Hong Kong, China, Maccau: Lawless Booze, World Gambling Capital, & Shaolin Temple Summer. 20.X.3

Hong Kong, China, & Macau: Lawless Booze, Gambling, & Shaolin Temple

20.X.3.

Summer....

I arrive in Hong Kong,find they no longer stamp passports, and quickly jump on a bus bound for the east side of the island. I'm heading to the “Wan Chai” district. I notice that the bus is bound for “Chai Wan”... probably a typo on the map I think to myself. Surely there wouldn't be two places whose name were just juxtapositions of each other? There would be, and I ended up at the wrong one. Consulting my compass and map, I hoofed it to where I was going: A hostel on Hong Kong island in the Wan Chai district. I arrive and find a note from the government taped to the door alerting me to the fact that this hostel is illegally run. It mustn't have been too much of a problem because the note was 6 years old. I checked in, found that I had been moved from an 8 person room to a 4 person (at no extra cost), and that my room was an all-girls room. The girls were surprised.

It was fairly late already that first night and I was tired from wondering the sticky viscous Hong Kong rain, so I laid down for the night. Drifting off to sleep I recalled how it was I came to be there in the first place.

University. Months Prior it was brought to my attention that I had been in school a comically exorbitant amount of time, and ti was time to graduate. With the proviso that I needed to complete a final internship before it was official. I got my internship cleared for a couple months in the summer doing wilderness survival/ leadership training in an interesting place (originally to be the Amazon), but I had a decent amount of time to fill before then. I heard that the University was sending people to study in China, expenses paid if you played your cards right, and I wanted in. It would be my final trip I would be able to skeeze out of the university. Of course, it wasn't as easy as all that. There were meetings and forms of all kinds to fill out, and it really became quite the pain in my ass, but it was well worth it. I got the trip to China paid for, as per the plan. In fact, I actually MADE money by going to China thanks to some scholarships and creative accounting on my part. The university go plane tickets for the students for 1,200$US; I told them I could find my own, got one for 600$US, and pocketed the difference. Not only had they sent me to China and given me extra money, they had effectively paid for my travel all across Asia and eventually to Australia as well! I planned to do some backpacking before and after China, and before and after Australia, but there was a problem (quelle surprise): Both Australia and China were specific functions I was attending with mandatory supplies, so I had to carry around a bag that was far too heavy and unwieldy full of oddly specific things. Que sera, I though, better to have Nash problems than mundane problems.

During my final briefing meeting with the university I was warned to stay away from fruits and vegetables (covered in poisonous pesticides), street food (unsanitary), and warned not to mention the “3 T's” in China : Tiananmen Square, Taiwan … and the teacher forgot the last T ( It's Tibet...)! I ate almost exclusively those things and Chinese citizens don't have adequate information to talk of the T's, so no worries. After the meeting I flew out to Hong Kong a week before the group of schoolmates to spend time on the island before meeting up with a bunch of people I didn't know to go to school in China. The flight was decently uneventful, though the Chinese people came from a land were personal space as all but a distant legend; They were literally crawling over me to get to their luggage. I didn't know that this was actually a foreboding omen for China, at the time I was just concerned to get to Hong Kong, which brings us back to the hostel...

I woke up and wondered to the lobby were I met a German guy who looked strikingly similar to my friend George. He looked... disappointed? “This place is nothing like the pictures on the internet...” he said with a laugh. That's for sure! Picturesque it was not, but I had been in far worse. We decided to go out for a midnight meal at a literal hole in the wall eatery. It wasn't bad tasting, thought he Tea left somethings to be desired; those things being flavor and appropriate substance. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was just hot brown tap water. Though the food and sewer water tasted OK, within 30 minutes it had sent my stomach into a grumbly tail spin. I popped some “Tumms” and went to bed. I awoke in the morning time, no worse for wear. Does “Tumms” need a spokesman? I've been working on a new slogan for them: “Tumms. Oh, you didn't shit the bed? You're welcome.” I think It'll catch on.

That morning I started my Hong Kong habit of getting up at 6am and walking around the city on my way to Victoria park to work out. It's great, because the park is full of people working out in the most ridiculous ways, so no matter what you feel like doing, someone is doing something crazier. Taichi? Of Course. Walking backwards and slapping yourself? Sure. Really old lady using weighted hoolahoops? Normal. Just yelling irrationally? Why not? Everything is fair game. I finished up my exercise and went back to the hostel to eat. A guy there said “...Nash?” I turned around. “Are you Nash?” Yes, I said curiously. “You have a luggage tag stuck on your jeans with your name on it.”Oh. Thanks. “Sorry, you are not famous. I just read the tag. Not famous, Yet! I replied confidently. I ran into Jentz (German George) and talked to him for a bit before a new person entered the room: Kuen. A south African guy with a great sense of humor and looks a lot like Leo DiCaprio. Kuen was teaching English in China and had come to HK for vacation, and Jentz was interning at a HK bank. The 3 of us got along great and decided to hang out. We all swapped stories for a bit, and during our discussion a couple of Canadian girls walked in and Jokingly called me sketchy! … That doesn't sound like me! Though I suppose taken out of context some of my stories could seem that way...

Kuen, Jentz, and I hit the town. First we went to the street market, which featured all manner of goods. I found a stall specializing in selling pig's faces (not heads, faces), and stalls full of living creatures from all walks of life patiently waiting for a Hong Kong denizen to take a bite out of them. After we had our fill of the edible zoo we went to Hong Kong park, famous wedding spot of Hong Kong, sauntered about taking in nature and watching huge piles of turtles sunbathing. From the park we took the tram up to illustrious and beautiful Victoria Peak, and what should be up top of such a southeast Asian beautiful landmark? A bubba gump shrmp house. Yeah... After getting the maximum amusement out of watching fat people sweat we left the peak at which time I went to Man Mo temple. Man Mo is Hong Kong's most famous temple and is dedicated to literature and martial arts (2 things I feel strongly towards) so I paid my respects. Then I left and road world's largest escalator. Afterwords My two compadres and I took the ferry to Kowloon, where we enjoyed the walk of stars and I visited the famous Bruce Lee statue. As dusk was approaching the infamous Kowloon night market sprang up. Hard core bargaining for items most ridiculous is de rigour there. They have scrolls, cloths, home furnishings, fortune tellers, food stalls, children s items, things of historical significance, and of course: Sex Toys. So, Many, sex toys. Booths and booths of them. Passing by I thought to myself “Who is coming here and actually haggling for sex toys? Surely no one.” At which point I pass two guys in the middle of a price war for fake vaginas. “30 is too much! I'll pay no more than 20!” Stunned I reasoned this was an isolated outlier case and not the norm. Not five minutes later I pass two girls buying huge face dicks (dildos) from a booth. “Which do you want? The Cheapest!” Apparently not an outlier after all. Strange. It seems to me that that would be the one item you would WANT to spend a little more on. If one were to be smashing their genitals into an item they probably want solid craftsmanship, not something that could splinter, break, or be filled with mercury or lead paint... maybe thats just me though. Later the three of us met a Canadian guy who was also staying at our hostel (Patrick) and the four of us went out clubbing and street partying on Lan Kuai Fong. I managed to get in a couple clubs with shorts and flip flops despite the bouncers wishes, and it was a fairly enjoyable uproarious night. There was however roughly 100 guys for every one girl, which got old fast. Luckily the street party was were it was at, and I got to see a flamboyant gay guy break dance with a street sign, and a man selling alcohol and liquids out of syringes. Beautiful. Bed at 3:30am, up at 6:30am for exercise...

