Fukuoka

In the Apple store using free internet. It is the Christmas season and the decorations show it. My Japanese is terrible, no surprise there, but I have fun reading what I can and trying to remember basic stuff. The boat was a nice 40 hour ride, lots of reading, very little interaction with others, little movement, some karaoke. Japan is so nice and orderly. The sushi is delicious and so fresh. Fukuoka is filled with fashionable people, canals, interesting architecture and lots of vending machines. Ok, off to explore.

pictures?

that's the horse head we shared a ride with.

Me next to a typical Mongolian religious thing that if it wasn't 7am after a night bus ride i could be more eloquent about.

mongolia, take 2

here i am in erlian, a soul-less border town that seems to fade into endless desert. unlike last time i was here i know when we leave and what to expect when we get into beijing, which is nice. being back in china means no more mutton, but i know i haven't strayed too far from mongolia since a guy next to me is looking at porn online, dirty pictures with the mongolian flag in the background. ah, the complicated nature of national pride. i just tried to post some pictures, but it made the computer shut down so you will have to make do with my words. some mongolian highlights:
- gers look boring from the outside, canvass structures often plopped down in the middle of nowhere, but it turns out that the insides are generally colorful and warm (if there's enough coal to make it through the night).
- there are not a lot of roads in mongolia. even the drive from UB to Kharkorin (the past and future? capital) is done mostly off road. this is generally delightful, except that sometimes you feel a little adrift in the middle of a desert with camels, yaks and sheep roaming around with seemingly more direction than the vehicle you're in.
- our last ride from Kharkorin to UB included the 3 of us, some mongolians who immediately busted out the beer for the ride, a horse head that came into close contact with my bag (hopefully while frozen), lots more meat in bags and a two hour ramble through town before departure to pick up people and their meat.
- there are a few national mongolian songs and they are played everywhere all the time.
- life in a former soviet semi-state is way different than other places that i've been. most obviously due to extensive vodka consumption. life seems more open than in China, you can access what you want on the internet and nothing is deemed "too sexy" for TV, but there is also not the same feeling of hope and opportunity.

more to come, hopefully with pictures at some point.

mongolia

we are here. after many many hours of sitting on a non-moving train around the china/mongolian border, lots of driving through moonscape, too many nasty toilets/holes to talk about and an introduction to new alphabets, we have made it into another country. so far we've holed up with foreigners and protected ourselves against the cold.
Alex almost lost her mind while riding the train and I did what I could to keep her from plotsing, kvelling, or getting agata. But I didn't do very much except for having enough power on my ipod to watch one episode of 30 Rock. As we sat on a ledge outside the train station (we were locked out of our train for a couple hours) the screen kept getting covered over with sand and I had to brush it off. Apparently Mongolia is a desert. But a cold, windy desert. Another suprising fact was that the town we were stalled in (Earlian (sp? - we are entering the portion of the trip where I can't spell the places I am visiting.)) is a shopping destination for people from Ulan-Bator. This is surprising since for us at least it was an 18 hour train ride to get there.

Getting kicked off the computer now....ttyl.

chengdu and bac

we've seen pandas, pimped some rickshaws with foreigners, climbed mount emei and seen pictures of the faux chinese dalai lama at the top, slept in a monastery, seen a very large carved buddha from a filthy beach, missed seeing jane goodall in two cities, eaten thanksgiving dinner and gone to "the bus bar" in beijing- a camoflaged trailer in a parking lot with a land rover bar- oh yeah, and we're off to mongolia at 6am. see you post-detox.

i climbed the great wall!

i thought that the great wall was just going to be a long walk, wrong. jane and i chose to go today which happened to be too foggy to see anything outside of the wall (which is actually good, if i could have seen what i was about to climb i may have just sat down and cried). by the end, after being lifted down from one of the towers by jane and some polish dude (each with a leg in hand) and climbing down another one with a number of onlookers coaching me on the footholds i was happy to reach the end, where it was snowing. besides the fact that it may have been a more challenging climb then i was ready for, it was fabulous to occasionally find myself alone on the wall, sans tourists and hawkers. scarily enough, as the bus got back onto beijing roads, jane and i could both feel the pollution. i am ready for chengdu and environs!

ni hao!

shanghai felt alternately like chinatown, brooklyn, and an amalgamation of american cities with tall buildings. now we're in beijing, after one of the nicest train rides ever, although i could have done without the chinese ballad muzak. we now know the words for rice, the numbers 6-10 and vegetable bun in chinese. we also do a mean reenactment of the announcer on the shanghai metro.

