¡Rayos! ¡Rayos! ¡Rayos! Stop petting the Pufferfish

Oh, I guess I should mention that I´m in Ixtapa, Mexico this week, trying to have what in common parlance is called a vacation. But I think I need to rethink my vacations and go to more cultural epicenters, because it´s low, really low season here and I don´t want to spend more time talking to Pat and Lori from Minnesota about how Pat hit a deer with her truck the day before coming. It was nice to be able to split the cabe fare, but the crowd is not really what I hoping, friendly as they are. Cabos. Cabos. Cabos. Enuf sed. LOL. (Spelling per the American coed vacationing in Cabos, who is not in Ixtapa/Zihuatenejo at the present moment. Like oh my gawd!)

My first mistake was going ahead and choosing an all-inclusive. To keep food quality quasi-decent while maintaining an all-you-can eat proposition, the food is the exact same thing every day. Please kill my taste buds now. I have no use for them. ¿Obsoleto? I have no idea if that´s Spaglish o no.

The scuba diving here is so-so, but I´ve cut down on the number of dives I was expecting to take based on my initial two dives. The scuba company I went with with through my hotel was very professional and by the book, other than the assistant dive master kept on petting the pufferfish he ran into, and trying to touch every animal in sight. (He also grasped at a lot of rocks rather than manipulating his bouyancy to descend and ascend, which made me think he hadn´t had the experience to find his hand on a poisonous stonefish to teach him a salutory lesson. Talking to him confirmed that he started three months previously.)

The undersea wildlife in the region is similar to Puerto Vallarta, but in the shallow dives I took, there were scores and scores of two to three foot wide rays on the sandy shallows. One first is spotting a sea horse in the wild. The water is fairly cold right now for diving, and I was the first to do the James Bond entry into the water both dives. They asked me how it was. I went ahead and spouted out all the Spanish curse words and asked them for some more, which got a few laughs and a few new words.

Diver talk

Miguel, the divermaster gives his briefing. He reviews the sign language for sighting an eel - make squiggly lines with your hand. Sighting a lobster - make as if you have two antennae on your head.

I say,¨What´s the sign if you see a mermaid?¨ ¨Like this!¨ Taking the set-up, Knute (sp?), a German expat quickly made the sort of indicative hip gyrations that Elvis would have made if he were a contemporary with Britney Spears.

Update

Things have finally started melting.

Dear Frosty the Snow Man

...Melt! Melt dammit! Melt like the Wizard of Oz Witch when she forgets to wear her showercap! Melt faster than the hearts of women, when I finally finish all my Tony Robbins "You da' man" inspirational teachings and walk tall on hot coals! Melt like a Kim Jong-Il thermonuclear firecracker. Melt. Down! Please.

Viewfinder Zen

The view from both ends

I have five hours before I go to KLIA, so I’m trying to chill out. I’ve been practicing my Chinese characters and learning new words. I find the repetition calming, a sort of script knitting. I can make peace with the 3000 threads and needles to go – it’s all acupuncture.

Every time I get ready to decamp I get a surge of adrenaline and my bp jumps, so I’ve decided not to work today so that I don’t get further wired. And I need to do holiday shopping. Sorry folks, I have trouble bringing myself to buy souvenirs. I find something and I spend ten minutes debating crap/not crap, real/not real, can-ship/can’t ship/it’s-cool-so-it-will-be-broken-when-shipped, rip-off/not-rip-off/rip-off-so-what-i-gotta-buy-it-somewhere.

So, while I’m waiting what haven’t I written? Randomly....

One of the highlights of my Hong Kong trip was going to Ocean Park with my friend Annis. If you’re in Hong Kong, skip Disneyland, save some money, and go to Ocean Park. As the name suggests it is a Sea World-like Park built on a hillside in two parts. There is a cable car ride across the two sections that has great views.

I liked the mix of education with a lesser number of coasters and thrill rides. One roller coaster seemed kind of tame to me, my friend said jokingly, “It’s an Asian roller coaster.”
Nah, I would imagine Japan has some of the greatest in the world.

The exhibit I liked the most was the jellyfish collection. They had a variety of species, and I learned the name of the jellyfish I had been surrounded with in one dive – moon jellyfish. It was cool because they backlight the jellyfish in psychedelic colors. I think the tanks work by having a directed circular current so that the jellies don’t slime the walls. They also had a very cool reef exhibit that cork screws around so that you can see multiple levels of the reef – it was a lot more biodiverse than the artificial reef I saw here in the KLCC Aquaria.

