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Back to the City of Churches...

It's all over. All over. The adventure is finished.

At least, it's over for now. Everyone who knows me well enough knows that i have a serious bug living inside me.... and i'm not just talking about that tape worm i picked up in China - i'm talking about the so-called 'travel bug'.

So yeah, i'm sure i'll be up and about sometime in the future, and when that time happens, i'll ressurect this dusty blog. For now, however, i've joined Lachy and Cam at http://www.upshake.com - and that's where i'll be making my stupid observations and constant spelling mistakes from now on.

For all 6 of you who followed this blog all year, i salute you.

As for Adelaide, it sucks. Never travel here.

Hard Times in a Capsule Hotel

Konbanwa,

O genki desu ka? Watashiwa genki desu. Nihonga sukimasu. Nihonno tabemonowa totemo ooishi desu.

........And yeah thats about as far as my Japanese has progressed in the past 3 weeks. I've learned some new words (like "sugoi!", which means 'awesome'), but mostly I've just merely realised how much Japanese I've forgotten since November last year. Sigh, so depressing. Personally, I blame that disgusting Romanian plum alcohol substance for the damage. At the time i thought it was good for you (because it was brewed with plums), so i tried to get into it as much as possible. But then I found out it was only 30% plum, and a good 70% alcohol. Some process called "fermentation" or something like that, can't really remember. But yeah, keep that in mind next time you're out that way.

Anyway, to summarise Japan in one word: SUGOI!!!

It's such a cool country. Definitely has to rank as the single most crazy, bizarre, non-senscial society in the world. I mean, just one example that immediately springs to mind is that you can buy a 3L beer from a vending machine. And this beer comes in a aluminium can, which means its intended to be consumed by only one person! Its the size of a keg! Unbelievable.

Infact, everything here comes from vending machines. Ive been to a number of "resturants" now where you order your food from a vending machine nearby the entrance, which then gives you a ticket stub, which you then pass on to the waiter. In a society where every waking second counts, it makes a lot of sense. No time to read menus, no time.

Yep, Japan is definitely a busy place. The noodle bars are probably the best place to watch society whirl on by. Youll be sitting there [sorry about the terrible grammer, cant locate the apostrophe button on this damn Jap keyboard. "Most technelocially advanced society on earth", my arse]. Anyway, youll be sitting there, sipping away on your miso soup, and business men will storm into the place, sit down, and then furiously attempt to eat lunch within a 2 minute period. No joke. Ive seen some particularly lightening fast businessmen even eat their noodles in the same time it has taken me to even work out how to operate the bloody ordering machine.

Hah, that reminds me, i must talk more about this "typical" Japanese businessman. Obviously, most of the time of this businessman is spent working. Or rushing around getting to/from work or various appointments. But sometimes he has to let his hair down, and thats when things in this society get particularly interesting. Let me explain.

Japan is a society of contrasts. On the one hand, the Japanese are the most polite, formal, hardworking, considerate, and proper people on the planet. I mean, there must be some secret government program whereby each new born Japanese baby is implanted with a Sony equittique chip or something, because, as far as i can tell: they never litter, they never swear, they refuse to drive above 35km an hour, and they waste a good 4-5 hours of every day just saying "arigato gozimasu" to one other as they stroll past.

But anyway, this robotic lifestyle of pointless niceities obviously wears you out after a while, and this is when the businessmen comes back into it. Japan may be the most polite society on the planet, but it probably also harbours the filthiest underworld. What do you do if you are a Japanese businessman, you work 60-80 hours a week, are earning a ridiculous amount of yen, but only have about 2 hours spare time a week in which to spend it in? Well, just use your imagination...... and by golly, they sure do. Strip clubs, brothels, peekbooths, dodgy kareoke bars, even more suss "theatre" bars, 3-story hentai shops, 6-story porn shops.... its all here. And its everywhere. You can pick up 100-page prostitute brochures from internet cafes for gods sake! In Tokyo, i kept walking into porn shops by accident all the time. This is because the front of the shop would be selling videogames, or manga, or some of other fairly innocent product..... and so itd all look respectable, until you actually walk in there and discover that most of the shelves are actually jam-packed with softcore idol videos, or a lot worse..... and i mean A LOT WORSE. Stuff that Project Avatar might be interested in. And no fellas, i have not found the famed "panty vending machines" yet, but im still looking. So stay posted on that one.

