Hue and Crime, Chinese style.

I was eating lunch outside of a little lunch café when three or four young men came down the street, running at full speed, chasing another. This was unusual enough, but then came the really odd part. Behind them were some older men, some teenagers, a few women, running along as best they could in heels, a policemen on a motorbike, and another bike or two, perhaps 25 people, all shouting and running, like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. The guy behind the counter in our restaurant ran out and joined the chase, and all along the street, people peeked out of doors and windows to see the commotion.

A few minutes later, the whole parade came back, dragging along the man they had been chasing. A friend explained the shouting- he’d snatched someone’s wallet. The guy came back to the counter, breathing a little hard, and resumed serving lunch plates. I’m not sure, but he may have been the one who actually caught the thief. Everyone else went back to whatever they had been doing. I went back to my meal, mentally digesting this new sight. I’ve never seen such a perfect demonstration of exactly what “hue and cry” in an old medieval town must have looked like!

Mangoes and Mushrooms

As I’ve gotten settled in here, I’ve discovered a few things I’m really doing to miss, chiefly Mangos and Mushrooms.
There are mangoes in the US, of course, but they are nothing like the ones here. I first had a real golden Mango three years ago in the Phillippines, and have been missing them ever since. Finally, Mango season is beginning here. For almost the first time in my life, the fruit is just as good as it was in my honeyed golden memory. For those who have never tasted a real golden mango, I will try to describe it. The fruit is sunset gold on the outside, nearly the same color as the inside. They come in three types, a little snack sized morsel about as long as your finger, a hand- sized one about the size of a large peach ( the sweetest) and a big one about the size of a very swollen banana. They are more similar to peaches than anything else, and like peaches are ripe when they “give” a little when pressed. All smell wonderful. The perfume, a bit like a peach, but stronger, with a hint of something totally unique in it, is so strong that a single ripe mango left on my dining room table fills the entire room with mouthwatering tropical fragrance.
Mangoes are good in shakes and deserts of all kinds, but I think they are simply impossible to improve on, so I generally eat them as is. There are two techniques to do this. For casual snacking, I simple slice off the two sides as close to the pit as possible, peel and suck the pulp off the center slice, and then score a grid pattern in the side pieces, pop them inside out, and eat the blocks of fruit.
For a more decadent sit-down presentation, I peel the fruit, slice off the sides, and cut the meat up into bite sized pieces. Instant dessert!
Besides the wonderful fruit, mangos make a lovely tree too. They are one of the most common street trees here because they have a lovely wide spreading shape, dark, handsome bark, and glossy leaves. A full grown Mango can even reach the size of an oak tree too. The only problem: they only grow in the tropics L

Mushrooms are the other particular culinary delight I’ve found. They have them here in all kinds, and they’re cheap, about the same price as any other veggie. The most common is an umbrella shaped type with a dark cap, which I strongly suspect may be portabella. :) The flavor is richer than the standard white cap types, especially when fried. Better yet, they serve then everywhere. You can even get a serving of nothing but sautéed mushrooms at the cheap lunch counters for only one or two Yuan- about 15- 30 cents! They show up with all kinds of meat and veggie dishes, and in soups, fresh or dried. Yum! They also sell dried bags of them, and the flavor is wonderful in soups. I think I may even take some home.

Sorry this blog has been a bit neglected lately. My new apartment doesn't have any wireless :( so I've had somewhat restricted web access lately.

I feel like a list today.

You Know You've Been In China too Long When:

-You pass a skyscraper being constructed with bamboo scaffolding, and you don't even look twice.

-You've just served up something delicious but quite slippery, and you're first thought is that eating this is going to require chopsticks.

- You pass a mirror, and in your peripheral vision notice that something is odd about your face. You look again and realize that it's your western eyes.

- You watch a movie in which a character hold his face just over his bowl and shovels food in, slurping, with noodles hanging out of his mouth. It takes you several seconds to realize that this is supposed to be offensive.

-You consider going to Spain, and try to rehearse your old high school vocabulary to see if you can remember enough for the airport- but all that comes out of your mouth is Mandarin.

I've had all these experiences in the last week. I'm still a long way from being at home here, but something is happening in my head! I just hope my English sticks with me!

