Ethnicity, Exoticness, Taste, Consumption

Last week we celebrated Devin’s birth. I thought of repeating Devin’s idea of releasing some fish into a river and birds into air when we celebrated her birthday two years ago in Hangzhou with my family, but Beijing is so large, I hardly see waters running through the city.Some taxi drivers told me there’re a few rivers crossing it, but honestly, I’m intimidated by this gigantic city with overwhelming traffic and poor service in most stores. So, we didn’t release fish and birds. My sister in Hangzhou did it and gave us some credit toward our merit.

Toward late afternoon last Thursday I thought of Makyi Ama, a Tibetan restaurant in Chaoyang District, which is about fifty-minute taxi ride from where we are in Haidian District. In the past my students and I had dinners and cultural events there. It is indeed a festive place for a birthday celebration. My assistant Jabeh quickly made reservation. By 5:00pm, Jabeh, his friends (our friends too), and we hopped into two taxis.

Makyi Ama is an upscale restaurant in Beijing. Its interior motif reflects the luxurious aspect of Tibetan cultural tradition: hardwood dining tables and chairs and the display of crafts of both religious and cultural significance. It is owned by a couple – the husband is a Tibetan and the wife is a Han Chinese. They started out successfully in Lhasa and now there are two more restaurants in Beijing. Most of Makyi Ama’s customers are North Americans, Western Europeans, and the new rich of China.

The phrase “Makyi Ama,” pronounced as “ma-ji-a-ma,” came from one of the fifth Dalai Lama’s poems. “Ma” means “not,” or “no” and “kyi” means “birthing” or “to give birth.” “Ama” means mother. So, it could be translated as “mother without giving birth.” Tsangyang Gyatso, the fifth Dalai Lama, was known for his love poetry. However, tantric practitioners and scholars contend with this claim by saying that his love poetry in essence conveys higher meanings of tantric practice, not just cheesy courtship verses. Anyway, Makyi Ama is a popular restaurant not just because of its food but also because of its Tibetan cultural contents. In fact it has become a window for local and foreign residents to experience Tibetan culture in a commercial environment.

So, we were consumers walking into this cultural window. Waiters and waitresses all dress in traditional attire with a Lhasa style. Jabeh reserved the best table for us, located in the center of the restaurant facing the stage where evening performance takes place each night at 8:00. Wendy, Devin, Merlin, and I arrived earlier. We took a slow tour in the restaurant. It has a small book/souvenir store. The jewelry displayed there is quite beautiful but expensive. It's probably twenty times more expensive than that I often saw in Qinghai and Gansu. The display of Tibetan kitchen wares in a corner particularly caught attention from Wendy and kids. Wendy began to take photos. One waitress told her photos were not allowed. The head waiter nearby then said to me, “You can take photos of yourself and kids but you can’t directly take photos of the displays in the restaurant…” He didn’t explain why customers could not take photos. One waitress standing next to him said, “Laoban (owners) said no photos allowed.” But I had taken one photo without people in it before we were told “No.”

Jabeh and our other friends, Gabeh and Sangdhe, arrived. They brought a Totoro Doll (a Japanese anime character) to Devin as her birthday gift. We began to order food. The menu is impressively composed with large photos and descriptions in both Chinese and English. Meat dishes are predominant choices. The owners have modified traditional Tibetan food because in general, Tibetans do not roast meat. Makyi Ama has assorted roast beef (yak) and lamb. Unlike the gamy texture of yak meat I have had in Qinghai, Sichuan, and Gansu, yak meat at Makyi Ama is soft to my teeth. What I like most at Makyi Ama is a type of thin pancakes made out of highland barley flour. The food was good so we quickly ate most of what we had ordered. I ordered an additional plate of yak meat, boiled not roasted. I knew Jabeh, Gabeh and Sangdhe all love meat.

Around 8:00, performance began. Dancers and singers mostly come from Kham and Amdo regions. Although I had seen the same performance quite a few times, I still very much enjoyed it especially the singing part because once in a while I fantasize myself as a folk singer. The performance is programmed to show customers different singing styles, choreography, and fashions from all regions of Tibet, namely, Lhasa area, Kham, and Amdo. There was a bi-lingual announcer on the stage who informed audience of the regional variations of Tibetan singing and dancing. Like previous times, my impression of Makyi Ama is colorful, expressive, and loud singing and dancing. This is what I see from Makyi Ama, as a window of Tibetan culture in Beijing.