The lowlight of my trip to China was locomotive. I think if you are traveling in a group and long lines and crowds don’t bother you, the trains are reasonably comfortable if you buy a sleeper ticket. The train stations in major cities are visions of judgment day. Once you are on the train, it’s not too bad until you get off again.

My first experience of the train system was hiking to it from the subway. Partly because of the heat, but mostly the beehive atmosphere and Soviet gigantism, I started to feel very dizzy. If I was the Terminator, the view screen would have dropped into place and I would’ve saw the mental text message “Overload Imminent…Evacuate Building” (appearing on screen with obligatory teletype printing sound…robots are aficionados of outdated technology).

So, as I mentioned here I skipped the confusion then. In contrast, the Beijing airport domestic terminal was tranquility. One thing about China Southern airlines is that they are pioneering the aviation equivalent of elevator music. I wondered if it was part of the communal ethos – no thirteen channels and individual headsets. I guess if it keeps prices down they can play Yanni for all I care. (Side thought, investors in Chinese airlines, I have a new concept in the line of Hooters Air – Kara-OK Airlines. If we’re all listening to awful music piped in, why not live-awful music? )

Now the not-so-fun trip was my 12-hour overnight train trip from Guilin to Guangzhou. My hotel was right next to the train station, and right up until getting on the train I was debating whether to go back to the hotel since I was getting a migraine. (Is it that I haven’t thanked you enough, Mr. Trigeminal Nerve? What’s the deal?)

The smart thing would’ve been to buy another ticket and spend another night at the hotel. But in my calculus I decided to go ahead and go. (China is not big on ice, perhaps always drinking hot drinks is an adaptation to prevent water-borne diseases. No ice machine in the hallway.)

A word on hard sleeper tickets: there’s no baggage compartment. Trying to sleep in an awkward position because of my bags + the vibrations and sound = thirty minutes after lights out I made my way to the car squatter. (And in China, we say squatter, it means squatter.) High decibel retching is heard throughout the train compartment. Yeah, this is the second reason not to travel by train in China if you have the dough. So I grinned and bore it, and managed to sleep three hours. Guangzhou is a very big city, so when we exited I was greeted with the scene I had tried to avoid in Beijing.

I’m trying to imagine what the experience must be like to travel without an assigned berth. The cheapest tickets work based on musical chairs’ rules.

There must be some Pavlovian principle at work. Take Amtrak off track! Chattanooga choo-choo foo-ey. Jet set. Hobo nobo.

The Art of Middling Eastern Cooking: My Recipe for Ergot-Falafel Shamm’ich

1) Go to a North Indian restaurant.
2) Order shammi kebab and naan bread.
3) When the sumptuous, fried but dry mutton-lentil meatballs come your way, take some raita yoghurt from your papadum wafer appetizer. Add a dollop, but no more than three dollops on the naan bread. Add two shami kebabs and serve.
4) Pretend the shammi kebabs are fried garbanzo beans. Pretend the naan bread is pita bread.

Kraft foods should give me an honorary award for my unified theory of fry cooking: everything fried tastes the same. Really good.

Next Stop: The Denver Divan

So a week from now, I will teleport back to the couch. So comfy. I will not move from that couch for the next six months. Or two. Please feel free to visit me in couchland. No visa needed. Couchland is on friendly terms with tvland so from there I will catch up on all missed episodes of 24, and the Sopranos. Carpe remotem controlem.

Oh, but about that teleportation, I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to make myself sleep. I have an overnight flight to Narita airport in Japan next Saturday. It was two hundred dollars less to stay in Japan for a ten hour layover, but if I don’t sleep it will be hell. Ear plugs ain’t going to cut it.

If it’s not too cold out, I will see about taking the train to Narita from the airport and visit a temple/garden they have there. Otherwise they have internet for 500 yen. Get some work done. Hah.

Facing Fonts

Today I learned the difference between the equivalent of “Times New Arab” and “Kufi Sans.” Instead of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” in Arabic it apparently goes “Nun [an Arabic letter] wa al-qalam wa ma yasturoona” (by the pen and what they write).