The other night Benji and I got to stay in a "capsule hotel" and got to experience this interesting life of the single Japanese businessman first hand. First off, the hotel was restricted to men-only. It makes sense - if you are a single Japanese businessmen, you dont want any non-virtual women complicating things your life. It would only make things awkward, take up valuable time, and restrict you from doing things you otherwise would feel comfortable doing.... like walking around the hotel naked for instance. Yes, there was a lot of that.

Infact, sorry, i lie. There were women at the hotel. There were a bunch of nice ladies in the massage parlour on level one, who would give you a quick rubdown at all hours of the night. Anyway, the routine of the capsule men seems to be as follows: return to the hotel after business, shower in the communal showers, have a quick spa bath and/or massage, then hit the dodgy area of town [which isnt that difficult, seeing as most of the capsule hotels are already located within the dodgy area of town], before finally retiring to your own private capsule, where you have access to a round the clock, in house porn channel. Yep, it certainly is the life.

The capsule hotel was definitely an experience. Ive never really been into the whole naked communal shower and spa thing. It kind of reminds me of what prison might be like. But in a capsule hotel, you have strict procedures to follow, and there are no exceptions. Here is the schedule you must follow: first off, when you arrive, you need to disrobe to nothing in the locker room, and then put on your special orange "pre-bathing" boxer shorts. This is to signify you are not yet clean. Then you must walk to the bathrooms, place your orange shorts in a laundry box, and grab ONE toothbrush, ONE shaver, and ONE cleaning cloth, and then proceed to the communal shower room. Here is where you clean yourself, before then moving onto the communal spa and sauna area. Then, once you are finished in here, you may enter the communal drying room, where you pick up a towel, give your privates a wipe, and engage in light, friendly banter with the other men who are also wiping their privates. Charming. After you have finished with this, you are then required to grab a dark green "post-bathing" pajama suit, put it on, and then you may proceed to the capsule hotel communal rooms. Here you can sit around with other freshly cleaned males, all wearing the exact same dark green pajamas, and can happily waste away the day watching TV or reading manga or deciding which dodgy bar to visit next.

It all honesty, the place kind of reminded me of a sci fi film that George Lucas directed before Star Wars.... i cant remember the name of it, but it involved everyone in society wearing the same clothes, being locked in a building without natural sunlight, and acting like robots. Although in the movie, im pretty sure the sleeping quaters of the characters were bigger than the capsule i had to sleep in.

Anyway, aside from the nude bathing, ive also done a lot of other stuff here, but as usual im going to have to rush through it because im running out of time. So.......

- Yesterday i went to see the opening day of the Fukuoka sumo tournament. It was awesome. The best bout was when one particularly fat sumo threw the other, smaller, sumo right off the stage into the one of the judges and some of the crowd. This led to all the judges having a "council" in the centre of the ring, where, after much deliberation, it was decided that the throw was not malicious, and the sumo was awarded the victory.
- In the past week i have visited two active volcanos. The second one i even got to go up to the summit to take a peak inside...... there was a lot of smoke coming out of it, but no fire. What a jip.
- I went hiking in Nikko and ran into a "herd" of about 60 snow monkies. It was incredible! Before this, my only experiences with monkeys had been in Thailand, where i decided they were evil, evil creatures; only interested in stealing your food and giving you rabies in the process. However, these Japanese monkeys were calm, shy, and actually quite cute. So my opinion of ape-kind has changed [albiet marginally, these Japanese monkies still had gaping pink bums.... which, when you think about it, is quite an insensitive thing to evolve to, esepcially considering the rest of you is coated in thick fur].
- Ive also done a hell of a lot of nerdy things that you wont be interested in reading about and im embarrased to write about anyway...... such as visiting the Studio Ghibli Museum, the offical Sega World theme park, and spending a whole day in the Tokyo electronics district. Yeah, you get the idea.