The next few days of the hostel it was business as usual. Jentz had work things to do, so it was just Patrick, Kuen, and myself up to shenanigans. One day we decided we would seak out the infamous repulse bay beach, and Stanley beach market. We quickly and awkwardly learned that there are many beaches in the area and we seemed to stumble on all the wrong ones before finally getting where we were trying to go. The bright sides of course being Adventure (!) and seeing things we wouldn't have seen had we instantly gotten where we thought we were trying to go. After all “The easiest way to not be lost is to change where you where going.” We stumbled upon some dragon boat races that were very nicely put on. Some teams were very nonchalant and competed joyfully, while others where clearly juice monkeys roided out of their minds. Humorously the juice monkey often lost. Also, we did eventually find our way to the beaches we were after. Repulse bay is a proper beach full of sand (not jagged rocks, seashells, and bottlecaps!) suitable for fun beach games. We even saw professional sand castle builders. Stanley beach market was disappointing, not living up the hype, Kowloon night market being the real champ of markets), but the boardwalk it offered was nice to stroll on.

My remaining time on the island was spent map and compass in hand, wondering hither, thither, and yon looking for martial arts schools. The ones I found either unimpressive or perpetually closed. Back at the hostel I got ready to leave and take a picture of a cat, which happened to feature a man's foot in it. Through a Cantonese interpreter I found out that old people in Hong Kong are of the mind that pictures take your soul, and so he wanted the picture deleted. I did not. I guess I took some of his foot's soul... I did actually run into this problem several times in HK with old people also refusing to take pictures of me with my camera; They really just wanted nothing to do with the thing. Fair enough. Back at the hostel I marveled at their complimentary tea. Being in Hong Kong you expect the tea to have a certain level of grandiosity... this was just Lipton yellow label. Not impressed. They did say it was complementary though, so on my way out I made sure to acquire a hefty sum of it, then it was off to the airport to meet my future classmates for the summer and go to China proper. They flew in, we boarded a bus, and we spent several hours en route to China at around 1am. During this time myself and 3 others bonded: Adrian, Mike, and Tony. Adrian and Mike were going to be dorm-mates that summer, and Tony and myself were dorm-mates. In all, there were about 17 students. We arrived at GuangZhou, Sun-Yat-Sen University, in southern China and found the dorms to be very nice, if not overly communistically showy. We went to sleep and got up early for our orientation.

Classes were everyday taking from around 9am until 4:30pm, with a 2 hour lunch break most days. The focus was on Chinese language, but there were also classes about culture and arts. I liked Tai Chi, Adrian liked singing, others liked culture, and no one liked calligraphy. The Taichi teacher was a legitimate martial arts student with skill, and this was not old lady Tai Chi; It was actual gung fu. The teacher and I were the only ones in class who could perform the techniques. In fact, the Tai Chi teacher seemed blown away by me and was shocked to learn I had never studied it before. She made me the “Class Coach” between classes, but no one but myself and a handful of others (mike especially) cared for it. So my title wasn't fully taken advantage of. I picked up the Yang style 24 posture form quite easily, and went about trying to learn more. A rough go, as I was continually disappointed by the martial arts level in China. Even getting supplies for Kung Fu was frustrating. There simply were no stores, and when I finally asked the Tai Chi teacher where she got her cloths she said “you have to order them on the internet.” Ridiculous

Our actual academia often listed towards the more difficult, and as a result we felt the need to unwind... constantly. Tony and I had the party room, and on the very first night of classes we had a party to celebrate. We drank “BaiJou”, we called it the white devil, which guaranteed that the night would be fantastic or we would get liver damage. The inaugural party was a success: Someone broke one of our glasses provided us by the dorm, two people passed out and I went drunkenly perusing the city while engaged in such activities as banging on the doctor's door at an insane hour. He had a young daughter with him. His only request? No one knock on the door... I also found a restaurant were I tried to drunkenly pick up soup dumplings with chopsticks, but they were super slippery. The old lady owner came over to show me how it was done.. and couldn't do it! I then resumed my work and succeeded, with both hands! I needed to prove I was better than the Chinese at all I did; Turns out it's really not that difficult to do. I earned the lady's respect and from then on the restaurant became a staple of ours. Victory! Tony and I awoke the next morning to a completely messed up room, he still wearing his clothes and shoes sleeping facedown on top of his bed. Beer bottles, Baijou, and broken glass strewn about. It was a beautiful scene that would be repeated many many times, and I must deduce it was the catalyst that started the cold war that raged between the cleaning staff and myself...

The dorm had cleaning staff, apparently, though as far as I could tell it was in name only. They cleaned up that first night's mess, without replacing our broken glass. I suppose they decided we couldn't be trusted. Right they were. Plus, at the end of the term, we would be charged for the glass. After their initial cleaning they became passive aggressive, and then increasingly aggressive. They were to straighten our beds while we were in class; Tony's always made beautifully, mine looking like they had been sleeping in it. Often I would pull back the covers to find books or refuse that they had just put a blanket over, not bothering to move. One day we came back and our toilet was broken (it had worked upon leaving that morning) and there was a cleaning ladies shirt hanging on our balcony to dry. Had she taken such a fantastical shit that it destroyed our toilet and soiled her shirt as collateral damage!? No matter; Tony and I fixed the toilet and I washed the cleaning lady's shirt and took it. They also were to bring us fresh towels, tea bags, and toothbrushes, and when they did I re appropriated them. By the end I had enough supplies to fund a small gorilla resistance army. The cold war against the cleaning ladies raged on, and I was sure, with a bit of evidence, that they had been giving the inside of our bags a cursory look-over as well. Jokes on them, I had nothing of value, not even clothes, and wound up wearing Tony's clothes the majority of the time.

Tony though, had not mastered the art of traveling light. At all. He was a supply depot. Cloths: he had a lot, with even a separate bag for hats. He had a laptop, ipad, iphone, and all manor of creature comforts. We were perfect roommates; he took up the whole dorm, I had nothing to take it up with. We also had complimentary personalities. Tony had a VPN and bought a wireless router thereby assuring our room always had people in and around it to use the internet. It's true our room was the party room, which was fun, but when there are clusters of people huddled around the room like wifi-syphoning roaches it is obnoxious and made it difficult to use our own resources.

As for the area the university was in, GuangZhou, it is a perfect microcosm of modern China as a whole. Too many people, garbage piles literally everywhere, no traffic laws (as in wherever a car or bike will fit, there will be someone driving one, regardless of whether it's on a road or not), smelly, polluted, and full of acid rain. I wound up with a ludicrous and unwieldy collection of umbrellas trying not to go rain-bald, which is an actual thing. The rain stained my clothes! GuangZhou is located far south in China, in the Canton region, were everyone speaks Cantonese and my Mandarin is all but useless. There's a strangely huge textile market that occupies blocks and blocks and is 7 stories high. The day Tony and I got lost there was the day I learned that China has a strict “bring your own toilet paper” culture. GuangZhou is also home to a sloppy level of humidity, some days as much as 99%. People hack, wheeze, cough, spit, and yell constantly, as if the Chinese government was trying to raise half human half camel hybrid people. They drop garbage right were they stand. In fact they drop pants right were they stand. I have on numerous occasions seen Chinese Children squat wherever they are and have a poop right there. Some choice poop locations I witnessed: In a museum, in a train station, on the street, in a restaurant (it WAS an outdoor restaurant...), and a friend saw it happen at the Shaolin Temple. This is viewed as normal in China, though as adults they mostly replace pooping with spitting. People smoke everywhere, all the time, which I finally figured out was to drown out the smell of poop and garbage boiling in the summer humidity. In typical modern communist fashion the niceties of an area are often an exaggerated fake facade at best. Often times there will be a magnificent looking shopping mall, and upon entry it still seems grand. Travel a few stores deep however and you'll find that the complex often times becomes a literal ghetto sprawling off in all directions, replete with homeless people, boarded windows, and rotting food waste on the ground. A perfect metaphor for China (and most places): Infrastructure has not caught up with need and means. This prompted me to wonder, was Chairman Mao really so bad? … Yes, and although his methods echoed Hitler's he made strides in a slightly more free direction. The new China was built on top of old China, the two being very different countries, similar in name, location, and language only. At least it was free of dynasties and ordainments which stated only royalty could use colors in their clothes and housing. Though being in China game me a heavy food for though I also experienced great things, especially because the university went out of their way to provide opportunities to see the better side of everything.