Weights, Measures and Confusion!

Some things about Asia are blatantly different and frankly discombobulating, things like the food, the traffic, and of course the funny lingo, but others are more subtle.
Over the last week, I've been struck again by the differences in basic standards.

For example: January 1st passes with hardly a nod- they're all just beginning to get ready for Spring festival, which is the agreed-upon start of the year.

The day has 24 hours here too, thankfully, but they use military time, the 24 hour clock, which is another adjustment to make for those who think in am and pm.

They eat differently- with chopsticks, of course, but getting used to eating and drinking not being linked is a bit of an adjustment.

And on that subject, tp commonly appears on tables in resturants as napkins, while pocket packs of kennex are intended for use as tp. Confusing! And the bathrooms are confounding in their own right!

The beds are different too- if you weren't a back sleeper before, a few nights of waking up with your shoulder asleep from the hard mattress will make you one!

The work schedule is different too. I could get used to the 2 hour lunch and nap break routine, though I still find it a tiny bit amusing to see all my co-workers doing home or rolling out nap mats in an unused classroom like a bunch of kindergarten students.

All lengths and distances are measured by the km, m, and the cm.

Temperature is in celcius. Do you need a jacket or a t shirt when it's going to be 26 degrees?

Locks and keys are made differently, windows open differently, showers are just mounted on the wall, there's no such thing as hot water plumbing, clothes dryers, or full sized ovens, the washing machines are wierd, and it's strange to only be able to drink water bought by the jug.

With rare exceptions, they don't do lines. It takes a complete reversal of training to force yourself to push in and put your stuff on the scale brfore anyone else can and the grocery store weighing station(that's a change too- you take your produce to the lady who weighs it and puts a price sticker on it before you go to the checkout), but if you don't you'll just stand there all day while other people push in front you. They don't consider it rude, so you've just got to put aside your good training and charge in there too.

The voltage is different, the wall sockets strange, and the light switches are a whole different model too.

Kilos are disorienting enough, but most things- fresh produce, rice, beans, etc, are sold by the jin, a unit I'd never heard of before I came here, which is half a kilo, or just a little over a pound.

The money is thankfully in logical units, but the conversion factor to US dollars is 6.7, a very unweildy number for in the head calculations.

And on the subject of money, I learned yesterday that they don't even do commas in large numbers the same way. The counting system has terms for four places before switching over to another order of magnitude, so they put a comma every 4th place, instead of every third. I never even considered that there was another way to do that.

So far I haven't identified anything that they do exactly the same way here. Each change is just a tiny thing, but the cumulative effect is totally disorienting!

Keeping Figure in China

A couple of very basic observations about China:

1. Virtually no one is overweight.

2. The food is everything my health books advise against: mainly refined starches, always oily, the meat is all fatty, everything has MSG and salt in generous quantity, and sugar may be a bit behind the western level, but it's far from non-existent. Diet and low fat cooking are unheard of, and hospitality revolves around eating lots of food.

So how is this possible?

After two months of observation, I've concluded that it is almost solely the result of the stairs and sidewalks.

To get anywhere here requires walking, and a lot of it. If you live on the 4th floor, go to work on another upper floor, walk or bike 15 or 20 minutes to get there, walk 5 minutes to lunch, (or home, and back up your own stairs), take a nap- the Chinese have a very nice custom of 2 hour lunch and nap breaks- , walk back up the stairs to the office, walk or ride back home, walk somewhere to hand out with friends in the evening, walk to the grocery store, and then go home again, you've probably walked 2 or 3 miles and climbed 16 or 20 flights of stairs, and all without even intentionally going out of your way to exercise.

Most of the urban areas are built with 7 floors of apartments over the street level stores- the maximum allowable without having an elevator, and most people choose an apartment based of the quality of the interior and the location, and don't worry about what floor it's on.
A seventh floor apartment has about 100 stairs, at a good steep pitch, leading to it. I've visited one, and my flabby legs assured me they didn't want to do it twice in the same day.

It's no wonder that almost to the person, the overweight people one sees are the wealthy- who live in apartments with elevators. I think in about 10 years, if the current trend of moving toward cars and elevators continues, the US won't the the fat kid on the block anymore. China is headed toward an obesity epidemic like a freight train.