Ok thats it. Im coming home in 4 days anyway. Ahhh home sweet home. My plan as soon as i arrived back to my house is: throw out all my clothes, quarantine my sleeping bag at an offical government centre, get myself checked out for parasites, book myself into one of those anorexic rehabilitation centres [its been difficult eating in Japan], and then finally buy a carton of West End.

Cya guys, in person, very soon. Scary, scary, scary stuff. Especially considering most of you now have career-style employment, and may be embarrased to socialise with a poor, possibly diseased nomad, who has spent the better part of a year offically classified as a homeless person. Nah, who am i kidding, im sure ill fit right in.

Photo Safari

Konichiwa!

I thought I'd spare you my usual verbal dribble, and give you some random photos. These are roughly from the Italy to England leg of the trip, and there's not many of myself, seeing as i'm usually the one behind the camera. Plus they're not in any semblance of order; i like chaos and you should too.



Nuremburg, Germany.



A village in Chinque-Terra, Italy.



A common sight in Mostar, Bosnia.



This is me in some Romanian village near the Ukranian border. As you can see, it's a hive of activity.



Sheep in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania. Altitude = around 2500m above sea level.



This is "team Commonwealth". These are the delightful English chaps who provided Benji and I with a place to sleep for almost 2 weeks in London, and who treated us like Gods.... day in, day out. I miss the bongo game, fellas. This photo was taken in Bosnia.



Benji chillin' in Bol, Croatia. This is definitely one of the best photos of the trip.

And i think i'll leave it there. Turns out most of my good shots are in vertical, not horizonal, and seeing as i can't operate Photoshop in Japanese, i can't switch them around for you. So you'll just have to wait a few more weeks.

As a concluding sidenote: i have now eaten snake. Finally.

I'm not a 'megwa', i'm from A-da-li-a!!

Hey all,

I'm now writing to you from a big city in southern China. It's called Chang-Sha, and has a population of 6 million people. That's bigger than Sydney, Rome, Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona, Boston, or Washington. Infact, it's about 7 to 8 times the population of Amsterdam. What's that, you mean you've never heard of the bustling metropolis of Chang-Sha? But, it's massive.... it should be at the forefront of international affairs, right? Well, not really. The thing about China is that every city pretty much has a population of 6 million people living in it, which makes Chang-Sha pretty ordinary in the scheme of things. As far as i can tell, it has a river, one museum, a train station, two statues of Mao, and, of course, 6 million Chinese people strolling around. And that pretty much is it.

Which explains why no tourists go here. Or anywhere that i've been in the last two weeks, actually. In all seriousness, Benji and I have not seen a Westerner in a good 8 days. What's more, we have not conversed with a Westerner since late September. We have not even been to a resturant with an english menu for at least 3 weeks. Which means i've had little to no idea what i've been eating for about as long as well. Which explains a lot regarding bowel movements, but we'll get to that later.

So where have we been then? Well, it's grown to quite a list of places that nobody goes to, often for good reason. First on the list would be the industrial hellhole of Datong... which the World Bank rates as the third most polluted city in the entire world. Interesting fact for you all, China officially has 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world. We've been to 3 on that list now, but i'd rate every Chinese city as being well within the top 50. Seriously, i haven't a blue sky since arriving here. I don't know if it even exists anymore. In Datong, the pollution was so bad that you'd even get to experience 2 sunsets..... the first was when the sun descended into the deep, coal-fuelled haze hanging just above the horizon. Then it would reappear again for an instant, before descending again behind the actual horizon.

I always wondered why Chinese people spit so much. Men, women, kids, grandmas... they all hawk and slag all over the place. Sometimes in bins, but normally on the street, on the resturant floor, on the bus floor. But now i understand why. It's to do with this pollution. The air is so filthy over here that your lungs literally begin to heave under the grot and dust that you're constantly inhaling. Even the most polite, well-mannered, ettique-focused person (such as myself) cannot help but spit all that crap out every 10 minutes or so. It's the only way to stave off a premature death from cancer, really.