On top of our regular classes, where the different aged teachers continuously served up contradictory cultural advice, there were also field trips and night activities we were free to take part in. We went to all manor of temples and museums, including the GuangZhou museum and Chen family house. Weekends we were free to do as we pleased, and often took side trips. Once I reluctantly agreed to go on a weekend trip to Hong Kong. With a group! The group was mostly made of women who where great by themselves, but useless in the gaggle they were in due to their indecisiveness. With no sense of group or planning, which isn't my style per se, I was not amused. Thankfully I was already intimately familiar with Hong Kong, so they didn't ruin my trip, though had I never been I would have had a terrible time. During one occasion the group wondered onto a train without Mike or Myself and met a guy who promptly booked them a hostel. They said “wow, what a nice guy!” … rookies. He did them no favors, and was in reality probably a shill for the hostel. Kuen had stayed there before coming to the hostel I met him at, and he said it was awful: He did not disappoint. It was full of garbage, hot, dirty, had roaches, and it seemed on the girl's beds had a body bag under it. Adrian and Mike shared a tiny bed, Sunhao (who was the highest leveled student in our school) and I shared a much larger one. After a run to the night market (sex toys!) we all returned to the hostel reluctantly. At least there was fantastic Pakistani food. The living quarter though... As if the hostel wasn't frustrating enough, there was a toilet situation. I retreated to the lavatory to have a poop. Upon BM completion I stood up to flush, and the watch I had gotten for Australia slipped off and landed in my freshly stagnant pile of excrement. I stood there, wanting to leave the dooty watch, but knowing I couldn't as I needed a watch with certain features and it took me awhile to find this one. I managed to get one of the Hostel's hangers and, defiling it, fished the watch out of the poop and washed it. Thoroughly. The watch now safe, my bowels empty, and the hanger back where I found it, I went to bed.

In the morning I led the group to Man Mo temple, and then to Victoria Peak. At the peak they have a stand where you can write heart felt notes to those you care about, on heart shaped paper, and leave it hanging from a giant heart. Everyone in the group decided to write one to their significant other, so I wrote one to the one person who's always been there for me, to let them know they'll always be able to count on me for support. My note read thustly:

Dear Nash,

I believe in you;

You're the best!

Love,

-Nash

and that was from the heart. On the way out of HK we stumbled onto a bid odd christian fair. I beat a hasty exit when I learned it was all sermon, no food.

Upon returning to GuangZhou, Mike, Adrian, Tony (who didn't go to HK), and myself decided to let off tension and relax by getting a massage and some moxibustion. It did not have the desired effect. We all ordered full body massages, but really what I wanted was my calves rubbed. Adrian and Mike got their full body massages. Tony got a full body accosting. What I received could be called a molestation or beating, and only on my back. Not only was my massage crappy, it wasn't even in the areas I wanted! Our moxibustion (cupping) went similarly, though Tony got several more cups than I did. Ours Sucked, Mike and Adrian's were fine. The massage and moxi combo is meant to “balance qi flow in the body and bring it back to harmony”. It definitely had the opposite effect and messed us up royally. For the next week our sleeping schedules were supremely messed up, alongside our hips and backs. Not the relaxing experience I'd hoped for, and paid money for!

In an effort to knock out the kinks caused by my faulty massage I went running one evening. This run was like any other, except on this occasion mid-run I was caught in a monsoon, and an especially violent one at that. I saw the sky start to turn dark so I fashioned a turban for my head out of my shirt to try and keep my hair from melting off, and within moments the sky had become black, the winds gale-force, and the rain heavy and parallel to the ground. It was an instantaneous flash flood, and on the way back to the university I had to run high-knees just to make progress; walking the road became fording a low rapidly moving river. The winds and rain wreaked havoc around me. Light posts broke, branches ripped from trees and trees from the ground. I even saw a flying cat! Somehow I made it back without dying, though I found out the next day that 13 people actually did die as a result. That run didn't exactly get the kinks out...

On one night, a few of us got tickets (free!) to the best theater troupe in China who just happened to be stopping at the university. Mike and I got second row seats! We were practically on stage, though honestly we couldn't understand much. At one point the actors made some joke about foreigners, and Americans in particular, and everyone turned and looked at us. It would have been nice to now what they said. Instead I just watched and made up my own dialogue and named the characters myself. The main guy's name was monkey pumpkin, and the play was about his crappy family. The theater manners displayed by the Chinese audience would be labeled disgusting in western countries. Talking, texting, bringing in big sacs of Mcdonalds, disregarding of assigned seats, and letting their obnoxious children run wild and loud was the standard and not the exception. Even though Mike and I enjoyed ourselves, we were super tired and both fell asleep several times, resulting in me spasming and kicking some people in my sleep. We decided to leave 10 minutes early to beat the crowd and go to bed. We were super tired, so of course on my return to the dorm room a party started. No sleep that night, only beer, Baijou, and broken glass! Good times. The same thing happened again a week later, only instead of the theater it was the Beijing opera, and instead of mostly not understanding it, I totally did not understand it. My observations lead me to conclude that the performance was about everyone's quest to posses a magic-flying-wish granting-gender changing hat. At least there was good dancing, and of course the sloppy after party in Tony's and my room!

The following Friday there was a nighttime field trip of a beautiful cruise down the pearl river. It was Adrian's birthday, so the gents and I decided to drink copiously before boreding the ship. After becoming exquisitely inebriated we boarded the ship to discover the university's top brass were waiting for us on board! Operation “make the university unaware they had funded my international fighting-adventure party” was underway! After the cruise we decided to hit some bars to celebrate Adrian's birthday even further. I was already drunk enough to finish the night before we even made it to the bar. We arrived to find the place mostly sedate, but that would soon change. Tony bought a bottle of Gin, and our teacher followed suit. Before long most of us were dancing on stage and some of us were up there most of the night. Tony and I kept getting free super strong drinks from some guys we didn't know. We drank them and partied harder, which got us more drinks, perpetuating the vicious cycle. I eventually had to pee so I went to the toilet. While utilizing the latrine some guy came up and started rubbing my shoulders and back. As I was holding my penis I wasn't sure what to do. I though that I would just let him finish... maybe this was a regular thing in China? You know, some countries have gentlemen in the loo who give mints, cologne, advice, ect? Maybe China has massages while you pee? After a few minutes I put my wang away, awkwardly standing at the urinal while some stranger gave me a rubdown. I didn't know the protocol, and was too drunk to know what exactly was happening anyway so I just threw some small bills at him and stumbled away. I rejoined the dance and get free drinks game, and every time I needed a pee the same guy would rub up on me, though I never game him any more money or waited for him to be done. By the end of the night (or morning) I had to be carried back to my dorm room by two of the girls (not an uncommon occurrence), and Tony passed out, face down, with his clothes and shoes on, on top of his covers. I later found out we were at a gay bar, which explains the guy in the gimp suit along with everything else..., and were probably getting rufeed with our free drinks. Good thing we had classmates looking out for us ! We awoke a few hours later, light of a new day, still drunk. Tony had lost his phone, and we decided to keep the party ball rolling, so Mike, Adrian, Tony, and I made a spontaneous trip to Maccau for the weekend.

Leaving drunk, unprepared, and in shambles we booked a train to Zhuhai, which is the border town to Macau. We had a rough go from the start. Upon arrival in Zhuhai it was raining and the zipper on Tony's backpack broke. ZaoGao (an exclamation meaning “shit!” or “What a mess!”)! This would be a recurring shout amongst the four of us. It was our frustrating call of unity. After Jury-rigging the bag we grabbed some food. Shitty food from a place with no one in it. The incompetent proprietor set us at the only table with crap on it, dishes, a sack of beans and the like, and kept offering us his diarrhea soup, which we were clearly not interested in, when all we wanted was dumplings. We got the bill and it was far and away the most expensive meal we had had in China up until that point. Far too expensive for a place with no lights and literally washed their dishes in a toilet (I saw it!). As we ran to escape our torment over the border we were besieged by beggars with horrible deformities, and this seemed really to bother Mike. One in particular seemed to be a doozy: A man with no legs, and his feet growing out of his shoulder blades. Runners up included a man with no face, a man with no hands, and a man with no left side. ZaoGao! Macau customs was a pain in the ass as well.

