For a little bit I was thinking of being a Druid. For a long time, I thought it was a rather flakey hippie religion, until I was in Hong Kong over the winter, on Lantau island, an island in the South China Sea famous for having a giant bronze Buddha statue on top of a mountain. The Path of Wisdom makes a circuit shaped like the infinity symbol, rising steep and rocky up the scrubby mountainside. Zen proverbs have been charcoal-etched into massive pine columns erected by monks at intervals, striking in their power and simplicity. At the top of the path I look down at the mountain pine forest laid out below me, and across an awesome vista.

Across that unspanned chasm is Phoenix Mountain, a promontory of bare stone that glows when sunlight strikes. All the elements are in harmony. To my right, the mountain drops off into the sea, the sun blazing fire on its liquid surface wreathed in golden mist. Clouds of mist form and unform about the Phoenix peak, transient yet ever-present, undefined yet ever-flowing, against the immutable face of the eternal mountain.

For the first time I hear the voice of a mountain. It is not a voice like one "hears" because it is silent, but a voice one feels. It is not the voice of an individual, and the voice has no words, yet it speaks, and the not-words are. "I AM HERE."

Above and around me the Zen columns rise against a blue mountain sky, cold and pure. I can't read the Chinese characters. According to a broad English translation, they are about the nature of non-existance, and the impermanence of self. I have learned more by not-reading them. This is why they call it the Path of Wisdom.

Am in Hong Kong, y'all.

I saw a funny ad. It goes like this: "If you are sneezing, it is for three reasons. One, you have a cold. Two, you have allergies. Three, your coworkers are talking about you behind your back. For the first two, there's (Trademarked Overthecounter Medication). For the third, you're on your own." <--- Jeremy will get this. Nobody else who reads my blog will.

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Something you'll notice about Victoria Park is that there are a lot of people practicing martial arts. Mostly it's flocks of old women doing tai chi to some brassy Chinese oldies blasting from a radio, or little kids from some kung fu school swinging quarterstaffs. Which is not to say that all Chinese people know martial arts, but a larger proportion of them do than Americans, and they tend to congregate in public places. I think Victoria Park is the only park in the world where a large portion of the populace has swords.

("But I wanna play on the swings!"

"Practice your kata! Then you swing!"

"Sifu!"

.. "Hold your head up! Head up! Arms out! Straighter! Very good! - Don't stab the joggers!")

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Went to Central today, the Manhattan of Hong Kong's New York. Were going to look at an art exhibit but it was over, so we walked around looking at the Bank of China Tower and the International Finance Center, which are basically the trademark shining glass giants of Hong Kong's skyline. They command a legion of window-washers, which provide a positive externality; shiny buildings mean moralized, productive workers. Inside, they're black marble and grey basalt, monochromatic basilicas, gleaming and white, catwalks with black fountains, ovals and arcs and slanted transparence. It's a sign of high GDP. This is good. The economy is wonderful. The most beautiful buildings of the 15th century were churches, glory be to God. The most beautiful buildings of the 21st century are banks. Glory be to Mammon.

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-Have had some trouble adjusting to the shotgun seat of the car being on the left.

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My grandpa has been in the hospital respiratory ward under observation, ever since x-rays of his lungs showed some scarring. Apparently it's from an old lung infection, so it seems like a false alarm. There's also something wrong with his lymph nodes which causes water build up in his cells, I'm not really sure, but the only way to find what that is is to draw bone marrow from his spinal cord, which they don't want to do. He also has low hemoglobin and is getting a blood transfusion so he'll be staying there a few days. Strangely enough, though I know I'm supposed to care, I don't really all that much. I don't feel very much of anything. I've been visiting him every day and standing around stiffly not having anything to say (I never have even when he's not sick) until he says that I shouldn't trouble myself and can leave. My mom says my silent visits make him happy anyway, just having someone there, but they don't make me feel any less useless.

