The Zen of Dusty Baker

"Everybody knows [Micah Owings] can hit," Reds manager Dusty Baker said. "If anybody knows he can hit, they know he can hit."

-ESPN

Let me be the first to say: What??

In other news, the Orioles have mathematically guaranteed their 11th straight losing season. They will finish last place in the AL East for the first time since 1988. Damn you for getting good all of a sudden, Rays.

I was really shocked to find out that David Foster Wallace committed suicide. On a complete whim back in April, I ended up purchasing his book Consider the Lobster at Garden Books in Shanghai. I specifically remember reading the titular essay while sitting on a bench at Fuxing Park, and another one in which he reviews a dictionary (wow, nerdness alert), while waiting to pick my parents up at Pudong Airport. I was hooked instantly and ended up buying another book of his, well, one that he edited, anyway.

Just got back from a fun little trip to Wuxie and Shaoxing. Pics are going up as we speak -- err, as I type. If you are wondering where your socks are made, I would bet that Zhuji (the city near Wuxie) is the answer, as I saw numerous sock factories along the road. That makes for some gripping tourism, I assure you.

Congratulations Mark!!

Non-China related: My friend Kelly's brother Mark plays for the Houston Astros' AAA team, the Round Rock Express.  Last night he got called up to The Show and jacked a home run on the first pitch he saw! I did a double-take when I saw his name mentioned on BLS.

Re-Entry

My cousin Mike is filming a documentary about Richard Garriott, the bazillionaire creator of Ultima and other PC / video games, who lives in Austin and is going to be the next private citizen launched into space. So it was with great interest that I read a feature story in the latest issue of Wired that followed Garriott around the training facilities in Russia. Particularly of interest was this bit from the author:

[N]o amount of camaraderie and training can prepare [Nik] Halik and Garriott for the worst part of the journey, worse than the grueling training, worse than the punishing gs of takeoff, worse than the indignities of space bathrooms. "The hardest part of the trip was coming back," [Anousheh] Ansari says. "You realize that you may never experience this again." It's difficult to readjust to life on Earth, to go from being a temporary cosmonaut to being a normal civilian. [Gregory] Olsen is known to wear his old Star City jumpsuit to schools and youth groups, happy for the opportunity to recount the story of the greatest moments of his life.

Yeah, it should be obvious why I posted this. I'm not in space, but to the Ryan of a year ago, Shanghai might as well be. During my two weeks in the US, I could feel myself wanting to talk about China and Shanghai, to speak Chinese, and to express a disquieted sense of how familiar everything was there, to kind of somehow let people know that I'd spent half a year living this insanely different experience. 

When I was in the US, it was great, but it was just really freaking weird that nothing was freaking weird. And I kept wanting to tell people that. Does that make sense? It wasn't bad. It was just ... well, yeah. Weird.

I wonder how it'll be when I go back for good in January.

Travel, Shmavel

Once I decided I wanted to visit Tibet over the October holiday, and once I convinced 3 other people to come with me, it was only a matter of 50 or so emails before we had the plans settled. There are numerous ways to get to Tibet; chief among them being, in my opinion, the world's highest train. I was itching to have this experience, so in planning how we made it, I insisted that we take the train either in or out of Lhasa. Luckily for me, no one had a huge problem with that mode of transport. 

Why so many emails? Because the devil is in the details: 

• Getting to Lhasa requires a permit separate from a Chinese visa
• Only travel agencies can get that permit for you
• You need your passport and visa to get this permit; two of my friends still need to get their residence permits
• You must specify your city of departure
• Your whole group must arrive together
  
• We're travelling during a week-long national holiday, which means we'll be travelling with 人山人海, literally (ren shan ren hai, "a mountain of people, a sea of people") so there was immense pressure to book the trip ASAP
• Train tickets go on sale only 5 days before the departure date; it's tough to reserve them in advance like you can for a plane
• Our travel agency is based in Lhasa, so it's easier for them to get the train tickets going from Lhasa -> Shanghai, and that is preferable for numerous reasons
• The Lhasa -> Shanghai train takes two days and leaves only on odd days (e.g. Oct 5th, 7th, 9th, etc.)
• You can fly from Shanghai to Lhasa through Xi'an, or you can fly from Shanghai to Xining and take the train from there, and then return by flying from Lhasa to Shanghai, or any combination of the three
• Some people were less than thrilled with the idea of the train and/or wanted to take it into Lhasa, whereas some of us wanted to take it out of Lhasa
• We're a consensus-oriented bunch, which mean we all want to make sure everyone's okay with the plan of action
  

But eventually, we determined the plan. Sunday Sept 28th, we'll take the train from Shanghai to Lhasa. We'll arrive on the evening of Sept 30th. We'll spend several days in Tibet, then on Oct 7th we'll fly from Lhasa to Shanghai, thus ending the trip. 

At least, that's the plan right now :-) We still have to determine our itinerary, which should be okay since we all agree that spending a night at Mt. Everest Base Camp is of prime importance, and we're on a private tour so we can do pretty much whatever we want, whenever we want. The travel agent built this into our next-to-last day and gave us numerous suggestions for other sights, so we should be fine. I don't really care what we see; I will just be happy to be there. (As long as I don't hallucinate too much from altitude sickness. My friend Cameron was telling me today about his AMS in Sichuan province, which borders Tibet. It sounded pretty crappy. His bout involved headaches, shortness of breath on even the mildest of inclines, lethargy, trouble sleeping, and a mild hallucination that someone was crawling around on the floor of his room at night. WOW. I am thankful that we are getting a driver and not relying on hiking.)

