the mud and rain and getting their nice silver car quite dirty, we parted ways with a memorializing picture of Laura and i, with wishes that we may work together again....
P.S. i have witnessed, at Laura's house after lunch, one of the weirdest cartoons i have ever beheld.... Done in a kitschy Hanna-Barbera style, i pick IT up in the middle of a story taking place in an ancient Asian mishmosh of cultures.... IT features a white hero in unidentifiable Asian garb, his brown bald white-bearded diaper-wearing swami sidekick, the Persian princess love-interest, ugly Chinese bad guys, and the twisted high-voiced mustached vaguely-Asian villain who gets thwarted in his evil plans by the intrepid friends in a long and convoluted rescue of some sort.... The villain then has to jump out his castle window and gets caught on a hanging branch coming off the tower, where he hangs, weeping pitifully and repenting his wicked ways as he squirms in front of all the townspeople below; suddenly, a strange vulture-like bird flies down and grabs the villain in ITs talons, swooping him away into the sky as he cries and begs forgiveness for his evil deeds.... Suddenly, the bird-thing and villain are engulfed in a crazy wormhole that opens up in the sky out of nowhere....
The wormhole takes the bird and villain to a faraway mountaintop cave, where the bird crashes into a rock and gets knocked unconscious, spilling the villain onto the ground, where he rolls and bumps into a dusty old chest, which he then opens to discover an ancient mystical amulet inside.... Forgetting all his repentances, and immediately reverting back to evilhood, he cackles and uses the amulet to open another wormhole which sweeps him up.... This activity has been witnessed by a bespectacled professor purple dinosaur who hangs out in the mountain cave, who voices his concern about the villain and his evildoings and jumps into the wormhole after him....
Suddenly the heroic friends are chasing after the villain through the wormhole, accompanied by the professor purple dinosaur, except now the villain, the friends, and the purple dinosaur are all wearing bubble-helmeted spacesuits and are floating up in space on their chase.... i leave the narrative at this point, feeling like i'm coming off some face-melting psychedelic trip....
The Dragon Wars: Laying in Wait
- i have not pooped now for going on five days, seemingly as the result of the hearty food we have been given in our lovely Tibetan family homestay; the diet of all carbs and fat (bread, yak yogurt cheese, butter tea, potatoes, turnips, and rice) seems to be just the trick to plug up the Dragon's Cave with some starchy boulders! We shall see how events continue to unfold....
Great Ideas File: Raising the military age to 60! Yes! All the old people who want to go to war can just go do IT and leave everyone else alone! Grandpas in machine-gun wheelchairs and cybernetic war suits like Matrix Revolutions! Grandpa training camp: "Get down and give me five!" Grandpas climbing ropes and falling off the big net....
"What kind of nappy ho are you?" - Tiffany to Rotem, during conversation about pube-dreds
The Fantastic Four: Ritodhi as Mr. Fantastic, Tiffany as The Invisible Woman, Nolan as The Human Torch, and Rotem as The Thing
10/4 - Happy birthday, Connor! i wish i could communicate my happy wishes to you over the interwebs today, but my ensconcement in this rural village prevents IT.... i hope you can hear me over the netherwaves! i love you!
Who hangs out with sensitive melancholy poets? Sympathetic depressives
- Tiffany has had the great misfortune to be lying in a bed immediately over a giant colony of fleas, and was progressively eaten alive over the course of three nights; she emerged from the third night with the bottom two-thirds of her body completely covered in red bites which itched her so badly that she scratched them all until they bled, so in addition to the puffy allergic reactions she is having in blotches all over, she is also covered in bloody dot-like scabs.... She was quite the gruesome sight as i rubbed the itch-cream on her back and hard-to-reach places, and she slept the next night with socks on her hands to stop her scratching....
"PHONY - The Pleasure Of Life" - Bisong Village shopkeeper lady's cap
Rotem went out to take a poop out in the field, and an insistent pig tried to eat the poop as IT came out of his butt :-D
Bisong Village chips package: "Cate & Health - Series High Foodstuff Good Taste, Choiceness Raw Material, A Present First Choose"
Bisong Village kid's basketball game players: Grandpa (Me), Fancypants, Player, Pussyking, Commie, Rambo, Shooter, Polio Boy, Jailbait, Wonder Woman, Commando.... The most sporting exercise i've had in at least three years!