Now I understand why all my Asian friends who come to the states promptly gain weight, and I'm hoping that the reverse- eating like an American and living like a Asian- will take some pounds off of me.

Added to all that the built in activity, many people do exercise. Yoga, sports and martial arts are very popular, and just as popular with middle aged people as young ones, and though the sight of someone running on the street is pretty uncommon, there are scores of late afternoon joggers and walkers in the parks.

Yesterday I went to a city park I'd never been to before. Many a gym could envy the level of activity there! I joined the scores of walkers and joggers, winding through the bamboo and rock garden scenery on the perimeter trail, while under the trees on both sides people were scattered by ones and twos, nearly as numerous as the trees, stretching, doing push ups and practicing yoga on the very worn grass. It was a diverse crowd, everyone from a young mother running (yes running) with her 3 or 4 year old child, to high school athletes, talkative groups of girls, to solidly middle aged (and older) men and women, working out with surprising intensity.
Over on the other side some teenagers climbed on the rocks and young couples sat on the lawn. Even as dark fell, so many people were still exercising that I felt thoroughly safe even in the darkest areas of the park.

Í want to go back to this park with my camera and a notebook- it was small but one of the most attractive and most highly used parks I've seen so far, and I've got a professional curiosity about why it works so well.

Malaysia

Country two of my recent globtrot was Malaysia. I must confess I didn't do much preperatory reading- eveybody knows that it's a tropical country, buisness center, and a vacation colony for China, right?
Not quite.
I'd forgotton that it's also a Muslim country. I got off the airplane at the Kuala Lumpur airport, and for a moment wondered where I was. Headscarves and white caps everywhere. The decrepit terminal made the Nashville terminal I'd always thought of as very modest look palatial. It was so small that you have to go out, up the sidewalk past all the taxis and back inside to get to departures. The whole one story structure is tan corrigated metal with not a scrap of decoration, unless you count the concrete barriers near the entrance and ticket counters, which are bright turquoise. The amminities conisted of a bathroom, MacDonalds ( no pork, of course- I saw none anywhere), a coffee shop, a little bookstore, a cafe, an Islamic bank/ currency excange, a KFC booth, and a waiting area- a couple of dozen seats in a roped off area against the wall. Without a question, it was the ugliest, smallest, oldest, dirtiest, worst organized and most inhospitable place I've ever taken an international flight to.
It was midnight. I was alone, and my flight didn't leave till 8am. I tried the seats for a while, but finally followed another passenger's idea, and laid out the sleeping mat I got in Thailand between the waitng area and a closed booth, put my head on my suitcase, put my beach towel and paro over myself, and slept a few hours. There was a pile of dust on the floor beside me.

From that low, my perceptions of Malaysia steadly improved. The regional airport on Lankawi Island is small, but much nicer. It even has a Starbucks. ( I'm told I was only at the low cost carrier hub in KUL- the other terminal is much better). Someone met me at the gate, so I didn't have to walk 15 minutes after all. The resort we stayed in was lovely- clean rooms, good meals, beautiful pool, palm trees, even thatch umbrellas on the beach. The company was, of course, peerless, and the week passed in a flash. In the short times I did get to go exploring, I found an very diverse crowd- European and Chinese vacationers, and a mixture of Malay people, which I found to be quite friendly. Almost everyone I spoke to could communicate in English, the shopping was pretty complete- I even had the first real pizza I've eaten since the states- and the scenery was lovely. The last day, I went on a Mangrove tour. The scenery in the estuary was quite a curiosity, brackish swamps punctuated by sheer rock spires and hills jutting straight out of the water. Besides the scenery, we fed some eagles, visited a"fish zoo"for lack of a better name, where we played with wild archer fish, putting up bits of bread for them to shoot down, petted mangrove rays, and saw several other fish, and finally walked through a small cave with a colony of sleeping fruit bats. Perhaps the most curious thing were some of the cave formations- under the overhanging rocks near the entrances, were staligtites which grew not in the normal gravity defined direction, but curled toward the light like fingers.

