Chinese Whispers

I never really cared about going to China.  For the last half-decade or so that we've been planning this trip, my head has always been filled with images of sweltering jungles and banana pancakes.  Lao, Thailand, Cambodia, those are the places that stir the imagination.  China, on the other hand, brings darker things to mind: open sewers, dirty streets, contaminated food, crushing mobs of strangers who spat and smoked and shouted, toxic clouds of pollution, an oppressive government spying on its citizens or disappearing them in unmarked vans.  These ideas come from the American media, from friends who've spent time in China, or from my own frantic imagination, and even though I knew they were probably of limited veracity, they hung over my head as our ferry pulled into Qingdao port.  Years in Japan had intensified my already timid nature; I feel like crying when someone cuts in line in front of me, how the heck was I going to cope in China?

Over the next four weeks, though, I found myself proven wrong in the best possible way.  The people we met were friendly, welcoming, and chatty (even when we didn't understand a word that was being said).

The food was abundant, easy to order, cheap, safe to eat, and damn delicious.

Except for the scorpions, of course.

The scenery was absolutely breathtaking.  Especially where we did all of our cycling, Yunnan province, which means "South of the clouds."

And the cycling, most importantly, was top-notch.  Mountainous, sure, and therefore exceedingly difficult.  We were unable to keep up our usual molasses-on-a-cold-day pace what with all the 20-kilometer climbs, and so we had to cut our visit short to get out of the country before our visas expired.  But if we had had another 30 days, we would have spent every one happily pushing up those mountains and taking photos of clouds.

The road leaving Kunming is lined with these solar- and wind-powered streetlights.  On a windy day like this, the turbines hum like cicadas. 

Unfortunately, China's nice modern roads are the product of constant construction, which leaves day-long patches of road that are nonstop mud puddles or dusty pothole fields.

 

Of course, not everything about China is perfect.  Beijing was a good city to be a tourist -- easily navigable by bike or foot, plenty of English, lots to see and do -- but the pollution was so unbelievably thick every day we were there.  It was so bad that skyscrapers a block away were all but invisible and the sun looked like it was coming through smoked glass.  In a way, Beijing felt like being in the future.  The dystopian future, y'know, where the earth is too far gone to save and all we can do is cough and squint and hope that it doesn't go completely kaput until we're already dead.  Leaving the city for the countryside was a relief, but we haven't forgotten how awful it felt to be somewhere so polluted, and I hope we never do.

And we did find the pushing, rude, anarchic China that we'd head so many horror stories about.  In fact, we lived it for one brief afternoon.  On our trip to visit the Great Wall, which is only a short train ride away from Beijing, we made it to the train station an hour early for our return to the city to find the station completely mobbed.  We took our place in line and scoffed at the bent-backed grandmothers and young spiky-haired dudes trying to muscle past us.  "Where do they think they're going?" we asked each other quietly, unable to believe that someone would be so rude in order to get on the train 5 seconds faster.

As time ticked closer to departure, though, the station swelled with more and more passengers desperate to get a spot on the next train, which was also the final train of the day.  Miles from the city, none of us could afford to be stranded out here overnight.  Hundreds packed into the hallway, and it grew more doubtful that there would be room on the train for all of us, much less room to sit down.  After an hour of waiting, all thousand of our knees began to ache and we all knew that we needed to get on that train.  Uniformed officials shuffled around uselessly, occasionally making announcements far too quiet to be heeded (also they were in Chinese).

When the gate to the platform opened at last, civilization collapsed.  We all broke into a run.  Elbows out, backpack clutched to my chest, I sprang between mothers and their children, headbutted my way past old men with canes and young women in high heels.  A hand grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back, but I shook it off and sprinted to the end of the platform were there were already a dozen people waiting.  The train pulled up and hundreds of eyes stared at that door hungrily, all breathing that we would kick our own mother in the shin to get a spot on that train (sorry, Mom), so tired were we of waiting and so desperate to get away from this awful place.

In the end, we did make it on the train.  As far as I know, no passenger was left in a bloody heap at the station.  Somehow, Jenn and I even got seats.  We stared out the window into the smog, breathless and dry-mouthed, and we wondered if the price of getting our seats was worth the spiritual toll we paid.  All it took was a little bit of discomfort and a little bit of fear to turn two friendly, sensitive hippies into crazed animals who were perfectly ready to murder the crap out of Piggy if that's what it took.  If this is what train travel in China was like, if this sort of unmediated competition for limited resources was a regular situation to be in, then that must really make it hard for the people who live here to be nice people.