My cousin Fish plays Return to Castle Wolfenstein and all sorts of FPSes. I managed to convince him that Heinrich Himmler was indeed a real person, and not a creation of computer game designers. Such is the problem of pulp fiction action hero/villain Nazis. Real history is so easily forgotten.

Fish finds me sadistic for this, but being tortured by lightning-wielding silly-German-accent mad scientist zombie Nazis in a torch-lit gothic dungeon is pretty damn funny. The caged skeletons dangling from the ceiling by rusty chains are the icing on the cake. Camp at its finest hour.

I also play Warcraft III- Fish wonders whether the people have British or American accents. The answer to that is they speak in a dialect of English known as Campy Fantasy Film English. I'm sure a true linguist can look into this. Fish also says that Arthas the paladin is comparable to Bush in his warlike righteousness; we had a good laugh mentally imposing Arthas' forthright knightly dialogue on Bush's simian head; "I stand for the light!" "Feel my wrath!" "Slay them all!" 'For honor!" "Betrayers of the light!" "I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth!!! Do you hear me?!!" I'm afraid this is only funny if you say the above in a grim and determined manner, setting your jaw just so.

Have also done lots of mountain hiking so it's not like I never go outside. I'm outside quite often. Kinda tropical. There's a type of fern that curls up when you touch it, and stairs carved into the rock and tumbled rockfaces and waterfalls that trickle over them (but they look dirty) and small orange crabs bright enough to appear cooked that scuttle away with amazing dexterity when you (unwisely) poke them with a toe. The good thing is that you can see very far into the mountains that fold in a green felty fashion like a giant's cloak in the foreground. It's easy, in the shadow of a mountain, to misjudge distances, until you see tiny white blots that are apartment buildings on the adjacent mountain's rocky spine, and you realize that walking from point A to point B would be the fruitful work of several days. You can see into the densely populated valley with its concrete forest of buildings, and saddles of mountains and the sea between mountain gaps, until the mountains fade into a universally flat haze in the blue distance against the horizon.

It's very strange how halfway around the world the rustling murmur of cicadas and the warm smell of suntan lotion can make it feel so much like home.

On July 1st, 2003, 500,000 residents of Hong Kong took to the streets to protest Article 23, a lovely piece of legislation wherein the Chinese government can ban or arrest any organization it considers to be a "threat to national security." In a city with little history of civil disobedience and little history of democracy, one fourteenth of the population turned out to defend its freedom of assembly based on something one small human rights organization circulated online. If something like that happened in the States, (even where people seem to protest or rally at the drop of a hat) something would REALLY happen! I don't know what you saw in the press; I have NO idea what kind of "foreign" news makes American news these days, but the streets were filled as far as you could see from one horizon to another, spilling over with people even in aerial shots, like Times Square on New Years Eve- the air was excited and electrified, almost festive, like though that's trivializing it, because something very important was happening, and people were part of something big, and doing something that mattered. Most of my family went (both my uncles, my aunt, and all four of my cousins), though I didn't; I kind of regret not participating in what is now a part of history; my cousin Joanne and her friends, in a Where's Waldo fashion, can be found in a crowd photo on the 2nd page of "The Apple" newspaper, which she's saved for posterity. She's now a part of documented history.

On July the second, looking at the sickle moon over a neon night, the city and harbor felt very much alive. It- the crowd moving and alive splashed across the tv and papers captioned in big lightning characters reading "Against 23!" and "To the Streets!" and "Hong Kong Lives Forever!"- was one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a long while. Perhaps there is hope for this century after all.

Unrelated and Interesting Tidbit: Omnipresent in public places are a bunch of hand sanitizing boxes, like electric blow dryers you see in public bathrooms. You stick your hands under the motion detector and a little mist of antibacterial wash sprays bout. The bottled variety is also popular. Ah, zeitgeist of the times.