Cool Things I've seen in Portland

• really tall bikes. I asked someone how he got on his (multi-colored, earth flag, anti-war stickered) tall bike today and pointed to his step. someone else told me "faith."i didn't actually see this guy, but plenty of people who look like him.

• weird cars. people like to decorate their cars with tiles and little alien figurines and other bizarro things. so many people, so many crafting opportunities.
  
• international rose test garden! Portland is also known as "Rose City" strange, there must be one nickname for every 25 people in Portland, but this one makes sense since roses grow everywhere and are nurtured. see how happy i am about roses?

• Next to the Rose Garden is this serene Japanese Garden, complete with Yoko Ono inspired wish tree.
• these people like Japanese gardening too, but they have a lot to learn.
• Finally, this is what nerds do on their day off...

Welcome to Bridge City

here is the view from the Burnside bridge on the way to Voodoo Doughnut, best donut shop ever.
here is my new hip haircut.

that's all i've got for now.

I am a bike commuter. That's right, I have joined the ranks of thousands of Portlanders. I read bike maps, I follow bike routes, I hang out at the bike shop and I get passed by lots of people on much fancier road bikes whose legs are ready for hills. Helmet on!

Dance Party USA

Last night we went out. It seems that the 22 other people I'm here with are party animals, and it's nice since we spend about 12+ hours a day together in classes and doing field games and walking the streets talking to people about voting, so sometimes you need to not be talking about politics. Or if you are, you should be playing red state v. blue state flip cup on July 4th, which miraculously ended up in a tie! America wins!

Anyway, I walked the handful of miles from my home to downtown Portland last night and am constantly impressed by the greenery all over the streets and the cats running around. Portland feels like a variety of small towns linked by some big bridges and car busy arteries. Downtown is weird and gritty and the homelessness hub of Portland as well as where the hip clubs and Voodoo donut is, awesome local donut place. It's very bizarre. I think that's all i can do now since I am in class. More later.

Viral Marketing

Doesn't that sound fun? I think it does! I've spent a bunch of today working on it in a collaborative group, I wonder if any of it will work. It does mean that I spent over three hours sitting in an office kitchen and I feel a little funny. Things continue apace. Portland is beautiful, I took a nice walk around the nice neighborhood of Historic Irvington in NE Portland yesterday evening. The well kept lawns were blooming in a way that would make natural lawn types happy and there were lots of big dogs lounging on lawns just lapping up the cool weather. Everyone here seems happy and I'm working on getting used to that. I guess more to come.

So it begins...

I'm back from my two day crash course on PolitiCorps, it was fun and we learned lots of things about health care, rethinking democracy, campaigns, leadership and where we're all from. Admittedly, I have spent so much time at this point making new friends and keeping the old that I feel a little sick of it, but yeah, I'm 22 so hopefully I will get over it soon. It still hasn't set in that I'm in Portland. Since I seem a little stuck, here's a list of things of interest I've learned over the past few days:
Don't sleep with each other! (from two different people)
The US is in 7 trillion dollars worth of debt and 1 trillion seconds ago was 3000 BC. Just to put it in some perspective.
Ultimate frisbee is fun, but will probably be more fun once I'm not scared to get near the actual frisbee.
Our government needs to be dramatically overhauled to better fit our society, and that overhaul is a real possibility.

I have internet now, and Portland has lots of free WiFi, so hopefully we'll meet again sometime soon.

Keep Portland Queer!

I'm here. Getting here was long and filled with tears, snot on my shirt and watching a burned copy of Sicko (thought provoking movie, I'm interested to see how people react to it). Portland is green and it smells good. People are good at DDR. The nickel arcade has lots of games. I liked to ride around on a bike, it didn't seem scary at all. Hannah's downstairs neighbors- a gay 50 something couple of David's- spent all of last night yelling at each other and to each other and breaking EVERY piece of dinnerware that they own. Sample conversation:
David (wearing Nag Champa in his hat): "I hate my father! I hope he suffers!" SMASH.
David (wearing yellow sweatpants and a cowboy hat): "I think we've broken everything we own."
Nag Champa David: "Mikasa."

more to come...