Macau was owned by Portugal for awhile, in the same way the English owned Hong Kong, and this made their official languages Cantonese and Portuguese, which helped us none, and seemed to give the general populace the worst traits from both cultures. Once we did finally get into Macau proper we changed into the prior night's smelly party clothes, checked our bags for free at a hotel and hit the town. The town hit us back. We were losing money fast, and my “Everyone is out to get you” survival strategy was tested true. Case in point: we went to a 7-11 to buy drinks. The price was clearly marked at 5$ We got 4. The price rang up as 27$. I explained that couldn't be right. The guy punched some numbers on the register. 55$. What!? No! That doesn't make sense, I told him. He hit some more keys. 22$? He looked at me wondering if that was good. Yeah, fine, whatever. Even at 7-11, where prices should theoretically be fixed, you are not safe. I swear it's like dealing with monkeys in people clothes sometimes. Another case: We went to grab something to eat from a cheapish looking place, but well crowded. We each got the pork and duck over rice. The waitress made a face of half surprise, half disgust. Soon she brought us our dishes, and I saw flies fly off as she brought them over. The meat was cold, and the rice was of such a low caliber I wouldn't feed it to a living thing on purpose. No doubt the food had been sitting out all day, and was by now quite inedible even by my notoriously lax standards. ZaoGao! We trudged back to the casinos intent on salvaging the night. We saw a beautiful fountain show, and stopped in an upscale watch store so Tony could ask the proprietor if he could use his computer to locate his missing phone. “No.. but you can use my ipad”. The proprietor was very nice, and while Tony was locating his phone, which was somewhere at the dorm it turned out, the man let me try on the most expensive watch in the place and walk around with it... it was 300,000$USD!! Then he gave the 4 of us each a die for good luck. The night was finally turning around! We went off to gamble, knowing we were about to have a blast... and instantly lost our money. Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. The pit in the casinos was set up uniquely to begin with, ripping you off before you even play. Certain games would only take certain money, even though they all used chips. For example, I wanted to play roulette, so I exchanged my Macau dollars for chips, but was informed roulette only took chips that had been exchanged from Hong Kong dollars. So in effect, we had to exchange our Macanese$ for Hong Kong$ then the HK$ for Hkchips, losing a little to the casino with every exchange. Brilliant! Then there was the inexperienced lady running the table that I was at. On several occasions the pit boss had to come over and ream her ass because she was doing things egregiously wrong: taking bets too late, forgetting payouts, ect. Thats what happens when you can only afford to gamble at the poor people's table in a rich man's town. Macau is called “the Vegas of the east” even though more money changes hands there than it does in actual Las Vegas! The equivalent of entire countries GDPs can change hands in a night at the VIP rooms. Entire countries are won and lost! Clearly I am on the opposite end of the financial spectrum of these people.

Broke and beaten the four of us left to go wander the streets of Macao. We had planned to stay up and party all night, so there was no need for accommodation, but the previous night's partying was beginning to take it's toll on us, and Adrian was not having it any longer. He became especially cranky and his sole focus was finding a place to sleep. I suggested the docks and he burst out with “you are a legit hobo!” I explained that it's relaxing to listen to the tide as you drift off to sleep, but he insisted I wasn't helping my case and he wanted a bed. Fair enough. The quest was on! We moved from place to place, and everything was full. Our available two options were what amounted to a quarantine hospital, and a place run by the rude brother of the moguai dealer from the movie Gremlins. We chose the latter. After being literally barked at for awhile (pretty sure he wasn't speaking a language) we arrived at the garbage suit. It was 3am and the place was dirty, full of mosquitoes, and the beds were literally slimy and dripping wet! I went to use the toilet one, but it was full of mosquitoes and decided against it. The place was expensive too, but what it lacked in ambiance it made up for by also lacking in function; I couldn't sleep because soon after lying down people started yelling Cantonese and playing the bugle outside our room. It was probably the crazy asshole moguai dealing owner...

After a stressful night we got up in the morning and walked to the temple of the sea goddess, the very goddess Macau was named after. It's a standard temple, complete with too many people. I carved my name at the top on some bamboo and left. We then made our way to the statue of the sea goddess, which to me was far and away the best part of Macau. Beautiful, simple, and relatively unspoiled. Taking that high note, we left to go back to China. At the border the train ticket lady wouldn't take Tony's credit card, even though we had used a card to GET there. Then Tony got tricked by the lady into buying standing only tickets, which meant we had to stand up in a crowded cattle car full of people for the two hours back to GuangZhou, all the while marveling at how a country with such a high maths score failed to grasp the fundamental aspects of geometry. Sometimes things only go through a door way when rotated to fit in! What a weekend... ZaoGao Macau!

Arriving back at the dorm, exhausted, all we wanted to do was sleep... so a party sprang up in our room! Time to break something and be unrested for school in the morning! Pretty much the theme of my entire schooling there.

That week, one day after school a few of us went to go climb GuanZhou's famous mountain “BaiYunShan”, or white cloud mountain. I climbed it barefoot! Joining me where Tony, Adrian, Mike, and Kate. Kate I had just found out was dating a friend of mine in the states, and I didn't even know her before the trip. Small world! The gentleman and I ate at a Korean barbecue later, and met a mathematician, of some repute apparently, who had authored several kooks on differential equations and was being paid an exorbitant sum to teach at Sun-Yat-Sen university for 3 weeks. He was unstably drunk when we met him, and after he gave me a beer he vanished as quickly as he arrived.

A couple days later our teacher pulled us out of classes to take us mid-day to Karaoke at KTV, the preeminent karaoke joint in China. This particular KTV was supposedly the crème de la crème of KTVs, as our teacher was a very high roller and loved to show off. As it turned out, we had all been to better. The service was atrocious for a place of such supposed caliber! They wouldn’t let us use the air conditioning, we ordered several items such as food and booze they were out of, and they weren't going to tell us, just not bring them to us and hope we didn't mention it. The food items we did order that showed up arrived cold and bland, and no, that wasn't the style of food we ordered. Then when we started questioning them about the menu we found out they were out of almost everything! As for their Karaoke, their screen was missing crucial lyrics in the songs. Inexcusable. After that KTV fiasco a bunch of students and I decided to combine our individual shopping quests, to no avail. The shopping in China is ironically awful; The same 4 stores you aren't interested in, repeated ad naseum. It would seem that although everything is made in China, nothing stays there to be sold. No one else in the group seemed to fair any better at finding anything than I did.

At least there's tea in China. Lots of it. And since I fancy a good cup or two, or gallons throughout the day, at least China had that as it's saving grace in my eyes, and as luck seemed to have it, there was a student who had been studying in China the entire past year and had formed a friendship with a tea master. To the tea master! The man was younger for his trade, maybe late 30's, but he took his job enjoyably seriously. We spent the entire day at his shop drinking all manner of teas, learning the subtle-teas (PUN!!) of tea, and I was correctly able to identity most their finer points when the master quizzed me. Drinking copiously of expensive things I didn't have to pay for? It was a fine way to spend a day. Afterwords the group split in half to go do various things. The half I was in wound up going to a mall with a little amusement park at the top. We rode Chinese bumper cars! That situation explained the driving stander in China fairly well; They drive like they're in bumper cars. Those bumper cars were no joke either, if you got hit you knew it; I thought I had given a couple of the girls whiplash! Good times. Upon return to the dorm I found my room door ajar, so I went in ready to beat up some sneaking cleaning ladies, what greeted me instead was a bunch of people jumping out yelling “surprise!”... surprise birthday party for me! It had gotten out that the day was my birthday, so they had thrown a surprise party. Ice Cream sunday with candles, Thai bananas, and alcohol... perfect! Tony was truly a great roommate, and everyone else great companions. The whole day had been one perfect way to spend a b-day.

