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.