I took a cab to the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia. It was an impressive collection. The first exhibit I saw showed Chinese Muslim calligraphy. The admixture of calligraphic styles is very unique, Arabic mixed in with Chinese characters, written with a bamboo brush rather than the reed pen used predominately in Arabic calligraphy. An architecture exhibit showed scale models of about all of the most famous mosques and gave details of common “greenprints.”

At one point I was surprised to see on display a kiswah, an embroidered door covering over fifteen feet tall that draped the Ka’bah in 1964.

Across the street from the museum is the National Mosque of Malaysia, built in signature 1960’s style. Strangely enough, while the main train station and other museums are nearby, it is a very pedestrian unfriendly area. After spending about three or four hours reviewing the lessons from my Mideast history class and trying to read what little I can comprehend, I walked around for an hour before taking a cab to the Petronas Towers.

To complete the theme of the day (and maybe a Thanksgiving make-up gorge) I went to a Lebanese/Persian restaurant Al-Marjan there. They had a feast of a buffet. While it wasn’t the greatest Middle East food I’ve had (too mild of spice and tasteless hummus), everything was fresh and it was great to try a little of the different foods and desserts. I tried Arabic coffee, and it seems like an intermediary between tea and coffee, but I’m not sure what’s going on with that. The local drink I’ve liked and had for lunch is teh tarik which is a sweet tea that has the consistency of chocolate milk.

I finished a book I bought about the Krakatoa eruption a few weeks ago, so I bought a new book to start: “A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.” A convenient thing about KL is being in the Anglophone zone, so they have as good selection as anywhere, and a little bit cheaper prices than Hong Kong.

Bleepers

I was under the weather last week so didn't get to do much. I saw two movies.
I saw Imax Sharks 3-D. I thought it was cool because it shows the perspective you get in the briny deep, minus the briny feel. At the end, it went through the sharks that were filmed and categorized them as endangered, super-endangered, Danger-Will-Robinsoned. Now I like conservation. I just wondered about how they determine the category of endangered. It's asking too much for a 45 minute film narrated by a talking turtle, but I'd like to know facts behind slogans.

This year as I've been more exposed to H.K. movies, I've started to be a fan, particularly of some of the goofy movie conventions. I recommend seeing "Kung Fu Hustle" to start to see some of those elements that are common to many H.K. comedies.

Yesterday, I saw "The Departed." Eventually, I want to track down the H.K. movie it was based on and see if I like it better. There was some unintentional comedy in watching "The Departed" in Malaysia because of the censorship. Rather than bleeps, the method of choice was just cutting out the sound for a second. What was funny was that while the f-word was consistently cut out, the characters said far worse things that made the cut, or should I say didn't make the cut.

I guess while I saw the form of the movie as mostly well-made, I didn't see much substance to the story. I didn't particularly care for the Tarantino-esque conflict/plot resolution.

Some guy in my row answered his cell phone twice for like minute long conversations, informing his contact in Mandarin that "I'm watching a movie." I was thinking up things to say in Chinese, but was thinking that in a darkened movie theater best not to say "Hey Rotten Egg, turn off your cheap-ass cell phone." Maybe the guy was a mob boss who went to see the movie to brainstorm ideas for criminal mayhem.

Extreme Body Modification is Nuthin New Nor "Baru"

A coconut grinder. I only bring fascinating stuff to this blog. But on the subject of coconuts, three cheers for the Thai desert with ice shavings mixed with coconut milk and water chesnuts.





As a public service, I wanted to convey the message of the Muzium Negara of Kuala Lumpur that you are not to imitate the gentleman pictured above. They had a section on Hindu celebrations.

The national museum was worth seeing, though half of it was closed for renovation. I wish my camera didn't run out of batteries before I got to record the collection of shadow puppets from all over Asia that they host. My favorite part of the exhibits was the tribal wood carvings of imaginary creatures (I think from Borneo). There was one that was particularly impish, and belongs in one of those retarded Indiana Jones imitating movies about unlocking a vast evil from some ancient decoration. Those fiendish interior decorators of yore.

Hanging in the KL for at least another month...

An update (and there you go dad, the view from here). I'm pausing in Kuala Lumpur for at least another month while I plan my next steps. It feels good to unpack my bags fully. (I´m thinking what to title my photo album: "Harbucks of Asia Tour 2006", or the "Megamalls of Malaysia Marathon") I'm thinking to return to the U.S. for about a month to six weeks in late February. I´m debating whether I want to return to Asia in late March, or go check out South America. I´m thinking South America would be a good idea because my Spanish could use a tune up and I might be more likely to form a coherent plan.