Last semester I directed my students to make a video project on how tourists consume ethnic sites in Yunnan province. What we experience is similar to elsewhere in China – ethnic cultures are being turned into a type of commodity for consumption. I didn’t mean to kill the fun at Makyi Ama. Honestly, this type of fun is a one-time occasion. It does not sustain itself for the second time when you go. Tibet has a dichotomized public image in China. On one hand, its tradition, or what is referred to as “Old Tibet,” is portrayed by the Chinese state as a most barbarous society because of its feudalist system known as “serfdom;” thus, it “deserved” abolishment via revolution and reform. On the other hand, in the tourist industry of contemporary China, Tibet is being advertised as a place closest to the heavens. Images of Tibet as Shangri-la are well employed in Chinese tourist industry. So, Tibetans, somewhat resembling the image outsiders hold of Native Americans, are seen as “noble savages” – they have tantric Buddhism but they also carry swords and daggers wandering the highlands with their yaks and sheep.

This split image of Tibetans prevents non-Tibetans, especially in China, from seeing the humanness that is common to all of us, i.e. personal emotions, kindred relations, and the individualities of the young and old. At Makyi Ama, customers are physically close to the Tibetan waiters and waitresses, and the performers; however, they’re more than an ocean apart from each other. The sharp cleavage between tradition and modernity, and backwardness and progress is fully displayed at Makyi Ama. The divide between those on the stage and those off the stage making merry with their food and Tibetan performance, sets Tibetans apart from non-Tibetans, as if Tibetans were the presence of the past – a museum piece. Their colorfulness and expressiveness are to be looked upon but are too distant to be embraced.

I’m not saying that non-Tibetan consumers of Tibetan culture are the culprits who cornered Tibetans into this museum-like display. In many instances, they did, but Tibetans with resources, like anyone else, also take opportunities to make a better living in this age of economic globalization. In the meantime, Tibetans in China mostly rely on the means of the market economy to exercise their collective self-representation. For so long, Tibetan culture has been portrayed, in China, as the “darkest” social system on earth. So, why can’t Tibetans take opportunities to show the festive and glorious sides of their ancient civilization? Like anyone else in China, they also desire to be loved and cared for instead of being shunned because of their past. But, commercial channels are too narrow to let the river of Tibetan civilization display itself.

I haven’t been to all parts of Tibet. My association with Tibet is mostly with farmers and nomads in eastern Tibet, currently southern Gansu, western Sichuan, and most parts of Qinghai provinces. In these regions, I have never experienced the same luxurious gourmet that we find at Makyi Ama, but I have stayed with Tibetan families with integrity and dignity, who are not always in colorful and expensive outfits. I feel I’m experiencing multiple culture shocks in Beijing – the disparity between performed Tibet and lived Tibet, between the current China and the China I grew up with, and between the prescribed human destiny of modern progress and my own imagined utopia where differences give us stronger bonding and distances bring us kindred spirit.

assorted pictures

A random sampling of pictures we've taken over
the last month... scroll over each photo for a caption.

on not always telling the truth

I'd been collecting anecdotes about the changes in Beijing as the Olympics draw nearer. Some of the things I'd noticed or had heard were positive, others not quite so.

I wrote it up with the intention of posting it but I changed my mind. I don't know if it's because I'm simply predisposed, as an American, to be critical of Chinese policies, or if it's just my own personal tendency, but I realized that it might be an interesting exercise to consider being in China as though I were engaged in a relationship.

Truly I'm here by the grace of the Chinese government. It was a huge bureaucratic hassle to get my residency paperwork, but I got it - I'm approved and certified. So why would I need to be so quick to point out faults?

It's not necessary to always draw attention to the negative qualities one finds in others. It's enough that I've noticed them, at this point, and while I may share them eventually, I think it's prudent to try to go deeper first, to try and see the intentions behind what I'm quick to criticize.

...I just wanted to say that.

retraction

Well, I'm going to go ahead and negate my assumption from the other day - I was fiddling with my various proxy-server settings and found that one of them in particular always leads me away from any Blogger blog and toward that spam site I'd mentioned. I can access any Blogger blog just fine when I don't use that proxy option. When I'm running completely openly over my DSL connection I have no problem accessing the blog.