As bad as we felt, we still kept our seats.  I don't know how many orphans or limbless veterans had to stand up for another two hours, and I didn't want to know.

I don't know why China has such a terrible reputation in the West.  I think a fair amount of it stems from good old-fashioned racism; hell, Chinese people have been distrusted or outright reviled in the US for a couple hundred years.  There's also a healthy dose of distrusting the other major world superpower.  I mean, there are more Mandarin speakers than English speakers in the world, and that's scary as hell to a place where few dare utter that USA does not equal #1.  I guess the biggest reason there's such a negative image of China, though, is just basic media scare-mongering: people will watch a news program about a big bad empire of not-white people who oppress their citizens and hate our capitalist freedoms.  Programs about diverse, complicated places don't really make it to air.  And I don't mean to say that China's without problems (because that would be a dumb doo-doo-headed thing to say), just that it's really easy to assume from watching the news that America is nothing but school shootings, state-sponsored executions, and McDonalds, and that's just as ignorant a caricature as thinking that China is nothing but jack-booted authoritarianism and poison toothpaste (and pandas).

So I guess the lesson here is: don't trust the media (sorry again, Mom).

The other, probably more relevant lesson?  China's an awesome place to tour, and we're sure as hell coming back someday.

Leaving Seoul

Note: We're out on the road!  Badly dated tales of our biking adventures will be up shortly.  Until then, please enjoy some extremely self-important reflections on a blogless year in Korea.

A year really isn’t all that long of a time.  Sure, it can drag on for dozens of work weeks, a thousand meals, 0.5 haircuts (if you’re Harry, anyway).  But especially if you move around a lot, a year can pass by in a flash.

We didn’t come to Seoul to find the Real Korea.  We didn’t come to make friends or learn a lot about ourselves.  Frankly, we came because we could earn more money in a year teaching English here than we could anywhere else.  Our months of job hunting while touring in Japan (which is not recommended, btw, as it requires carrying around unnecessary button-down shirts and showering on the semi-regular) yielded a multitude of job opportunities for experienced but unlicensed educators, yet none of them as good on paper as even the lamest of hagwon jobs in Korea: an international kindergarten in Hong Kong paid just well enough to afford the astronomical cost of living in an exciting city, provided we were willing to live in a tiny apartment with two other roommates; Disney English in China offered us a chance to work for the Evil Empire, which, as Star Wars has taught me, includes decent pay but terrible benefits; a program in Vietnam, astoundingly, offered us a pittance to work at a dozen schools for an absurd number of hours per week...and also would not pay us a cent of that pittance until the end of the contract.

Meanwhile, while the Powers That Be are definitely trying to pop the EFL bubble in Korea, it’s still possible to find 30-hour-a-week jobs in Seoul for about $25,000 a year, benefits, housing, and completion bonus included.  Factor in a relatively low cost of living and suddenly Korea makes a whole lot of sense.  Sure, the job you find might be one of Those Jobs that we all hear about: a friend of ours fled her contract after a few months of late paychecks, missing paychecks, and bedbugs.  But for thousands of dollars in savings, we could endure any job for twelve months.

So in short: while we were fond of Korea (except for the bugs), we didn’t really choose Korea.  It chose us.

It wasn’t easy after a year of unmitigated freedom to go back to working a regular job five days a week.  We tried to focus on the positives, on the luxuries like air conditioning and showers that we missed on the road.  But our goal was to make the year pass as profitably and quickly as possible so we could get back to our Real Life, as we thought of bike touring.  We didn’t seek out new friends, knowing that we’d be leaving in a year and would have to say goodbye right after meeting.

And yet, somehow, after twelve months in this dirty, crowded, sprawl-y city in a damned sub-Arctic desert, we found ourselves tearfully bidding farewell to more new friends than we had ever expected.

“You may not think you have anyone here in Korea,” said our Korean teacher, beginning to cry, “but you do.  You have me, and I hope you come see me if you ever come back to Korea.”