The next day it was field trip time, to a place called “Guandong impression” which was an old timey preserved amusement park place. The trip was to be lead by two Chinese students at the university who had actually never been there before either. The two students were Aubrey and her friend whose name I didn't remember. Their English was surprisingly good, and I know this because they talked to me the entire trip. They seemed heavy into me and were laying it on pretty thick. They were telling me how good I look, and taking pictures of me and with me while talking about my muscles and having me strike various flexing poses. They are also huge fans of Japan and Japanese which scored me brownie points, telling me unprovoked about how their dorm had no air conditioning so it was hot and sweaty all the time. Aubrey said she would be anxiously waiting for my return to China once I left. The whole situation was certainly since it was all in front of my classmates. As for the amusement place itself, it wasn't that amusing; it was overly fake. Oh China... The employees were also true dicks. I had a great time though, on account of the ladies and our mutual interests (me). That night was the one and only party that wasn't in Tony and my room. It was in Suenhau's and Logan's room, though it wasn't a party in the classical sense. It was a fruit party! All the area's fruits accumulated in one spot to be eaten at this social gathering. Of course there was alcohol and music and whatnot as well. During the commotion of the event, I annexed one of their glasses and took it back to Tony's and my room so we wouldn't get charged for destroying ours. We socialized until late, like always, except we had to be a little sharper when we woke up in the morning because we had our closing ceremony!

The next morning our studies at Sun-Yat-Sen university, officially came to an end, after finals, and we had a closing dinner. I once again proved I was better at using chopsticks than the locals by accepting a challenge and throwing out one in return, which was not accomplished by the challengee (our teacher). It was finally time to say good-bye to the university we had come to know and take advantage of the previous month. Good-bye “gym” that's actually just a pile of broken equipment thrown outside in a mosquito marsh, good bye condescending teachers, goodbye cleaning ladies who didn't actually clean. None of you will be missed. Oh, but the monkey shines didn't stop there! We still had a week tour heading North in China! The next day we boarded a 21 hour train to Xi'An. Once again, another microcosm of China was found, this time in the form of the train station. Layers and Layers of unneeded and infective bureaucracy! After navigating a maze needlessly built of construction gates whose only purpose was seemingly to make passengers lives more difficult, we needed to get our tickets and passports checked before we got in the station, then when we got in the waiting room, then when we got on the train; all the while part of a huge human cattle run. China...

Tony and I came prepared for a 21 hour train ride: Alcohol, and lots of it, playing cards, and just in case: cups and balls. We used Logan's bicycle box balanced on everyone's knees as a makeshift table and then proceeded to party obnoxiously late into the night, disturbing everyone else on the train. Served them right. Chinese people don't seem to have an inside voice, so they probably just thought we were talking on the phone. As the train sped on, I looked out the window as we passed literal mountains of trash. Farmers herding cattle on fields of garbage. We drank and partied, ignoring the rubbish outside and the smoking out of shape security guards inside, until we were finally forced to bed.

We finally made it to Xi'An. Xi'An had a pair of nuclear cooling towers in the city, which made me nervous not only because of what they were, but because they were made in China. The group was staying at a beautiful hotel, but we had to leave our luggage with some shady looking dock workers at the train station and trust they would take our luggage to the hotel. I wasn't taking anyone's word for it that they could be trusted. I took pictures of all of there faces, trucks, and license plates. If I wound up missing anything I vowed I would hunt them down. It didn't come to that, though there was a tear in my bag that they put there which I had to sow, but not surprising since the Chinese don't have the best track record with such things. Cutting corners at every turn they will get away with whatever they can (as a whole). While I was in Hong Kong a Starbucks got busted for making all their drinks with toilet water, which they had been doing the whole two years they had been open apparently. Even our guide seemed to be filing itineraries with the university, getting money for them, then changing the itinerary and pocketing the difference. This seemed to be a common occurrence, so it was with trepidation I let them carry my bag. They're lucky they succeeded.

The first thing we did in Xi'An was to go to the museum. Not a bad museum, but there were some who seemed more interested in taking pictures of me that the artifacts. Also, a child shit on the floor. NOT an uncommon occurrence, as previously established. Next we went to something I had been wanting to see for some time: The terra cotta warriors. The terra cotta warriors are certainly a very fascinating archeological discovery. 40 years ago a farmer was digging on his land to make a new well, and stumbled upon an underground chamber containing them. The government seized the opportunity, swept in, displacing all the farmers on the land and re appropriating the resources, poorly of course. These days the farmer who found the soldiers sits in the “museum”, a slave of the institution now. The “museum” itself is just a couple steps away from theme park status, thanks to the characteristic money grubbery of the area, and the soldier site itself is dubious. Firstly, why are they not done digging these up? They've not made much progress given 40 years. Looking at photographs it seems they are not much further now than 10 years ago. Misappropriation of resources. Secondly, are we really to believe that people would leave such an important archeological discovery unguarded for the uncouth masses to destroy? I saw a water bottle in one of the pits! This would mean the solders were excavated, restored, reassembled, then replaced were they were all in the open for the thousands of people who pass by daily to potentially ruin. Fakes, most likely. I propose the statues you see are logically copies. It's well known the Chinese have perfected the art of replicating goods; you can even purchase full size copies of the statues from the gift shop, right outside the pits! Who says the pits aren't full of those same copies!? A part of me wants to believe they are, so the real ones are kept safe. Another part of me wants to believe the statues in the pit are authentic, and that people can be trusted to preserve valuable things. I want to believe that, but all evidence to the contrary.

Next the group went by the hotel proper to make sure our bags made it. They did. The rooms even came with a complimentary sowing kit, which I used to fix the damage to my bag they had done. Once finished we went out for garbage “all-you-can-eat” food, because the tour guide was sure foreigners don't like Chinese food.... at least they had pomegranate wine.

That night some of us went for foot massages. Myself, Tony, Adrian, and mike got a room for our foot massages, and 4 women entered to massage us. Imediatley Mike's woman left and a man was brought in her place; we all laughed, but realistically he probably got the best massage. My masseuse immediately noticed the calluses on my hands and feet; we all felt bad for her really, I’m not an easy rub. She seemed wholly fascinated though and tried to hold a kung fu related conversation all the while having me intermittently flex and giving me compliments. I liked this masseuse much better than my previous one. In fact, this foot massage was a better full body massage than my full body massage! I even got hit with toy hammers, which was a first. Fully relaxed, Tony and I went out with Lara and Eshaun for a midnight meal in the Muslim quarter consisting of dangerously spicy snails. They even give you plastic gloves so you don't have to touch the spices.

A good night's rest and then back to Xi'An's wonders. We went to the city wall, which is a large square encasing the inner city. Mike, Laura, and I got bikes and over the course of a couple hours biked around the whole thing. It was beautiful, and fun; We stopped to look at various sights such as a Tibetan Buddhist temple, and a museum. Mike hit his brakes too hard and flew over the front of his bike, barely landing on his feet. Lara crashed riding no handed and hitting a bump escaping with only a bruised and scraped hand. I was certain I was to be next, but my bike-cident never came. Tony and Adrian rented a tandem bike, and had their own special kind of fun...

After biking over 8miles we needed to refuel. Shitty buffet! Then we went off to the wild goose temple pagoda. The temple itself has a legend associated with it, as most of them do, but I was more concerned with making a new legend and seeing the realization of a 10 year goal... I rang the temple bell with my fist! To reflect on this momentous occasion I took a long stroll around the temple grounds and it's various gardens. Meeting up with Tony, he and I used our student I.D's to get cheap passes that allowed us to climb the pagoda itself. So good. We spent the rest of the day taking silly pictures, and some guy selling pictures took my picture so maybe I'll be used an an advertisement for that guy? That night we all took a 6 hour train ride to Beijing.