So, though it made a nice story, and certainly seemed to be true at the time, I guess there's actually nothing really limiting what we're doing on the internet at this point.

So, no need to point fingers....

Pilgrimage to Mt. Sedzong

I feel elated each time I return from a pilgrimage trip, including this time, regardless of my bus crash. As a matter of fact, I’m recovering very quickly. I was told by a doctor that it would take a month to recover. It has been slightly over a week and an half but my routine has been resumed, i.e. going to work, researching, and writing. Pilgrimage in general gives me a sense of rebirth, transformation of my consciousness in terms of my existential and spiritual positions in this world. The world goes on as it is with events of both happiness and sadness. The transcendental nature of pilgrimage elevates my consciousness from multi-dualities of our worldly mode of being. I feel restored, recovered, and renewed upon returning from my recent pilgrimage trip to Mt. Sedzong, a sacred site where Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava, founder of Tibetan Buddhism) had solitary meditation in a cave.

This time, my pilgrimage was not only a trip expressing my homage to the teachings and practices of a Buddhist saint. I was also connecting the sublime physical environment of Mt. Sedzong with human ecology. For this coming fall, I plan on making a visual documentary with my students on the relationship between Tibetan traditional wisdom and ecological health. Mt. Sedzong is an ideal site. Unlike Mt. Ani Machin, Mt. Gang Rinpoche and other sacred sites that require many days to complete a circumambulation, Mt. Sedzong is compact enough for my students to explore its natural beauty and caves of historical and spiritual significance in three days. It is also fairly close to the county seat of Xinghai, about an hour bus ride. Most importantly, there is a monastery on the south side of the mountain. It’ll be our base and a site for our students to have conversations with monks who know the history and folklore of Mt. Sedzong.

The rock formation at Mt. Sedzong is one of a kind in the region. It stands out among the expansive rolling mountains covered with lush grass in the summer. If a Chinese Fengshui man or an Australian aboriginal Dreamer happened to be at Mt. Sedzong, I am sure he would identify it as a celestial place or as a place where many songlines (passages of dreams) converge. This was how I felt when I was there: Buddhist practice in Tibet isn’t a lone business; on the contrary, when a lone practitioner takes residence in a cave, he or she immediately plugs into multi-interplay with other species and with both earthly and cosmological energy-fields. Enlightenment comes from within, but I wonder how much our inner landscape is nourished by sublime natural environments like Mt. Sedzong. In turn, from the perspective of human ecology, we also consecrate the landscape of our spiritual/religious choice. In the context of Tibetan Buddhism, the consecration is done in Buddhist terms.

The circumambulation of Mt. Sedzong goes clockwise. Direction-wise, it starts from the south toward the west, turns to the north, and return from the east to the south. The west side is uphill, a gradual slope leading up to a long ridge, resembling a long spine of a dinosaur, which separates the south and the north sides of the mountain. A long stretch of prayer flags were hung over the ridge. It was a spectacular scene. I began to see how humans are capable of sanctifying parts of the earth with spiritual orientations; thus, they’re immune from our utilitarian activities.

While I was standing along the ridge taking a photo of it, my Tibetan student cautioned me not to stand right on the spine of the mountain too long because I could faint. He grew up in the area and told me a few cases of local residents who had fainted on the ridge. He shared his folk education with me that mountain ridges are the intersections where deities, spirits, and ghosts frequently pass. They are the places where the living need to stay low and be respectful toward lives and things that are not visible to our eyes. In fact, I was feeling slightly light headed; perhaps, I was intoxicated with the congregations of the assorted invisible beings.

I felt much affinity with the north and the east sides. When I reached to the north side, it was around 5:30pm. The sun was tilting toward the west, shining on the north side of the mountain. Everything, i.e. rocks, grass and yaks, looked surreally uplifting. A nomad boy was singing on a rock while overseeing the herd of his family’s yaks. I caught a few verses of his song – “The sun is dropping to my height…my ama (mother) is beckoning me home…” I waved at him. He joined us for our walk on the north side. It was a long stretched slope with green grass on the foot of the mountain.