"When i went to the Midwest, i realized that Jesus really loves processed food." - Ritodhi
The Dragon Wars: Light At The End Of The Tunnel
Back in Shangri-La, at the Dragon Cloud Hostel, the first poop in four-plus days of backed-up fats and starches! Solid and stalwart! Also kind of stinky, but i don't want to flush IT down because i'm having such a love affair just looking at IT! :-D
Good advice from Ritodhi tonight over foodsticks, helpful and offering useful guidance: start at the most basic, by figuring out what IT is that i can and cannot deal with.... What do i really care about? What can i not live without? What do i not really want or need? What do i love? What can i not stand? The answers to these questions will begin to lend shape to the larger questions concerning what i need to be doing in life....!
"i love Drew Barrymore.... i just feel really frustrated that i know who she is." - Tiffany
Thespiphobia - The fear of actors
Kelsang arranged for us to head out for the day to nearby Chenyi Village to do a video interview for Ritodhi's documentary with the oldest fossil of the village, Newa Lazong (69 years young) about the traditional Tibetan lifestyle, consisting of mostly yak herding and yak products, with a little potatoes on the side.... "The Grandpa" (as Kelsang called him) was a kindly old soul who was well-versed in the ways of his ancestors, and fingered his mala while softly muttering his prayers between sections of the interview, during which a little wild white weasel climbed across the roof rafters of his humble little wooden home.... He openly answered all Ritodhi's questions as Kelsang translated for us from the Tibetan, and seemed to feel that modern technology and lifestyles were not inherently bad, as they bring many helpful conveniences into village people's lives; his main issue was with the distance and separation which modernity places between young villagers and an active interest in maintainance of traditions and old-world lifestyles.... Newa was very kind to do the interview with us, and as we were thanking him in the darkening field outside of his home, his wife hung over the fence and laughed about how he was too old and ugly to be a western movie star....
Rotem, the Erectionless Israeli, got charged by a crazy yak in the field during Kelsang's interview :-D
"They gave me some cakes and i passed away." - Kelsang on his hospital experience
"The Gui Qing Sound Is Like A Store" - Shangri-La storefront name
"Ugly women very safe." - Kelsang Phuntsok
A great evening after the interview with Kelsang, who fits into our little party like a yak in a condom catheter.... His stories had us all rolling; illicit sex parties at the Thangka Academy, local dialects which mix up the words for yaks and penises, Uncle Thomba getting jiggy with the farmer's daughter, etc.... We parted ways at the end of the night with warm hugs and high hopes for future collaborations....
10/9/11: Bai bai Shangri-La! And let begin the epic adventure of The Great Ruili Border Run! We four are up at 6:00 AM, on the bus to Dali at 7:00 AM, and ready to go get the best French baguette in Asia, and pick up Tiffany's passport, money, and debit card which she forgot a month ago at the Jade Emu Hostel....
From there, Tiffany and i will get on a bus heading down southwest to Ruili, once the Sin City of Yunnan, dripping with prostitution, drugs, gambling and vice; once there, we have every confidence that the border guards between China and neighboring Myanmar (Burma) will be kind enough to understand our visa turnaround-plight (the governmental rule says we have to leave the country every three months if we want to keep hanging out) and stamp us right back through in a revolving-door fashion.... Right? Right? Sure! Everything will go great, i'm sure.... Because otherwise we have to spend a whole bunch more dough on buses to get to Mengla and the Lao border to get this shit done by the 16th.... We're undertaking this Ruili run because IT's a significantly shorter (and less expensive) journey than going all the way down to Lao for the turnaround; i read ONE post on gokunming.com from a British guy that said IT had worked perfectly smoothly for him this summer to do this same thing in Ruili.... so what could go wrong? We'll just disregard that EVERYBODY and their mother has posted all over the internet everywhere that China/Burma border crossings are difficult and harsh and that no one anywhere has gotten the visa turnaround successfully accomplished....
Anyhoo, from our planned turnaround in Ruili, we plan to figure out buses or whatever to Lincang, where Ritodhi and Rotem will have met up with Colin, the Kevin of Kunming, and shuttle out and meet up in Bangdong Village with which Colin works closely in his NGOs, and be back on track again, one big happy Fantastic Four Family.... well, that's the plan, anyway.... What could go wrong? :-D
No comments:
Post a Comment