This will probably be my last "big trip" in China. I think after Tibet, I might be content with smaller excursions, like to Xitang and Putuoshan. But who knows? Never say never.

Oh -- check out the care package my parents sent me!!  Thanks guys!! :-) 

Q: Why Climb Mount Everest?

A: Because (I will be) there.

A Break-In

Not really, but yesterday evening I was playing Wii when my doorbell rang. Because I wasn't expecting anybody, I assumed it was another wrong delivery, like what happened last time. But no, it was three people: a middle-aged man and woman and an older woman. Immediately the three of them started yammering away (in Chinese, of course) at 100 mph. I, being a) a lao wai and b) perplexed by having three strangers show up at my front door, stared at them blankly until my brain revved into gear enough to understand what they were saying. Apparently the guy's co-worker was coming in from somewhere, Britain I think, after having spent some time in HK, and he was going to be working in the Lujiazui district in Shanghai. This threesome were scouting apartments in the area (the woman in the lead was the agent, I think) and were looking at a place on the 22nd floor of my building. However the person wasn't there, so they came to my place to see if they could see how the apartments are laid out.

Not feeling very threatened by this trio, I let them in and they began sniffing around my place (and imparting the above information to me). They were pretty efficient about it but seemed surprised that my place only had one bathroom (I guess the place on the 22nd floor has, or is supposed to have, two).

Anyway it was funny, mainly because it was completely unexpected and they were all talking at warp speed while puttering around my apartment. But the best part was when I was seeing them to the door, the agent scolded me for walking around my apartment barefoot. She said I would get sick. I just thought that was funny, being mothered by a Chinese leasing agent :-)

For those of you who haven't seen my Huangshan pics, I highly suggest you do so now. There are some pretty dang memorable shots in there, if I do say so myself. (And, not being able to say it any other way -- that's how I'm going to say it.) You also may be interested in the Hong Kong and Macau sets.

I'm planning more travel soon, so stay tuned!

Exhausted But Amazed

Man, whenever I come back from a vacation, or any length of time without the Internet, I've got like 6,000 things to catch up on in my RSS reader. It's a tad overwhelming. I should probably just mark them all as read and move on with it.

Huangshan was amazing. On the first day, we climbed about 7 miles worth of stairs. It HURT. Just imagine that. SEVEN MILES. of STAIRS. OUCH. But it was worth it, for we got amazing photos of the North Sea and West Sea, so named because of the clouds that roll in and out. The rest of the time, it was rainy and misty and terrible.

There are so many other things I could write about, and I might when I have time. But now I am exhausted and waiting for the pictures to upload to flickr. Let me just say that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness nature on such a grand scale. Looking at the vast gouges of jagged earth and roiling tendrils of mist that compose 北海 and 西海, I felt time stop. Seeing those peaks and valleys was worth every sore calf muscle, every overpriced bottle of water, every bug squashed in the hotel room, and every ragged gasp of wheezing breath I just barely managed to exhale as I willed myself to put one foot in front of the other ... just ... one ... more ... time while hobbling up that accursed set of stairs.

Seven miles. And that was just the ascent. It was another seven down, and that's only because we took a cable car partway. There are people who do that ascent and descent twice a day, with loads of hotels' dirty laundry, bottled drinks, and other sundries on their backs. I don't ever want to hear you complain about your day job again.

The pictures should finish uploading in an hour or two, so go check them out. I might post some of my favorites here on the blog. But just know this -- the pictures cannot do the view justice. Everything felt so sharp and clear and in-focus. A picture just doesn't capture the awe-inspiring majesty of looking at those peaks in person. I could have sat there for hours, and I probably would have if the mist hadn't rolled back in. It's amazing. It takes literally 15 seconds for the entire valley to empty out of, or fill up with, an opaque white cloud that kills all sightseeing opportunities. People run from one viewing platform to another, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rock walls that have been obscured for their entire visit. I feel very lucky to have gotten the time and views I did, although there were plenty of other times during the trek where I was frustrated because the mist was blocking a view. It's like, "I know there's something beautiful out there, but I can't see it, dammit!" That's frustrating.

Tourism trips improve my Chinese. I would pass small children with their families and hear them say "... lao wai ..." or "... wai guo ren ..." and then I would say (in Chinese) "Lao wai? Where? I'm not a lao wai! I'm Chinese!" I love hearing them gasp and laugh when I answered them. Unfortunately from then on it was downhill as they would continue the conversation and, more often than not, I would not understand them, haha. But it was still fun.

I met Walnut Lady while taking a picture on the descent to the Hot Springs. She was with her grandson and they were meeting up with the rest of their family. I used my new Chinese phrase "Ladies first" to tell her to go ahead of me while I stopped and took a picture. We got to talking and I managed to do pretty well. Then she said goodbye as she went down the stairs. I saw her again on the shuttle to the main gate, and she waved and smiled. Then I ran into her and her family in Tunxi, and she was so excited. She kept saying something that I couldn't understand -- and nobody with her knew how to translate into English. So I politely said goodbye again. Then, because Tunxi is a stultifying labyrinth of boredom, I ran into her again like 20 minutes later. She tried again, to the amusement of nearby shopkeepers and 7 or 8 passerby who found it interesting to watch a 老人 converse with a smiling but not-understanding 外国人, to say something to me. No go. But Herbert remembered the Chinese phrase, and when we found Charles and Kitty again, we asked her what it meant. "Walnut", she said. So we're assuming that this lady wanted me to buy her a walnut, or vice versa. Thus the Walnut Lady (核桃女) was born. That's how these things happen. I shoulda got a picture with her.

Okay, so, no travelling for at least 2 weeks. Okay? Okay. I'm exhausted. And flickr seems to be borking out again. Boo.