I am in Hong Kong. The weather is actually good for a change, meaning that it's cool and breezy. Took a walk in Victoria Park, which has finished renovation and is greatly improved. Have gone mountain hiking. Take that, Malex! Wyoming my ass. Except that it's raining right now, but that's beside the point.

Kinda boring, but that's what you get for living with old people who do nothing but watch crappy Chinese tv.

My grandma is not biting my head off this year which could mean one of several things. One, that she's going senile. Two, that I'm not as obnoxious a brat as I was last year. Three, that losing twenty pounds does affect how people treat you.

People still wear SARS masks, but not as much. In airports. Also, mostly restaurant workers and sanitation workers. Saw a t-shirt, which I did not buy but still thought funny, of Mao in a SARS mask.

Have problems sleeping the entire night, but that's to be expected.

Went to dinner with my mom's friend and her daughter Marie, which is why I had to excuse myself from watching a third movie. I was actually a bit grateful, because there weren't that many good movies to pick from in the first place and after two (movies, not necessarily good), it was like, oh ugh. It's sort of depressing that Marie and her mom are going to Hong Kong for two weeks- Marie speaks very bad Chinese, so that she speaks half in Chinese and half in English, which I found annoying me slightly even though I knew she couldn't help it. I mean, she could've just spoken all in English since we all understood it anyways. When she's going to Hong Kong she's going to be living in a hotel. This is what depresses me about the whole affair- with her horrid Chinglish and her living in a hotel and her mother having to consult a map to get to even the most obvious landmarks (this was what the dinner mainly was; my mom showing her mom places on a map), everyone's going to treat her like a foreigner. She's going to go to Hong Kong and (in my imagination, because what else would you do in Hong Kong?) visit the giant bronze Buddha statue on Lantau Island, Ocean Park with its shiny new roller coaster, Victoria Peak, Hong Kong Park, Central with its pinnacles of modern architecture, and the Jumbo floating restaurant, and when she gets home she's going to talk all about how pretty Hong Kong and Victoria Harbour is at night, just like a tourist. And in general, just have a wonderful time, which is all good for her.

I'm not any less American than she is, but somehow when I get to Hong Kong, because I can speak Chinese fluently, suddenly I ought to be a genius on the proper greeting of your ancient grandparents and strange distantly related cousins by blood or marriage, and when I go to church I ought to be able to make pleasant and witty conversation with my cousins' fellowship despite the fact that I've never met most of them and I haven't even been in the same hemisphere for the last year, let alone belong to the same religion or read the same language or watch the same tv shows. You know why I suck at foreign languages? It's because I hate sounding like such a retard all the time- I'm native level in Chinese, and I still can't get the words to say what I want them to say.

Back in the US of A, and jetlagged like crazy. 12 hour difference, man. The blogger ate my last post, so let me tell you..

I went to the Hong Kong history museum, which involved me looking at lots of Neolithic pottery shards. Admission is free on Wednesday, so it was incredibly crowded, with loads of stupid elementary school kids. It was really interesting though, because they put a lot effort into the reconstructions. There were facade reconstructions of a theater and a brothel, and then there were reconstructions that you could actually go inside of. I got to go into a junk, a shrine, a Tang (I think) dynasty tomb complete with vaulted ceilings, a tram, and a reconstructed street from the colonial era inside the museum. And it wasn't just a facade of a street; it included reconstructions of a tea parlor, a pharmacy, a bank, a printing press (the building with the press inside it), a store, a post office, and an alley with market stalls and clothes hanging out to dry overhead. The icing on the realism cake was the recorded sound effects, so at the junk, you would hear the creaking of the ships, the slosh of water and the cries of the seagulls, and in the tea parlor you'd hear the clinking of eating utensils and gentle conversation, in the alley you'd hear the vendors' cries, so it was like you were actually there. Not actually part of the street was a reconstruction of a British boat (which was unexciting, looking like every other boat in Annapolis harbor), a colonial collunade, and large boxes marked "Opium." Some breech loaded cannons, a rickshaw. For realism, of course. There was some video on the Opium War which had a portrait of Lord Palmerston in it at some point (I was like, woo! It's him!), the rest of which I didn't bother to watch because it looked uninteresting. In the folk culture section there was a mountain of steamed buns from a folk festival or something, a wedding panaquin and historical wedding clothes, ceremonial dancing lions, dummies posed to do the ceremonial rowing dance (an ethnic version of the Dragon Boat Race- maybe they were too ghetto to afford boats). There was an exhibititon on the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, the 18 Day's War, which basically had never-before-published photos of the war from journalists intended for Japanese newspapers, and a Japanese propaganda film about the victory in Hong Kong. And there was an exhibition on modern Hong Kong, which is just MMC... my mom used most of the stuff when she was younger.