But I´m trying to make the most of the time I still have. So I better get to bed. Part of my funk of late has probably been my interesting sleep schedule. I´ll try to do at least one thing interesting this weekend besides work!

On a side note, with regards to the interpretation of equal housing around here, the government is the impetus for the bumiputra discounts (according to the infallible wikipedia).

Communal Commity

Speaking of my last post, there are some constraints for my offshoring experiment. I'm only looking at middle-income countries with developed infrastructures with reasonably good healthcare available.

Actually where I am at now in Malaysia fits most criteria to a tee. China, although not middle income (though the distribution is skewed to the cities, where it perhaps starts to approach middle income), had a pretty decent technological infrastructure in place in the big cities. (I seem only to have had faulty internet connections since I've left China.) It would be workable, but not ideal on a number of liveability measures.

Really the only thing I've found annoying here so far is the two-tiered pricing. I'll see an advertised offer for a hotel, and then in the fine print, available only for residents of Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. There was probably an implicit two-tiered pricing in China and Taiwan (maybe explicit if my Chinese reading level was higher), but because of the language barrier I wouldn't have been conscious of it everytime I looked at the newspaper.

Today, I noticed an advertisement for apartment homes. "5% bumi discount." Imagine reading in the newspaper in 2006, "5% White-Anglo Saxon Protestant Discount" for a housing development! Every single day, the newspaper I read here, The Star, has articles about communal harmony. There is definitely conflict, although the aim of most parties seems to be to avoid ugliness on the level that takes place in Indonesia.

P3 Hacker

I awoke this week to the fact that I am businessman. Hence I need a business plan.
To pay the taxman. Tax woman? Seems more appropriate some how.

My business plan is offshoring myself to where the Purchasing Power Parity is to my advantage and I can pursue my hobbies. I'm thinking Argentina might be a good place. Anyone have any suggestions for destinations?

Some countries have rentista programs where if you can demonstrate a certain level of monthly income they will grant extended visas. I'll probably need to incorporate my business or create an LLC to have an entity that provides guaranteed monthly distributions.

Or I just need to find reasonable short-term housing in neighboring countries where I don't continue to bust the bank on hotels. I'll probably go with this option.

Unexpurgated, Whiney Sentiments from Three Days Ago (That's What Blogs are for Right?)

Last week I had the salutary experience of my notebook’s hard drive passing on to the great data stream in the sky. Thankfully, I had planned for this eventuality, so my hard drive was reborn from the back-up hard drive I bought three months ago. My HD is born-again, Hallelujah! My HD is saved!

But it put a crimp on the week, and because I only had a full disk image from a week ago, I’ve had the joy of re-doing some work I already completed. I think I’ll be more circumspect in the future. But I could be in a lot worse work circumstances right now.

I was hoping to move to some island or beach in Malaysia this week, but I wasn’t able to make arrangements because I had to try to catch up. The hotel I was in was a great value, but their special promotion ran out today and they were going to jack up the price 40% so I had to at the last minute find a place with internet. As I start to stay in more hotels (rather than the low-end backpacker slumming I’ve done in past trips), I get pissed off to no end having to decipher whether a hotel that says they have “internet,” actually has what I need. Or they’ll be coy about charging from $10 to $15 dollars a day surcharge to use the internet in the hotel room. I guess that’s how they stay in business. Make taxes and service charges confusing so it’s harder to compare hotels mano a mano. Milk the people with expense accounts. The rack-rate hotelier conspiracy. If someone says “++” or “Net” again…argh…if you’re so four-star, why do I the guest have to do the math?

I use kayak.com to try to find and compare hotels in advance, but often I find the best deals once I get to a place and can walk around and find a lower-profile, better value hotel. It can also be too much information, or the guest reviews make you think that every hotel has bed bugs, surly front desk service and exploding toilets.

Okay, I’m just in a cranky mood. I guess finding a place to settle down is looking more and more attractive as the nomad model has it’s share of annoyances. In part, it’s that I haven’t really done enough interesting things the past few months to justify the overhead of setting up office every few weeks or days. It has been worth the experiment, though. It’s less of a problem than that my trip has veered off into aimless wandering. If I was wandering with an aim then I could consider it the price of being in business.

On the bright side, at least it has been enjoyable becoming a first-rate instant noodle chef.