Tony and I got Baijo and beer for the trip, and before it left the station we were already gone. During the ride we found out we were sharing a car with a debate team from California that we would eventually go on to continuously run into in Beijing.

Beijing. It was nighttime when we arrived, but we could already tell: the pollution. The air was a congealed mass, like trying to breath solidified meat grease made of toxic chemicals. Breathing was laborious and even when you succeeded you felt like you lost. I cannot stress enough how wretchedly polluted the place is; you can literally see the air, a thick yellow fog obscuring everything.

Our first day in Beijing we set out to climb the great wall. The pollution was of course gross, but it was also storming, so special attention needed to be paid to the baldness/ cancer causing toxic rain. Ponchos. I hate them, but better than the alternative in this case. I had a poncho AND an umbrella. The storm worsened. By noon it was pitch black. The wall had flash flooded and become a shallow river, and lighting boomed through the sky, hitting things rather close. Officials blocked off parts of the wall and advised everyone to halt their climbing. I would do no such thing! I climbed on and up. Soon I was above the treetops, with nothing but me, the wall, and the sky. Keep in mine it's a lightning storm. I'm holding an umbrella with one hand, holding a metal guard rail with the other, and standing in a pile of water.

I got hit by lightning.

Not direct, luckily, but second degree. It struck the rail I was holding further up the wall and then traveled down to greet me. Still shocked the shit out of me though! Throwing my umbrella down I had a good shake while thanking myself for going to the toilet before the climb. An older Australian guy saw it happen and asked if I was OK. I said “If I know anything, I'm pretty sure I have super powers now!” He thought that was pretty funny and we got to talking. Turns out he had a son who enjoys backpacking and couch surfing and happens to have a house on the beach, which he extended an offer for me to stay at. Offer Accepted! Plodding on I made as far up the wall as people could get, at which point I carved my name in it. I rested in the tower for a bit and was eventually joined by Mike, at which point he peed on the wall. Peeing on landmarks is his thing, and I’m sure it did nothing but improve the smell.

After the wall we were originally going to go to another place, but the storm knocked the power out, so we went to a Cloisonne factory-restaurant. The Cloisonne was impressive. The food was not. After we had begrudgingly eaten what we needed we went to the famous Ming Tombs. The Chinese are very superstitious regarding the place, but I found it more curious than foreboding. Something withing the tombs seemed off. I couldn't tell if it had just been badly renovated, or if the whole thing was a fabrication by the Chinese for money. I'm cautiously optimistic of the former, since the arrangements of things like thrones, coffins, and the structure of the walls could all be due to poor up-keep.

The next major Beijing attraction we visited as a group was the silk market. The name is a bit of a mis-nomer, or at least is now, as it's actually a mall that deals in the construction of custom clothes and the selling of knock-offs. Ironically I became intimately familiar with the place, though I never liked it. The sales people are rude at best, and unless your bargaining skills are top notch, mine aren't bad, you'll be broke in seconds. Then of course there was the experience of our first night there at the the market. I needed to poop and Tony needed to Pee. We made our way to the toilet area, at which pint I entered a stall (this was obviously a place of luxury!) and Tony took a urinal. As I was closing the door I saw a guy saunter up to the urinal next to his. A minute later I heard Tony in the hall saying “Bu yao”, meaning “I don't want it.”, his go-to phrase the entire time people had been trying to sell him garbage that night. When I got out of the stall I found it was actually some creeper, the guy from the urinal, rubbing on Tony and trying to touch his dick. “Bu yao” indeed.

Tony got a little PTSD for the rest of the night, afraid everyone was out to grab his dick, and I made fun of him for it. Until the metro ride back that night when the doors opened and some guy walked in, and not even blinking, grabbed my dick and balls and rolled them like dice, and then sat down casually. What!? Everyone in China is out for your dick! Anxious to leave the rest of that night behind we took the metro as far as we could, then decided to take a taxi back to our swanky Beijing hotel. The problem of course is that we didn't take a taxi, we took a rickshaw... and this guy didn't seem to know anything about anything. We gave him a map to our place, but it doesn't help when you're an illiterate homeless guy on a bicycle. Every two meters this guy would shout at someone and ask where the place was. Didn't really help, I'm fairly certain he couldn't read the street signs and didn't know their names or where he was. After a prolonged struggle the guy did get us back to the hotel, and demanded 10 more kuai for his troubles. He should have known when he took the job! I gave it to him though, as it converted to about 1.80$US and he looked like he was having a rough go. That first night at the silk market was a rough go all around. At least Tony and I could hit our luxurious hotel's gym and then alcohol and hot tub, which became an almost nightly ritual.

Next the group went to Tiananmen Square, where I honored it's impressive scale and historical significance by doing handstands. Even though the army marches the area like clockwork, it's heavy security is false. People climb over fences and the metal detectors and pat downs do nothing. I myself had several blades on me. Mao Zedong's memorial was closed that day (we came back) so we went straight to the forbidden city. The forbidden city is rather big and samey until you get to the garden which I found very interesting though it's only a small part of the compound. Afterwords we went to the famous “summer palace”, where we left the tour guide and her obnoxious squackbox to go see the 1,000 armed Buddha statue. More interesting that that though twas the Buddhist “stone locks” which were later used in Okinawa for karate (toude) training. The shape of the lock is that of a kettlebell, but you can only use 1 finger to lift it. I easily achieved this feet with both left and right hands. No one else in the party could, but a few gave a good try. I was pleased.

On a different day we took a bus back to Mao's memorial. Once again I was left wondering: was what I was seeing real? Was this a well preserved dead body, or just a wax reproduction? Could go either way, though I'm sure Mao Zedong's preserved body is somewhere if not there. After those of us that cared had a look (I even had to get slippers to go in! No flip flops...) we took the bus away. Ah, the bus in Beijing traffic. Hours and hours on that bus. It seemed at times we had spent our whole existence on that bus, with all non-bus memories fading into the polluted haze we were driving through.

Next up were the prince's palace, which was nice but similar to several other palaces, and then the temple of heaven. The temple of heaven is interesting because it contains a point that the ancient Chinese believed was the closest point on earth to the heavens. If you stand there and speak, you're words have a greater chance of reaching the gods. So, for a photo I stood on the spot and did the “separating heaven and earth” pose. Once I did, heaps and heaps of Chinese people started doing it too! I decided I would invent a new pose just to see it catch on: Self-bunny-ears! Hence forth known as Nash-style bunny ears. It'll catch on... while at the temple of heaven I also got a “Taichi racket ball” set. DAMN! They made it look so fun... now I had to carry extra crap around.

Next we went to the Lama temple were I wandered it's beautiful grounds and saw some guy trip and fall super hard over a kneeling bench and knock over a bunch of incense. This chick screamed like he landed on a sack of babies. Hilarious!

On one of the group's last nights we went out to the bars to party it up. Just like before we went into an empty bar and got the party started. By the time we left the place was packed. The bar we made base camp in had a multi tiered stage, and once I had managed to reach the top level I decided I wasn't backing down. As a consequence I wound up dancing up their the entire night and ended up so sweaty my cloths were literally soaked and dripping. It was also that night we learned that the previous club we were at, where I had the urinal rub down, was a gay bar. Makes sense once we started to think about it, I mean there was a guy in a gimp suit...

After a few hours sleep on return from the bar we all got up and went to the Beijing Olympic park and saw the “Bird's Nest”, before getting a rickshaw tour through a hutong, which is a kind of Chinese alley maze ghetto. Afterwords we jumped to lake Xi (...10something) where we meandered around taking funny pictures and I ate some scorpions and starfish. Then a few of us went off to go watch some amazing Chinese acrobats. That night we had a hotel party in honer of Eshauns birthday; party every night!