Last Day of Work

There were certainly some times this year that I didn't think I would make it through, or that I saw Portland dangling before me like a carrot, urging me to keep going, but it's hard to understand that feeling now. This whole week I have happily, if not somewhat guiltily, exchanged packing time for friend time: sharing a 40 outside rather than sorting the trash, rocking the "Jewish Favorites" section (Siman Tov, to be exact) at karaoke instead of returning home at a reasonable hour and giving my favorite dog tummy rubs while avoiding taking my boxes to UPS.

Strangely, I was re-reading earlier blog posts (if I don't, who will?) and thinking about my fear of religion when I first got here, and, specifically, people forcing their religion on me and I realized that what I have actually experienced is far more nuanced and not at all as overwhelming as I'd feared. Then I went to the dermatologist. In our 10 minutes together he wished me blessings, he asked the big guy to watch over me on my trip to Portland and he was quick to clarify that while he'd called some NYC Drs. melanoma gods, he meant it with a small g. I have never been so happy to leave the doctor's office.

Happily, interactions like that have been the exception, not the norm and in Vermillion I have met a multitude of creative, kind, interesting, funny, self-sufficient and surprising people. It is truly a special place. Possibly the center of the Universe and certainly an excellent place to have experimented with living outside of my East Coast Liberal norm, mostly because I was able to adapt to the Small Town South Dakota Liberal norm with ease. I will back for Labor Day weekend and look forward to a stream of Vermillionaires rolling through the streets of New York with me in the not too distant future.

Packing and Parting

It seems like the memories of leaving are somewhat indelible. Leaving my home in Hyderabad, I stayed up all night dancing with Miranda while she folded clothes until the car came and she and the remaining students stood outside crying and waving as the all-too-appropriate Ambassador spirited me away.

When I was leaving for Hyderabad I spent my last minutes frantically run around doing nothing useful while Ethan and Adam threw all of my junk into garbage bags and then helped me stuff them in the overfull van to the horror of Marin's mother. On the way home we preceded to get lost in PA and remedy it by eating an animated dinner at an anywhere-USA restaurant somewhere deep in anonymous America.

Leaving Ithaca for the last time, Smita and I shamefully (well, the shame is mine) ditched out on Patrick's valiant cleaning/recycling efforts and sweatally drove off along the Southern Tier. Gotta love that tier. We took goofy pictures in small towns and ingested enough iced coffee to fuel a mini-emotional breakdown on the veranda of a Cracker Barrel in Indiana.

This time I'm trying to take a more pragmatic approach, absorbing the community and the scenery deliberately, but without being overly dramatic. A good distraction was making post-modern (I really need to learn what that word means) collages out of old magazines that I will not, I repeat will NOT, idiotically mail to myself to be thrown out later. Hopefully other activities will continue to distract me from the act of leaving.

Clay County

This weekend, my last as a Vermillion resident (tear, seriously), was jam-packed with Clay County exploration. Kicking it off with a night camping out at Amy's house, next to a creek, under the stars and with many tail-less animals running around, Nick and I made it our business to see and be seen in Volin, Irene, Wakonda and Lake Marindahl. Not to mention a quick dip in the Mighty Mo. After going through so many small towns where streets seem to run as they wish and an open store on Main St. on the weekend is a triumph, our return to Vermillion felt like a re-immersion into civilization. Moving back to a city right now feels pretty intimidating. Here is your virtual tour of Clay County:
These towns contain a few old gems, like this bank building that hearkens back to an ancient time. Well, maybe just a time when small towns had their own well-stocked grocery stores on Main St.
The mulberries are getting ripe.
Lake Marindahl seems to come from nowhere. In the middle of softly rolling grasslands is this gem of a lake. Quiet and serene. Near the lake we stumbled upon the Broom Tree Retreat Center. I got a quick sense of being deep in a fundamentalist heartland, something that I don't often feel. Upon examining their website, I think I was overreacting just a little bit, but I guess my conditioning runs deep.
South Dakota boasts an abundance of service and convivial organizations such as the Lions, the Eagles and the International Order of Odd Fellows. These clubs are mostly made up of a rapidly aging population and their membership is widely shrinking. I don't know much about the community in Irene, but I enjoyed this sign for their American Legion.
Irene is proud of their new sign. I wish I wasn't missing the rodeo. I hope this taste of rural SE So. Dak whets your appetite and has you clamoring for more. Nick and I hope to be hired soon by Google to bring their new StreetViews function to a new venue.

