Bitter Chinese Medicine

6/14

Beijing! I slept somewhat okay, probably would've been fine overall if I'd just gone to bed earlier. I went to my hostel and they said I couldn't check in until 2 so I spent a long time in their common room. For whatever reason, or maybe because I kept asking them, I'd thought they'd let me into the room earlier, since check-out was at 12. They didn't. At 2, I tried my key and it didn't work so I checked with the front desk. The man said it wasn't ready- it still hadn't been cleaned. I had to literally force him to get housecleaners to do it, and then while I tried to nap, they took three hours (not exaggerating here- I seriously checked the time on my phone) to clean the room. Admittedly, it had been quite messy, but not that bad- they were just being really slow and lazy. I was not happy and ended up just getting some random street food for dinner and spending a lot of time reading that night.

I really do have to find less depressing books. Here's the body count from the one I just finished (of main or important characters): 1 dead wife, 2 dead husbands, two dead sons and one dead daughter. And that's just from the main characters, not including all the tons of peripheral deaths.

6/15

Besides my general annoyance with it, that hostel was way overpriced, so today I moved to a new one; Forbidden City Youth Hostel, for almost half the price, though in a room without windows (though it does have an ensuite bathroom, hmm).

I also decided to go to a doctor for my headaches/presumed sinusitus. I looked online and in my guidebook and apparently the best place to go was a hospital. Beijing hospital was near me, so I went there (though I had a hell of a time finding it, same with a CCB Bank- Bank of America's (WORST BANK EVER) partner).

For about $15 USD, I received consultations with a general doctor and a neurologist, basic physical neurological testing, blood testing, Tylenol (supposedly special but it didn't have much effect on me), and twelve doses of Chinese medicine, which came in the form of 10 mL bottles that I had to use straws for and tasted horrible, like bitter death and mushrooms mixed together by the trio of Macbeth witches. I drank them as quickly as I could and chased them with soda.

Gross as they were, the combination of those and lots of sleep and rest seemed to put my body mostly back to normal so I felt I'd made the right decision. Otherwise, those headaches could've incapacitated me like they did in Cambodia and Korea and I would've lost valuable time.

That evening, feeling a bit better, I visited the Doghuamen night market, which is completely set up for tourists, but still kind of interesting. Nothing I tasted was particularly interesting and while I considered tasting the starfish (mostly because who knew you could even eat starfish?), I ended up just munching on some pretty normal food. I've gotten to the point that I'll no longer try something to eat just for the novelty of it, but only if I think there's a chance I'll actually enjoy it. Life is too short to eat crap.

Bad News

So, besides Facebook and most of Wikipedia, it turns out that all blogspot blogs are blocked in China.  I've gotten around this somewhat by paying for a special proxy program ($6 USD a month which I realized was worth it based on my apparent addiction to Facebook).  Anyway, so with this program (which makes me feel very subversive and patriotic and proud as if I were actually using this access for a cause instead of vanity) I can access this blog but can't post pictures, so I'm going to wait until I can, which will probably be around mid-July. Sorry.  I miss you and love you all!

Sad and Slow

5/7-

I spent today recovering from my nuclear particle collision speed in Japan by reading "Shadow of the Wind."  It's a wonderful book so far, but I had to put it down at one point just because it was so sad.  In fact, all the books I've read recently that have been really good have been sad.  Between that and all the sad sights I've seen, I have to wonder if I'm being masochistic, but I don't feel sad or hurty overall?  Also, it seems like Spanish and South American authors in general tend to write very depressing books, I wonder why that is, and why that makes me like them- because they understand pain and sadness? 

The city is drowning today, so I only went outside once to get food, which was forgettable.  I'd planned on changing hostels to a cheaper place, but they had a dorm bed available here for the same price, and searching for a random building in the rain sounded terrible, so I'm staying here. I did buy a bar of chocolate and milk, which I successfully combined into really yummy hot chocolate, so I'm counting that as my achievement for the day.