Once again, after a few hours of sleep I was up early, though this time not to see a landmark, bur rather to see my classmates off. This was the day they left China, and the day I went back to being on my own. Bittersweet to be sure, as I relished the freedom, but had absolutely nowhere to go. Before I left the hotel I made sure to stock up for my return to the poor life; I ransacked the hotel for the 4 T's: Towels, toothbrushes, toilet paper, and tea! Now that I had supplies, I just needed to find a place to go. That's were Jimmy came in. He was another member of the group who didn't leave China, and happened to know a place to go. We banded together and made our way to a hostel near Tiananmen square. I would wind up spending way more time there than originally planned, though I had a great time doing it (hazardous haze aside).

First orders of business were to jettison my school supplies, and find a train out of Beijing. The first was easy enough, the second not so much. It was time for the annual Dragon Boat festival, and it's kind of a big deal, especially with Beijing having the largest parade. So, when I went to get a train ticket to Guilin, I was told they were all sold out. Hehan? Sold out. Shanghai? Sold out. Any train, to anywhere? Sold out. The station man informed me that literally everything out of Beijing was sold out. Being skeptical I talked to one of my new friends at the hostel I was staying at who had some connections; They were actually sold out! Stranded in Beijing because of the Dragon Boat festival I made the most of it and improvised.

First thing I did was make straight for an infamous martial arts park. Ritan Park is known for martial artists gathering in the park for training in numerous styles. I arrived and the sky promptly began an acid-monsoon rain out; no training. I retreated back to the hostel where I made the acquaintance of a couple wild girls from the UK, and Richie, a tour guide from the UK sporting great dreadlocks and sharing my penchant for doing handstands in exotic locals. Richie taught me the drinking game of “rollerpool”, which he had created and I very much liked. He questioned my nationality by saying things like : “you know about jaffa cakes and kyle minogue, just what kind of American are you!?” The non-representative kind? I'm Nash, “of the road”. We wound up drinking until 3am that night. I awoke at 6am to exercise, and decided I would go have an early morning walk to see if I could find a park close by. 3 hours later, no park. Returning to the hostel I noticed a Japanese man writing in the bunk across from mine. He said hi, and I said hi, and through talking he found out I spoke Japanese. Before I knew what was happening I was embroiled in way too deep conversations with a man who was every bit the stereotype of the beatnik strung out writer. Taxing, but interesting, he had me read his writings. Really, really heavy reading.

Again the poisonous rain fell, covering all it touched with an unwanted slime. Nothing too grand could get accomplished so I spend the day reading and writing, and got a new bandana which I immediately wore, prompting 2 different people to tell me I looked like Axel Rose, and one to tell me I looked like Brendon Fraiser. I don't look like either of them, but I'll still take them as compliments. Once again the UK girls, Richie, and I hit partied through the night but this time accompanied by Gareth, one of Richie’s co-workers. Gareth and I hit it off right away with a bit of back-and-forth, though apparently we were the only ones who knew; everyone thought we were going to fight! Far from it in fact. At around 3:30 in the am he coaxed me into doing the splits in the middle of a dingy restaurant he had convinced the owners to open just for us. Once again, we drank late. This time it was after 5am and the sun was coming up. For some reason I woke up spooning some unknown person's shoe in my bed. Also, I once again had no place to stay.

The Dragon Boat Festival had turned Beijing into an even madder mad house, and I couldn't stay in the hostel any longer because it had been booked up months in advance. They were holding my bag though, so at least I didn't need to worry about that. While wandering the street that day I wound up bumping into Gareth and a few of his customers. Though it was only 4pm, he insisted we recommence our drinking. Before anyone could object he materialized pints for the group. Over drinks he told me about his tour company, and about an online travel magazine he writes for. He said if I was interested in contributing he would pass my work to the editor. Interested indeed. Richie also writes for the magazine and he and I have similar writing styles; he extended me an offer to write for the magazine as well. The group drank until midnight at which pint we disbanded to my advantage. The hostel was over-full and under staffed, so I snuck in, then slept the night in their back courtyard. Free stay! I got up early the next morning as I had procured a ticket to Guilin. Good riddance Beijing!

Guilin. A beautiful place, with karst landscapes that look pulled from a post card. To get there though, I needed to endure a 23 hour train ride. Getting a ticket during the time was incredible in itself so I should have known what the train would be like. Abysmal. I was in a bunk so small I couldn't sit up, reach my bag, write, or even read. There was no dining car. The train itself was so shoddily built I often wondered if we were even on tracks. It was way over packed, and of course, full of crying babies.

Arriving in Guilin was liberating. Trees! Mountains! Rivers! Sky! Thanks to the pollution I hadn't seen the proper sky in sometime. I visited all sights of interest I could find. The town square with it's little shops and bell. 7-Star park with it's nature trails, sculptures, and free running animals: peacocks, monkeys, and human children! The sun and moon pagoda, which is the biggest copper pagoda in the world and the only one with a lift. I perused the night market. I climbed to the highest point I could find for spectacular views. I went to rent a bike when I found out they were only 15kuai a bike, then immediately decided against it when I found out you needed to put down an 800kuai deposit! Pass! I went off to Yangsho by bus instead. It was hot as balls there. The mountains must channel heat or something. While there I enjoyed all the karst landscape could offer, but spend a stupid amount of time trying to climb one mountain I was accidentally orbiting. I couldn't find the entrance, and everyone I asked gave me contradictory directions. What a long day that was.

Guilin was also nice for the environment of the hostel I stayed in. Swapping stories with other travelers is always great, and they seemed to take an especial liking to me. They called me an adventurer, and once again people suggested I get a TV series. I would if I could! I also met someone in Guilin who turned out to be a friend of a friend of mine in the states! Crazy how like minded people wind up together.

My final day in Guilin I got up early for a 5am train to Henan province, where the Shaolin temple is. This train was a 24 hour train ride, and learning my lesson from the last train I made sure I got a spacious bunk I could actually do things in. How luxurious was it? Well when I arrived, the bunk sheets had not been changed and were already disheveled and stained. The bunk smelled like diarrhea and it was right next to the toilets and garbage, with juices and smells from both freely flowing by me. The train was of course full of obnoxious people. 24 hours of luxury! At least everyone was chain smoking to drown out the diarrhea smell, and when I tried to go to sleep no one would leave me alone because every one who saw me wanted to practice their English. Happy to help.

Upon arrival in ZhengZhou, Henan Province, I hopped a bus towards DengFeng, the town closest to the Shaolin Temple. I originally didn't plan to stay that long, but woundup staying almost a week. When I arrived into town I spent a good amount of time just looking for the hostel I was planning to base out of. It was a kung fu themed hostel, so I was hopping to meet some like-minded people. For awhile the only other person in the hostel was the guy staffing the place, but he was cool people, so it was fine. He gave me a map and I took off to explore.

The first thing I noticed about the town was that finally, there were martial arts stores and kung fu schools. All manner of both of them, of high enough skill and variety that if one where so inclined, they could find what they were after. The gung fu up until that point had been sparse, and the supply stores non-existent, but at least in DengFeng the Chinese kung fu stereotype is still perpetuated.

Looking at my map I saw that the world's oldest observatory was just down the street, so I checked my compass and took off. Hours later I found myself far from town on a country road startled by a guy herding goats. What!? Still I pressed on, knowing I must almost be there. Over 6 hours I walked. As it turns out, the map was not to scale... or even close. By the time I arrived at the observatory it was closed... Damn! It was surrounded by a nice small park though, so I decided to take a stroll through it. While doing so I was besieged by 3 10 year old Chinese school girl who wanted to practice their English. Their honesty and sincerity were adorable and it made me uncomfortable not hating the children. They were sweet and had yet to be corrupted by their country; If there is any hope for China it lay within those girls and those like them, divested from the influence of failed predecessors. We talked for about half an hour, and when I went to leave they ran off and picked me a flower, giving it to me they said it was for good luck on my travels and so I would remember them.