What else can i tell you about China? Well, the toilets make an interesting side story. Of course, we all know that the conception of sitting on a toilet seat, as a opposed to squatting over a smelly pit, hasn't really caught on in this part of the world yet. But the Chinese take the 'asian-style' toilet experience to a whole new level.... because most of the time they don't even bother installing divider walls between the holes. This means there is no such thing as even the 'toilet booth'. Rather, you walk into a room with between 3 to 6 holes, you pick a hole, and get to it.... often right next to another guy. And, thanks to the typical Chinese diet of chillies and nothing else, your neighbour will probably be merrily squatting away last night's dinner... making the experience all the more, um, melodious. Many Chinese even have conversations while shitting in this fashion, but what they talk about i've got no idea.

Heh, maybe i should explain the difference between Chinese food back home, and Chinese food here. One word: chilli. No joke, the chilli intake here far surpasses Thailand. As i said before, i've been ordering from Chinese menus for weeks now, which means it's always a suprise, but the one assurity is at least 5-10 chillies per dish. I said AT LEAST. Often i've made the hilarious mistake of ordering a dish which is just all chillies (say about 50 or so, red and green, finely chopped), with a bit of pork thrown in for flavour. It's a difficult dish to consume, let me tell you. The furthest i've got through is about 50%, which i think's a pretty respectable achievement, considering that for most of my 22 years i've eaten nothing but sausages, mash potato, and green peas, perhaps with a little bit of salt and pepper thrown on when i felt the need to live dangerously.

Other things you should know about the Chinese: they play a lot of online role-playing games. They get drunk very easily. None of them know what a kangaroo is. They call Americans, 'megwa', which sounds more like a disease than a nationality (Australians are from 'a-da-li-a', which is kind of cute). They think that Chinese NBA player from the Rockets is the single greatest sportsman since Michael Jordan. They play majong and chinese checkers just as much as sterotypical 'chinese nerds' do in US frat movies.

They also eat absolutely anything. Infact, just some of the things ive seen alive in cages outside of resturants include: beavers, turtles, eels, chipmunks, frogs, etc. Plus, we've dined in resturants where you can get dog, pig's testicles, and a whole host of even weirder shit that we can't read and have no idea what it is. The coolest things we've (knowingly) eaten include donkey meat (delicious), wild mountain boar (decent, but not fantastic), and this crazy toxic substance known only as "sheep's blood cake" (absolutely terrible).

What else? They have a Muslim population of maybe 40 million or so, which is interesting (the Chinese Muslim cuisine is fantastic by the way). They also have a 'Chinese Jewish' population... don't really know how that works, but supposedly it exists.

And, of course, the rumours are true: the Chinese, for the most part, are hardworking, business focused, money loving, capitalists..... which makes the juxtiposition with their chosen national ideology all the more perplexing.

Speaking of which, let's get political. I go to Hong Kong tomorrow, so i shouldn't be abducted and raped by getting a little controversial today (as i say this, i cautiously look over my shoulder). First off, it's absolutely astonishing how much the Chinese seem to love and respect their government. Definitely more patriotic and state-loving than anywhere else i've ever experienced (even more so than America). When i visited Mao's emblalmed body (which looked like a shiny new manequin by the way), most of the Chinese there (and there were thousands of them shuffling past), were crying, praying, offering gifts, and generally revering their great revolutionary leader. It got me thinking: the best thing our Prime Minister gets from the Australian public most of the time is nothing abuse and rotten eggs (with good reason mind you), but even he isn't responsible for millions of deaths. Of course, i'm not saying that Mao meant to kill millions (he meant to kill alot of reactionaries, but not millions by famine), but still..... it's strange. Even the current regime here admits Mao was 30% wrong, and only 70% right (although that doesn't stop them building a seemingly endless array of Mao monuments on every street corner). So yeah, I don't really know what to make of all of it at the moment, which is probably a good thing, considering my internet usage is probably being monitored as we speak, so the less i make of it right now, the better.