Peace and Sadness in Hiroshima

4/17

I've only been in Japan for an hour and a half and already I've seen: a Japanese dwarf (which I think just seems particularly funny because I imagine they should be doing acrobatics or something stupid like that- I know, I suck), a woman dressed in a full kimono complete with socks and sandals, and a girl/young woman all Harajuku'd out in red with bows, frills and lace. 

Once again, I have to try to keep these entries shorter, because I just get backlogged and then I start to feel overwhelmed and almost start to dread it when I actually really enjoy writing them.

So today, I got in by ferry to Shimonoseki, going through the lovely straits of Japan.  The train station was a short walk away so I went over, remembered that I had no idea or plan as to where I was going and just walked onto a train.  Once on the train, I looked at a map and decided that from there I'd go to Hiroshima for the night and since the train was still at the station while I was making up my mind, I just got up and walked off.  I had to go South to get a train to go North to Hiroshima, but I got there.  Since I didn't have a hostel booked and didn't have a guidebook, I needed to get online to look one up.  This sounds simpler than it was. 

Internet (cable or wifi) is not just available here in coffee shops or public places.  They have it, of course, but you have to go to a specific Internet Cafe.  These are usually quite nice; comfortable, fast internet speeds, free soda/coffee/tea, and a manga library, but it is inconvenient as I'm used to being able to pretty much pop in anywhere to get internet (even if I have to pay for it or buy something).

Still, I found one, looked up a hostel that looked decent and made it over to J-Hoppers, a hostel group in four cities here.  I got a dorm room with internet access and just hung out there for a while resting.

In the late afternoon, I had to get out and do something, especially if I wanted to leave Hiroshima the next day.  Plus, I was starving.  I caught a train into the city center, go off at a main shopping area and found a ramen place, then walked over to the Peace Park which included several different types of memorials, burial shrines, trees still alive and marked from the blast, and a building of some importance left as skeletal as it was after the bomb was dropped.

Epicenter of the bomb, though higher up in the sky

Hiroshima was fantastically done.  It really was; the Peace Park was non-judgemental, simply factual, and calming, and great. 

Thousand Paper Cranes Memorial

Yet somehow, it was still terribly, horribly depressing.  I started to think about it though and it's really my own fault; I'm the one who was stupid enough to go from one country known for civil war/genocide/land mines to a country known for civil war/foreign interference to a place where the worlds first atomic bomb was dropped- really what could I expect?

Leaving the World's 5th Largest Port

4/16

Got up and finally, after several dips in various hot tubs, left the jimjillbang.  All that steam had helped and my headaches were already feeling much better.  It was also, finally, a nice day in Korea, not too cold, and sunny.  I realized that the dead trees I'd seen from the train actually weren't dead at all, just a very dark green and I could start to imagine that it might actually be a beautiful country. 

I went to the Busan Museum, which was quite interesting, especially the section on Japanese relations with Korea in Busan, but also quite depressing, as there was a section on the Korean War at the end.

I think part of the reason I'm not all that fussed about Korea is because, even with North Korea attached, it's still very much in between.  In between in that it's always been fought over by someone and so those cultures have seeped into Korean culture.  It's in between China and Japan geographically, financially.  This point is getting very convuluted but what I mean is that I like extremes, and South Korea is as middle of the road as it gets.  Also, I'm not particularly interested in the Cold War.  Even more generally, I'm not very interested in ideological conflicts because they just seem so ridiculous to me.

Practically next door was the U.N. Cemetary, which was also sad, though it was pretty.  Though I still had quite a bit of time, I went over to the Ferry Terminal and waited.  The ferry itself was quite impressive- almost like a small cruise ship.  There was even a public bath, but I'd had enough of that for a while.  The trip out of the port was quite pretty all lit up at night.  My berth was another pad on the floor in a large room- still uncomfortable, and I was once again, wildly grateful for the Ambien, which is becoming a life-saver to me.