The last days in Seoul were to be spent simultaneously getting ready for an international move and a year-long bike trip.  We’d had a to-do list taped up next to the bathroom door since March, and a dozen tasks to be done were gradually whittled down to two or three, which then ballooned back up to twenty or thirty in our last days as more and more chores made themselves known.

“Get travel vaccinations.”

“Buy ferry tickets.”

“Transfer money.”

“Buy shoes.”

The final week was insane...and in the process of leaving, we discovered that we had so many friends to say goodbye to that we underwent an abrupt re-prioritization of chores.  More tasks were discarded as unimportant or impossible than actually completed.  Some of those we regret.  “Buy spare inner tubes” never got done, for instance.  Nor did “Go grocery shopping.”  But we regret not a minute that we spent saying goodbye to our new friends who are soon to become our old friends.

In short, Seoul is a good city.  It’s not a great city, perhaps.  It’s dirty, the air quality is fairly hellish, and it takes forever to get anywhere.  But it’s not a bad place to live.  Especially with friends like these.

Also, Jenn learned belly dance!  Truly, our skills are as varied as they are impractical.

The Lowdown

OK, so.

This guy:

...and this gal:

...joined forces several years ago and formed this amazing team:

And as the Gaijin Patrol, they have been cutting a streak of awesome all across the globe ever since (well, until recently, across a very specific few corners of the globe).  In Osaka, we educated surly Japanese teens with only a few hundred pounds of crazy, a thimbleful of good sense, and exactly zero years of teacher training.  We did battle with ogres, survived earthquakes, climbed motherfucking mountains of sand, avoided making eye contact with maids, got assaulted by children, found Happy Beach, rocked the roof off of various ghetto bars, and ate bugs one time and it totally wasn't an accident or anything, you guys, for real.  Also, Tommy Lee Jones was there, though that may have been a dream.

At last, when our combined rockage threatened to shake The Big O into the sea, we left for the good of the land.  Having saved our money carefully, we decided that the wisest course of action would be to invest it in further education to better our future career prospects and prepare for the children that we would one day bring into this world.

Then we said, "Nah, fuck it, let's buy some bikes."

And so the legend was born...

Having had little experience riding bikes since our idyllic childhoods in the Midwest, we were relatively new to bike camping.  We had done a fair amount of reading in our apartment in Osaka, and as we studied Japanese and nursed our bruised bodies (children be violent), we dreamed of circling the globe like Travelling Two or Going Slowly.  Realizing that it was far easier to drop everything and be full-time bike bums before having children than after, we decided there was no time like the present and no way like holyshitgorightnow.  After all, though we were comfortable teaching in Osaka, there was little room for growth or challenge.  Sure, we could have stayed longer, saved more money, played more gigs with Raku Three, studied more Japanese, but...well, that would have just been more of the same.  So, clearly: bikes.

The first thing we did with our bikes was to educate ourselves in their maintenance and upkeep so as to better equip ourselves for world traveling.  No, wait, first we put a bunch of sweet stickers on the bikes.  Then the other thing.  The next thing we did was to bike across Missouri, then bike from San Francisco to San Diego.  There will be more written on this, but SPOILER ALERT WE MADE IT.  And so, bikes sufficiently broken in, we flew back to Asia, never to return until we had kicked its ass.

The Plan, in short, is to bike around Asia until the money runs out or we get sick of traveling.  Right now, we are still in Phase 1 of the Plan, which involves very few bikes.  The reason for this break is that, as of press time, it is winter in much of the world, and thus far too cold for bike camping.  So, to wait out the winter, we flew to Seoul to teach more childrens and make a little more cash to support our travel habits.  Since winter still stubbornly has refused to end as of February, we thought we’d blow some of the vacation dough on a trip to the Philippines until it’s warm enough to return to Japan and The Plan, which, if you’ve been paying attention, is to bike around Asia until the money runs out or we get sick of traveling.

That about brings us up to speed, then.  From here, there will be frequent posts about what we’re up to at the moment, periodically intercut with flashbacks to the last few months of travel.  Expect photos, whimsy, and more analogies than you can shake a regulation stick at.  But first, a sample of what else we’ve accomplished since our ogre-battling etc. days:

Adventure!

Travel!

Adorable children!

Beasties, critters, and assorted varmints!

More beasties, critters, and assorted varmints!

More nasty food!

And...

...mysteries solved!