Wind

It is quite serious here these days. Trees down, branches strewn around, and the ever present feeling that something is going to land in your eye and you are not going to like it. Yesterday Nick, Lu, Jewels and I took a long walk down to the river. Everything was green, the river which is generally a trickle seemed full and the tall prairie grass looked very appropriate in the wind gusts. I love the little things that trigger Little House on the Prairie memories.

In other news, this makes me happy. I haven't yet attended a Church of Stop Shopping Event, but I've heard about them for years, and appreciate their efforts to bring attention to the malling of NYC. Relatedly, the World Monument Fund published their 2008 list of endangered places, and Main Street Modern, USA is included. It seems that Main Streets are also threatened by the pull of the big city. This is something I've been thinking about (inconclusively) all year. Hopefully I'll move to Portland and find that they have the answer to keeping communities vibrant without too much gentrification, but I know that's a pipe dream.

Finally, here is a really neat photo essay about how families eat for a week around the world. It seems natural to include a short update about my no-corn-syrup experiment. To be honest, soda is hard to refuse and I've been finding myself buying diet soda because there's no corn syrup, but obviously there are other bad things, so it seems like a pretty lame move on my part. The other thing I haven't been able to refuse is ketchup, which is essential in some ways and has corn syrup as the second ingredient. As I had thought, the trick seems to be planning ahead and reading labels, things that I should theoretically be doing anyway. If I were to stock up on a few essentials and make sure that I have corn syrup-free snacks and condiments on hand, it wouldn't be too bad. Sometimes this makes me angry since it shouldn't be so much effort to find food that doesn't contain something that is bad for you. Also, it was interesting to notice (although not surprising) that in England things that contain corn syrup here, don't there. Gotta love ag policy.

Country Roads

May be my favoritist thing ever. Driving along gravel roads in the country after hanging with friends and a crazy fire-hating sparks-eating dog as the sun gradually disappears feels like the antithesis of city living and a medley of everything I've enjoyed about living in SoDak.

Oh yeah, and this article about the future of space is both incomprehensible and extremely frightening.

Fish: Gefilte and Raw

This weekend marked my much-anticipated Sioux City Day! Nick and I hit up some of the stinky city's hot spots including: Congregation Beth Shalom, a local foods market, the mall, and Fuji Bay sushi restaurant. We also ventured across the bridge to Nebraska hoping to find a flea market, but instead finding a main street filled with so many Mexican and assorted Asian stores that I felt like I was in East Austin, or Queens.

Sioux City has a very gritty feel, and the stench of meat processing plants definitely adds to the aura of hard work and slight downtrodded-ness. Despite that, I was really impressed by how much interesting stuff there is to do, even if the sky is black and your time is dotted by periodic downpours. The Jewish community was kind and welcoming and made me miss home (a little). The sushi was absolutely delicious and reasonably priced. The local food market was housed in an old firehouse and felt slightly haphazard, but had a great variety of foods (mustard gift pack!) and a very Iowan enthusiasm for keeping things local that hasn't quite migrated across the South Dakota border yet. The mall was... a mall! But I did some necessary summer shopping, so there you go. And I bought Seed Magazine at the Barnes and Noble which provided some fascinating and well designed reading about China and space, among other relevant scientific topics.

Back in Vermillion it was a typical weekend of bingo, chicken coop cleaning and half-hearted room tidying/packing. I CANNOT WAIT until the time that I do not have to move once a year. Although, judging by my previous packing misadventures, the longer I stay, the more impossible it is for me to get my stuff out. This year I do not have the option of toting any belongings in garbage bags, so hopefully I will be better than I have been in the past. Hard to believe that a year ago Smita and I were wrapping up our post-collegiate mini-road trip and I was flying home from Chicago with a garbage bag filled with random items, scissors and trash that had ripped and was being carried in a Dunkin Donuts bag. When will I learn?

Bingo didn't help me win the big bucks, but it did provide me with the opportunity to feel like I was glimpsing into another universe where even the colors feel like a step back in time. The International Order of Odd Fellows hall, where Bingo is played, has the operation down, complete with cordless mikes for the callers and roving board checkers. I was impressed, can you tell?