Other random thoughts or things I wrote in Korea:

It is nice to see some attractive men again.  I'm not saying there aren't any, and everyone has different tastes, but I don't think I saw a single (native) attractive man in all of Southeast Asia.  Fortunately, a fair amount of Korean guys are cute, and not nearly as short as people always say.  Most were average, not tall, but average.

I don't have too much homesickness overall, but I do miss people, and certain things, places.  It seems to work one subject at a time, and lately the category I'm missing like crazy is my friends.  I had a dream the other night, and when it started, it was about a hot guy in a bar who was going to hit on me and we'd go out.  Obviously I had to be in a bar for this to work, so in my dream, I walked into the bar and met with my Seattle friends and started talking to them, while the hot guy was at the bar.  Somehow, my dream just turned into me chatting and laughing with them.  At one point I even went up to the bar to get drinks and had a mini-conversation with the hot guy, but then just went back to my friends- I couldn't help it, I just wanted to hang out with them and talk to them more than I wanted to meet some guy- they were just more interesting.  In short, I ended up having a very long, vivid dream about having a conversation with my friends in a bar and I think that was when I realized how much I miss them.

In Korea, several cultural practices are based in Confucianism.  The one I noticed was balance.  Sandra explained to me that drinks in bars were always accompanied by some kind of snack, and more interestingly to me, flavors in food all have to balance out.  Koreans take this to mean that you have to have kimchee or something bitter with every meal.  I took it to mean that after eating at any point, I had to keep the balance by having dessert.

Busan Tower at Night

Leaving the port, quite lovely at night

How Much Happy Do You Want?

4/8

It's always surprising to me when I actually do what I say I'm going to do, so the fact that I actually got up, ate breakfast and left the guesthouse early felt rather shocking.  My headache was almost completely gone, and after how little I'd done for the past few days, I had tons of energy so I decided to walk over to Tuol Sleng (the former high school that had been turned into a torture/prison under the Khmer Rouge) and see it and pay my respects.

The only problem with this plan was that, despite the horrors that occurred here, I could think of little besides the wildly crass and inappropriate jokes about torture and high school that I wanted to make.  This urge was not helped by the fact that the signs kept referring to Pol Pot and his "clique" and that part of the main things used for torture had previously been part of their P.E. program (a series of ropes, presumably previously used for climbing, that were used to turn prisoners upside down and dip them into filthy (like, portapotty filthy) water). 

It was actually really sad though and while I'd thought it even more at the Killing Fields yesterday, it really did make me consider the horrors of war and man's inhumanity to man.  At the same time though, it made me remember that there are things worth fighting for (Tuol Sleng was largely populated with political prisoners) and that the people who are fighters have to fight.  Once again, I'm getting all convoluted and confusing my original point and making it sound hard and bad in a way it isn't, but that's life. 

There was a series of photographs of the prisoners and some of what they went through.  Many of them were mugshots or otherwise uninteresting, but I did really like this one.

 

Another thing I was forced to consider was the inaction of other people and countries.  Several of the signs said things to the effect of "so that it may never happen again" and similar, which made me think: a) haven't we heard this before? (In regards to the Holocaust, in particular,) and b) how are we still allowing this to happen now?  And it is.  I'm thinking of the situation of the Sudan in particular, but any instance would do.  I don't even really mean this in an accusatory way; obviously I'm not doing anything to help the situation there either, but just that it should perhaps make us think.  Maybe as human beings, we really aren't made to think of much besides ourselves.  I'm not some exemplary example of a person; the truth is that unless I saw something as likely to immediately affect me, I probably wouldn't go far out of my way to stop it, even when I do understand that it's a terrible injustice.  That's a hard truth to accept.

On the other hand, there are those who are true idealists and try to really solve the problems of the world.  Don't worry though, Tuol Sleng showed how those people just sucked and are enablers as well.  In what was actually the most interesting of their exhibits, the curators had collected a series of photographs taken by a Swedish man who'd been a serious Vietnam War protester and had been part of a very small party allowed into Cambodia under Pol Pot's rule in an attempt to show how well his extremist Communist revolution was working, and showed his comments from the time and his thoughts now.  It was really interesting and helped you to understand more how people can let themselves believe what they want to believe.  His thoughts seemed foolish and naive, and I couldn't ever imagine myself being weak-willed enough to believe in any of it.  At the same time, it made me a little bit sad and perhaps wistful because I also couldn't ever imagine myself [being young, naive, passionate] believing in a cause that strongly, and sometimes I wish I could.  Believing just seems so much easier sometimes.