By the way, you cannot access BBC World in China. Nor can you access a whole host of Western media outlets, including, strangely enough, Wikipedia. Those media you can access, most of the stories regarding China fail to load. Of course, the ever-reliable Adelaide Advertiser still works, but i'll be damned if i'll read that piece of Murdoch trash, even if it is the only available newspaper on the planet.

Geez, i'm getting sidetracked here. Luckily Benji has actually written about we DID in China (as opposed to what I THOUGHT about China), so you should really check out his blog at http://gleamingtheglobe.blogspot.com to find out why chilli hurts so much in some many different bodily areas when eaten by the bucketload. I will give you a quick rundown on the months events, however, cause really, it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than my incoherent discussions regarding the failure of modern communism.

So, without further adue, these are the highlights:

- WuTai Sahn: This is a buddhist mountain range in the centre-north of China. We went here after Datong, because we thought our lungs could do with some fresh air after all that lovely coal-mine inhalation. As usual we didn't really have much of a plan, but we me this Dutch couple, who gave us a map of the area, and we decided to just walk off in a random direction. This soon became quite an adventure. We passed impoverished communities, ghost villages inhabited only by stray dogs, empty buddhist monestaries, and, by far the most bizarre, a fairly large marajuana plantation, guarded by a whole lot of Chinese dudes. Now, we've all seen the movie 'the beach', so you could imagine what me and benji were thinking as we approached this little private herb garden. The Chinese dudes were staring at us as we approached; fixed, cold, motionless. It got so awkward that i decided to say hi to them. And after a poorly orchestrated 'ni hao' to them, they all jumped up and down laughing and smiling and saying 'ni hao, ni hao, ni hao'; partly teasing me, partly happy that a foreigner had come to say hello. So yeah, they turned out to be really nice people. Not even that many AK 47s or anything either.
We ended that day by climbing a 2900m mountain, easily the highest i have ever climbed, and stumbling upon a wild flock (?) of horses. At the peak of this mountain, there was a solitary buddhist monestary, inhabited by one Chinese monk, and another American monk on a private pilgrimage. The American ended up letting us inside, and teaching us how to pray, so it turned out to be a fantastic, enlightening day. Of course, i won't be converting to Buddhism, because the only Westerners who do that seem to be those crazy hippy types who frequent nuddist beaches and sing camp songs around fires (naked, of course), but it did seem like a pretty cool religion.

- Shaolin Tsu: This is the traditional birthplace of Asian martial arts, and also the setting of every period Hong Kong movie ever created, so obviously it was a necessary pilgrimage spot for Benji and myself. The actual temple itself was thoroughly disappointing, a huge, big, disneyland-style tourist attraction. But we ended up staying in a little ghetto town nearby Shaolin, where we were introduced to a local kung-fu school, and, before you could say "chop-suey", had somehow signed up for a few days training. It was an amazing, difficult, and extremely embarrassing experience. Every single student, excpet Benji and I, could do the splits, could do back flips, could kick their own head if they so desired..... oh, and, of course, they could speak Chinese too. No one could speak English. But still, it was fun. We trained 6 hours a day, outside, in the sun, next to a glistening field of rice paddies. My aim was to learn a 28-move form by the end of the training, but now, largely thanks to 15cent Chinese rice wine, i can only remember maybe 22 moves. Still, i'd like to see that Budapest thug mess with me now! (that's a joke by the way! Just cause i learned the stance of "monkey picking fruit from a tree", doesn't mean i'm a kung fu master now by any means).

Bloody hell! I'm exhuasted, and i'm sure you are too. So i'm gonna leave it there. Once again, all the other misadventures will have to wait till i get back home. And there's a lot of 'em.... kareoke fun, car crashes, trains with so many people you literally can't move, Asian hip-hop dance competitions.

Bah! i'm off, to Hong Kong and beyond!!

Nick

PS - No spellcheck this time, it's in chinese. So sorry.