After my all day unfruitful sojourn to the observatory I got some rest. Next up was the Shaolin Temple. On the way there I was hit by the famous wave of red shirted kung fu students flooding the streets of DengFeng for their morning run. Hundreds and hundreds of them jogging in unison, their cadence militaristic. Arriving at the Shaolin temple I was struck by the size of the beautiful national park grounds it sits on, and the admission fee. Presenting my international student ID card I was able to enter for almost a third of the regular astronomical fee. Once you've entered the park there is a huge area you can explore, with a straight path full of tourist attractions. On the way to the temple proper one of the first attractions you'll see is the “performance grounds” where every 30 minutes or so the “monks” (acrobats) will put on a kung fu show. At one point in the show they asked for 3 volunteers to come up on stage to engage in a kung fu learn-off. 3 people will be shown a form from 3 monks, and the one who can do it best at the end gets a prize. Perfect! One of my very special skills is just that very thing! Seeing martial arts and duplicating the technique. Unfortunately for me, my Chinese wasn't good enough and I had no idea what they were asking. I hadn't realized they were looking for volunteers until the positions had already been filled. Even though I wasn't able to pad my ego by going up on the stage that looked very similar to the one from “Dragon Ball”, and showing off, I was still able to pick up new tricks from the monks. Afterwords I hiked past near endless gift shops to get to the temple proper. The temple itself was packed with tourists both foreign and domestic since the first day I was there was a weekend, subsequent days were less packed on weekdays. I bought a bracelet for myself and a few for my friends, though I'm sure they don't have trouble keeping the doors open so don't need my money. The whole place is really just a corporation, and a successful one at that. Leaving the touristy area it was time to honor the location with some proper pilgrimage.

Within the park, not horrifically far from the temple, is the cave were Bodhidharma supposedly sat for 9 years in deep meditation, cutting his eyelids off, and eventually founding Chan (zen) Buddhism. Stripping down to just my bare feet and shorts I began the hours long climb to the cave. The sun beat down on me oppressively, and heated the steps to an unbearable temperature. Each step I felt as if my feet were boiling and I wanted to vomit. I pressed on, knowing I wasn't in real pain; it was only in my mind. A true spiritual training mission booster shot, it felt good. It felt good when people would wheeze from the climb, see me and take my picture, get inspired and keep going. It felt good that in all the climb I saw less than 20 people, and it felt good when I succeeded. I replaced my garb, entered the cave, burned my incense and was acknowledged by the monk inside by him ringing a bell chime. Victory!

Having enjoyed the solitude, training, and chance to study moves taken fro the monks, I though “why stop now?” After all, there were numerous mountains within the park, each with many things to see. I hiked past the pagoda forest on my way to a mountain to walk across a legendary 786 plank suspension bridge. I hiked and hiked, climbing down from the Erzu convent. Lost in the mountains the whole day only to discover I was on the wrong mountain! I probably wouldn't have figured it out so soon had I not run into the legendary “last true Shaolin Monk” while I was up there. He and his giant beard helped me out.

Coming back to the temple, this time I was able to more carefully study the student's training. Surprisingly their education is quite good, spanning multiple styles such as Muay Thai, Taekwondo, and their own nature styles. I also snatched a few more tricks and made connections and will probably return to the temple to live and train for a bit, despite it's numerous short comings (money grubbing, catering to foreigners with their own dorms, incomplete training), though my connections will hopefully mitigate most of them.

I did eventually get to that rope bridge as well. Taking no chances and realizing I could be in the mountains all day again I took a cable car up to the top of the mountain and began my search from there. The cable car ride took a ridiculously long time and the car itself seemed poorly constructed, so the 20 minutes dangling over a 1,000foot drop was a bit nerve wracking. However, I made it where I was going, to the rope bridge, so it was worth it. The trail down the mountain took several beautiful isolated hours; There were actually bugs since I was back in nature so I brought bug spray, or so I though. What I had brought instead was an empty container of bug spray. I had also brought a hammock, so that I could enter a specific hammock related photo contest. There were no good hammock spots. Be these things as they may it was a terrific day. Once I reached the bottom of the mountain I found out I was way far away from both the temple and the town. The area had several cab drivers, and nothing else, all wanting me to go with them. They knew that people coming off the mountain basically had no other choice because for all intents and purposes they may as well be on the opposite side of the world from where they want to be. The cabbies swarmed me. How much?, I asked. “120.” I'll pay no more than 30. “You crazy!” I'll walk. “110 is lowest.” It's OK, I'm walking. “100!” That's alright, I said already several yards away heading down the road, I'm walking. It's too expensive and I don't need it. “It's too far!”, they shouted, the distance between the befuddled group of cabbies and myself growing. “It'll take over 5 hours to walk to town! I've got 5 hours!, I replied. “It's too hot!” I've got water!, my final retort before they vanished from my site as I crested a hill. I made it about 5 minutes down the road before one of them chased me down; “40!” he yelled, panting and sweaty. Deal.

And just what did I do with my “saved” 5 hours you ask? Back to the world's oldest observatory! Properly this time, on a bus, arriving while they were still open. I stayed there for awhile taking notes, learning about how exactly it worked. A very interesting place; it actually divined a 365 day calender different in today's used Gregorian calender by less than 30 minutes, but predated it by 300 years.

My last day in DengFeng wasn't spent at the Shaolin Temple, though I still went to several martial arts stores, but interacting at the hostel. The employee went around town with me to help me get a picture of a part of one of the Shaolin frescos. During our time together he told me of his own personal time at the temple, working there. “The real monks are all gone.” A not subtle sadness in his eyes. “Now they have phones, money, girlfriends, kids, cars. They don't even do the regular upkeep of the temple; paid staff do that.” Shame. More corporation of acrobats than fighting trained protectors of Buddhism. When I got back to the hostel I signed the wall, as was the custom at the place, and gathered my bag to go. On the way out I met a couple, an English girl and a Belgian MD who where leaving as well. The girl had actually come there specifically to study Bodhidharma. She mentioned him and I dropped some trivia. “Wow, you know your Buddhism.” I dabble. We ate lunch together then split. She was heading for a bus south, I was heading for a bus to ZhengZhou.

Arriving at ZhengZhou I found I had an entire night to fill until my 2am train. Fill it I did. I found the most amazing outdoor mall I had yet seen and spent a considerable amount of time meandering about it. Once I had my fill I went back to the square in front of the station; It was an amazing sight. A couple hundred people had super early trains same as myself so they had all gotten tarps and set up camp in square. There were groups of people in a circle playing cards, leaning against their bags, groups of people having a picnic under the stars. Groups of people drinking and swapping items. Groups of people sleeping. It looked like a guerrilla war camp, or a gypsy stop. For once, I didn't look out of the ordinary in the least; I joined the shanty. It was a nice night.

My 2:30 train was about as luxurious as my previous one. My bed was disheveled and clearly deflowered, and across from me was a lady who had a huge bucket of live eels. The train was heading back to Beijing.

I spent the next two nights in Beijing with my new English friend Michael, drinking copiously and going to bed at 5am. I went out and bough some friends of mine a wedding gift, as they had gotten married that week, and then found out that China refused to ship it. It was a nice bottle of Baijou; Since I couldn't find services to ship it in the area it was donated to Micheal. My final night in Beijing Micheal and I drank causally with the plan of going to bed at a decent hour , and from out of nowhere a crazy drugged out American musician showed up and insisted on going out and drinking. We obliged, but it was more like baby sitting than partying. The guy was a true wild card: “Accidentally” strangling a girl with an Ipad cord one minute, engaging in verbal altercations with Michael the next. Rarely did he finish a sentence; whatever he was on would have gotten him a lot of jail time. That night I snuck into a hostel and slept in their movie-room, on the couch. Free stay! Of course it was only about an hour's worth of sleep; I got up at 6am and headed for the airport. Leaving China... for Singapore!

What could go wrong?

-Nash