So either you're cruel (strong) and uncaring or you're kind (weak) and foolish.  Either way, or even if you're something else, what I learned today (and really knew already,) is that you still suck.  Hope that helps!

One thing I have to add however, was that part of these exhibits and my experience in Cambodia in general left a really bad taste in my mouth in its anti-Americanism.  I'm not suggesting here that everything going on in that period in our history was perfect or even that we've always done such a great job regarding foreign policy, but the anti-Americanism here just felt harsh and a bit unwarranted, especially since the previous French war was completely, COMPLETELY, ignored.  It felt like propaganda, and Cambodia is one of the most corrupt countries in the entire world. 

Wooo, okay, breathe now.  After that, my day really did get much happier.  I went over to the National Museum and looked around at all the cool stuff (and some of it was really was very impressive, like the intricate wood creation that was a shed).  After that, though, I was starving, and my whole day went to pot.

Technically speaking, marijuana is illegal in Cambodia, but kind of barely since it's widely used in traditional medicine.  At worst, even if you got caught, it would be a minor fine (like $20-$50 tops) and probably more of a bribe fine than an actual one, so it's pretty gentle, unlike Singapore or Malaysia.

Every once in a while I enjoy a bit, but really rarely.  Most of the time, it just really doesn't appeal to me.  Part of this is because I don't want to pay for it, part of it is because usually when there's pot, there's alcohol, which I prefer, and part of it is because when I get high, the one stereotypical aspect I follow is the munchies route: I will eat 5,000 calories in an hour when I'm high.  So basically, I only smoke (or imbibe) pot about once a year on average.

All the same, it's probably been over a year since I have, and, if you add in the fact that there's actually a restaurant that serves it here, it's almost inevitable that I would get high.  Happy High Herb is a chain, and in Australia anyway, they sell only a legal alternative.  In Cambodia, it's Happy High Herb Pizza, which apparently they've been serving since 1994.  I was embarrassed ordering it- I won't lie- especially when the (very sweet) waitress asked me "How much happy do you want?" and I said "Not too much, I don't want to get high" and she suggested medium, which I agreed with.  So I had a supreme-style pizza, which was decent, not great, and felt just a little calmer, though not high.  Here's the ground-up pot:

So after that, feeling calm about time and well, most things in life, I went over to see the Silver Pagoda.  There were actually several temples to see, some of which were really very cool.  Unfortunately, photographs were mostly forbidden and I was a bit disappointed to see that even in the Silver Pagoda, which is famous because the floor is made of silver tiles, the best parts were covered.

I walked over to the Foreign Correspondent's Club for their "famous" Happy Hour, which was nice to see, but made me slightly consider how nearly all Correspondent-type clubs are super Western or Colonial style oriented.  It was nice, though, but I eventually headed back over to Metro Cafe again looking for raspberries, after visiting this temple:

At the bar, I studied their menu and this seemed to offer an even greater concentration of raspberries, even though it was non-alcoholic.

It was ridiculously amazing.  I ate it halfway with a spoon, and I don't care that I was in a bar and eating my drink like a three year old, it was crazy good.  Afterwards, I headed back to my guesthouse and hung out there before leaving at around 8:30 for my 11:55 p.m. flight.

I think I may have made Cambodia sound like a kind of crappy place, and while it certainly wasn't my favorite, and was very hard, I don't want to leave it without admitting that Angkor Wat was incredibly, blow-your-mind awesome.  They call it the "8th Wonder of the World," as do many other places, but I think it's one of a few places that truly deserves that title, it really was incredible, impressive and amazing.