The trip home was also much better. I had traveling companions, and though we again had to overnight in the same terminal, this time we found the real food court, reached by another walk outside, where we pulled up chairs and made ourselves comfortable. A few hours of real sleep does wonders!

Thailand

Dear friends, stalkers, and rambling readers:
I'm back in China now, getting over the peeling after effects of a light sunburn, and remembering a lovely two week stint in the tropics.
I want to go back to Thailand. Almost as soon as the steamy air hit me walking off the plane, I felt like I was back in the Philippines. The sensation continued all week- though there were certainly noticeable differences, the coconut trees and pineapple fields, the buildings and rest stops along the road, the look of the people, even the laid back attitude you could feel in the air reminded me so much of the first Asian country I left my heart in that I had flashbacks.
Among the first things that hit a visitor arriving from China is the cleanness. It's not quite up to western standards, of course, but even in Bangkok, the horizon is at it's normal distance, and not shrouded in gray haze. The streets are a notch cleaner, the waterways generally don't have a flotilla of trash in them, and the people seem to have some appreciation of natural areas. Even the medians of the roads are decorated by an impressive array of landscaping, including innumerable topiary elephants, birds, and beasts.
The second thing a visitor notices is that the Thai are indeed religious in all respects. Unmistakably Thai temples, crusted with more elaborate gold and carvings than a wedding cake has frosting, jut up regularly, and virtually every home or business has a miniature model, a spirit house, perched on a tray and column like an elaborate bird feeder, somewhere about the premises. They are some of the most distinctive structures you'll see, downright beautiful, in fact, yet to a Christian, also so disturbing in the generations of spirit worship they represent.
The third thing that strikes a visitor is how incredibly seriously the Thai take their royal family. Their level of respect is everything but worship. At regular intervals, the bridges over the highways feature elaborate, gilded frames, holding portraits of the royals surrounded by fantastically Thai relief. Schools and public buildings feature life size or larger pictures as often as not, and even in home and businesses, you'll see memorabilia from clocks to fans featuring their images. One day a week, it's even customary for everyone to wear yellow to honor them, and yellow shows up on everything from trashcans to waiting shed roofs as well. China's favorite color is red, Thailand's is yellow.
The reverence is not without some grounds, either. Thailand is one of the freest and most stable countries in Asia, and the king, quite elderly now, has done a pretty good job of bringing progress to his country.
The natural resources of Thailand are also impressive. I got to spend a lovely day on a postcard perfect beach collecting shells and sipping tropical shakes, and hiked through a national park to a waterfall, and swam in the clear, cold pool below. The food is good, though incredibly hot. When everyone 20' downwind of an open air kitchen starts sneezing and coughing uncontrollably, beware! Thai heat also has the unfortunate trait of being very delayed, so you don't notice it until you've eaten a couple of bites, and then...! Survival tips for those who still have taste buds: milk and to some degree, sugar counteract the heat, and "pet mai" means "not hot". Use that phrase often. Even then, like an American cook might assume that someone who wants food "not salty"would still like a tiny base level amount of salt, you will still get plenty of heat.
For travelers headed through the Bangkok airport, I'd also like to pass along another useful tip: skip the expensive little food shops. Go all the way down to the bottom floor, face the glass wall, and go to your left as far as you can go. Hidden away down there, you'll find the Magic Food Point, a food court where the employees all go to eat. Buy tickets at the desk, and then trade them for whatever strikes your fancy. For 35-45 baht, you can eat a nice Thai or Chinese style meal. Save a few baht for the isa chai at the drink stand. This orangy colored milk tea tastes wonderful, and provides a nice dairy antidote to the heat of the other food.
Sometime while in Thailand, you must also try a fresh golden mango. I hadn't had one in 3 years, but it was everything I remembered. Just be prepared to deal with dripping sweet juice!
For the potential tourist, I'll add a couple of other notes: A reasonable number of people speak English, especially in tourist areas, and they are as friendly as their reputation claims. Though airfare is high, once you get into the country, the prices are great. You can eat about anywhere for a dollar or two, and everything else is also low. Plan plenty of time for traveling- nothing in Asia happens fast, but you can get about anywhere by bus.