I also went to the science museum but it was aimed for kids. I knew most of the facts already, and some of the things there were already demonstrated in physics, but it was still cool. I got to do the Zimbardo illusion thing, where forced perspective in a room makes it look to an outside observer like I'm getting bigger as they walk around the room, when instead the room is strangely shaped. You could also walk through a rotating tube on an immobile catwalk, the tube being marked just right so that halfway through you'd suddenly feel like you were tilting and lose your balance, even though the catwalk wasn't moving at all. I got to run in what was basically a hamster wheel for humans that would crank a chain to turn a gear of some sort. It was incredibly difficult to get moving, but incedibly hard to stop, which was inertia and all that. I just got a riot out of running in a human-sized hamster wheel There was a face that looked like a hologram because it'd turn and watch you if you covered an eye. Actually it was a sunken into the wall, like a jello mold or something, but some lighting effect made it so that if you only viewed it with one eye (no depth perception) it would look like it was popping out of the wall and rotating. Lots of sound stuff too. There was a thing that you squeezed to force air through different plastic passages that were shaped like your vocal cords, so it would make crude a e i o u sounds. There was a maze-like room that absorbed sound, so you couldn't hear anything going on outside. If you pounded on the walls inside the maze, other people in the maze could hear it, loud, low, and distorted, as if you were inside a whale's heart or something. Totally unrelated, but if you stood under a certain convex plate at a certain point and clapped or talked, you'd sound very loud to yourself but nobody else. And there was a narrow wave tank which you viewed from the side to see what happened to waves when they hit a beach. One of the lecturers drove around a remote control hovercraft, which is actually not as impressive as it sounds, because it just looks like a boat that rides very high on the water. I measured myself against outlines on a wall showing the average set of Chinese boys and girls at various ages. I can't believe the average 18 year old is that tiny! There was a mound of fake food which was how much food an average Hong Kong adult ate in a year, which was .. I don't know how much I was expecting. And there were some unoriginal features like the kinetic energy machine (balls rolling down a track, basically), and the obligatory fake tornado.

Not on the same day, because my legs were tired enough to drop off, I went to the Hong Kong Tea Museum, which was amusing in itself because there was a giant inflatable teapot set on the lawn. Some pottery.. I guess I feel educated, even though we had to rush ahead of a throng of students on a field trip. Some cups.. pots.. tea cabinets.. scoops... dried tea leaves... video on excruciatingly boring tea ceremony.. You know.

Also tried to go to the art museum on my last day in Hong Kong, but it was Thursday and museums are generally closed on Thursdays. I guess it's to clean up after the rush of field trip kids after Free Admission Wednesday.

Read "Men at Arms," which is possibly the best Discworld book. Some discrepancies with Fifth Elephant regarding werewolves though. Also, a special feature called Captain Carrot Gets Laid. Finally. Was hoping to read "Thief of Time," seeing as that Hong Kong is the perfect place to read a book mocking kung fu flicks, but the English section of my local library didn't have it. Had lots of Eddings though. And Madame Bovary. Grrrr. Begone, summer reading! So many books, so little Pratchett... man, and Hong Kong calls itself a British Crown Colony?

Oh, wait.

Yes, Mainland (nickname: Big Green) China is now officially the most ghetto place I have ever been. Not so much as ghetto, but totally random. Let me demonstrate. Visualize what I'm about to say, instead of just reading over it, otherwise you won't understand me.

It is nighttime in July, and it is hot and humid. You see a large mall. Right in front of it, is not a parking lot, but a tiny lawn, maybe the size of a blacktop. There are large green spotlights pointed at the grass, so that it's a nice crayony shade of green, as if someone thought, "Damn, the grass should be green." Without thinking that grass isn't green at night. On the grass is some metal playground equipment. You know, swings, slides, etc. There's maybe a hundred people, coming and going into/from the mall, green kids (the lights doing their job) playing on the playground and random people sitting. On the grass. There are poles on the grass. There are Christmas lights shaped like fireworks on the poles. Around this whole scene are colonial style apartments badly in need of repair. There is a giant KFC sign in Chinese. Looming above the sign is a crane. And a clocktower.

I'm not sure if I'm getting across, but what I was thinking looking out at this was.. What the hell???

A fairly dumb tour.. we went to the beach, and just stood around acting like idiots, since it was blistering hot, even with the free fans and free water we were given. I hate beaches. The only thing distinctive about it was that you could see Taiwan. Chinese tea ceremony demonstration.. good tea.. but I didn't understand the Mandarin, and didn't pay attention to the Cantonese. Went to a nifty Buddhist shrine and ate a vegetarian meal there. The cooks were amazing- they could make everything taste like meat. They made fried glutton that tasted like pork kabob, and had some strange fungi mushroom thing diced up to taste like calamari, and mushrooms basted to taste like sea cucumbers, and some awesome vegetarian pan fried noodles.

In Hong Kong there is a tv show like Millionaire, where if you answer the question wrong, a trapdoor opens under you and you fall into a hole.

July 1; the fifth anniversary of Hong Kong's transfer back to China. Got to watch fireworks from Fish's balcony over Victoria Harbour at night, and a loony human rights protestor on a bridge surrounded by cops on my way to get some lunch (not that all human rights protestors are loony; this one was.) I filmed the fireworks. But I saw the footage again and it's extremely jerky. I wonder how the fireworks on the Mall were (I suppose now it's the morning of July 5th in the US.)

Am in Hong Kong. Actually, I've been here for a week or so (starting on the 24th of June) but was too lazy to blog.

It is all normal. It looks very good at night, sparkly like it's Christmas or something (Christmas in Hong Kong is demented by the way... too many lights...), but in the daytime, it's dirty. Japan creeps me out because it's an Asian country and clean. Has been 33 degrees C out, and I wish we'd turn on the air con. The fan is trying very hard, to its credit. This is part of the reason why I escape to my cousin Fish's apartment (flat, my bad) ... because my grandma is worse than Nick B's dad. I don't think she's let a meal pass without commenting on my fatness (when people comment that I've lost weight she immediately goes, "No she hasn't!") And she serves fish at every meal and gets hella angry if I don't eat it (despite eating other things). Evil..I hate having a mouthful of bones- it's like eating a skeleton, especially since choking on a bone when I was little and having to be taken to a hospital.

And semi-escaping from my other cousin's flat because a) he's starting to inherit his dad's temper (this being the type of model family where the father is the disciplinarian and the mother is the nurterer- so that the daughter is extremely compliant and my other cousin is starting to yell at his mom..) Also, he's been running around shouting, having spiked his hair like David Beckham and is wearing a "Brasil" soccer (read, real football) jersey. Also, I have to go to church with them, which althought it hasn't been as offensive as it was last year (we got to watch videos on "converting the natives of Africa") but it's still awkward because I don't know anyone and people think I'm weird because I eat pizza with my hands.

Anyhow. Fish has been teaching me how to play Counterstrike. Yay, FPS. And "Typing of the Dead." Type or die!