One tree decorated with layers of prayer flags caught my attention. It must be the “karmic scale” that I had read about prior to the pilgrimage. It’s a tall pine tree. Its uniqueness isn’t the prayer flags left on it by pilgrims. Of course, they certainly mark it as a special site. It is known as the “karmic scale” because a pilgrim can actually “weigh” how heavy his or her karmic retributions from wrong doings of past and present. The side of the tree facing Mt. Sedzong has a short, sturdy branch sticking out. One may lift oneself up by hanging onto it. The nomad boy demonstrated the weighing process. He was utterly serious about it. The weight of one’s karmic retribution is determined by whether or not one can see the “karmic mirror,” which is a large, round hole in one of the large rocks on the top of Mt. Sedzong. If one can see it, the weight is light. If not, the weight is heavy, unfortunately. This means one has much purification work to do.

We bid goodbye to the nomad boy when we turned to the east side of Mt. Sedzong. The caves on the east side gave me goosebumps and a warmth went up my spine. Entereing the cave where Guru Rinpoche had his solitary practice was revisting a history of Tibetan Buddhism. The precipice in the cave is smooth, having been worn by the hands of countless pilgrims. A sense of blessing and empowerment rose from within.

Besides Guru Rinpoche's cave, there are many other caves on the east side of Mt. Sedzong. Numerous monks, yogis, and yoginis followed the footsteps of Guru Rinpoche by taking residence in caves. These historical sites are marked with prayer flags and kadhas (honorific scarves).

These caves aren't quite historical in the conventional sense, as if they were only the relics of the Tibetan Buddhist past. There are current residents who have found new caves or have built cabins for their solitary practices. My yogi friend and I met four persons who currently live in cabins next to Guru Rinpoche's cave. One is a nun, one man is a cook for the other residents, and there is also a woman and her niece. The aunt has lived in her cabin for fifteen years. She hasn't left Mt. Sedzong since she arrived in 1997. She is the primary caretaker of Guru Rinpoche's cave, offering daily incense and water and cleaning the dust brought by the wind. Her niece joins her in the summer, before the family wheat wheat harvest. I took the aunt's long-term presence at Mt. Sedzong as a form of consecration and guardianship of the sacred.

The focal point of the sacredness is a Buddhist saint; however, what is consecrated has become a refuge for everyone who happens to reside here (besides the mountain itself). I particularly want to mention wild goats who freely roam the mountains. They walk fairly close to humans but keep enough distance to leap away. They resemble northern California's wild deer - brown, small and agile.

I feel very fortunate that I have a panoramic camera. For the last three years, I have got myself fixated on panoramic views of both interior and landscape photography. I considered being a freelance photographer, but it does not support our living. There’re tons of photos of sunsets, mountains, flowers, animals, that could be downloaded from the internet. I don’t know how attentive people are about landscapes and sacred sites. But I do believe awe-inspiring and sublime state of being is collectively felt.

bus crash

Living and dying are both dream states. It is a matter of one's consciousness shifting from one dream state to another. When the bus began to flip, I felt I was dying. When I woke up from the violent commotions, I could not remember my past as if I had entered a total new dimension into which I was just reborn. About sixty seconds (or longer) later, my memory of this life time returned...

Last week I was out of town in order to do some preliminary preparations for my students' fall travels. The day before I was to come home, I was going to make my way to the capital of the province so the next day's flight would be easy to catch.

The morning was kind of drizzly and grey, kind of cool. I set out after breakfast, waiting on the roadside with my friend. The first bus came but we saw some other people we knew approaching us, so we waited for the next bus, about 20 minutes later, and they got on with our help to load their backpacks. We saw them off and a few minutes later my bus came. My friend who was sending me off knew the driver as they were from the same village.

I got on the bus and decided to sit in the back since it was empty. I set my backpack against the window and wanted to take a nap. I didn't sleep, though, just enjoyed the scenery. A little while later the driver's relative who was collecting fares came to me so I paid my 15 or 16 Yuan. The ride was pleasant, the rain making it a kind of lazy day, quiet. We went up, crossing the big mountain pass on the way to the city. We came to a deserted gas station and there were the two travelers we'd seen off. They boarded and sat down about two seats in front of me, but they didn't see me. Oddly, they didn't have their luggage.

Shortly afterward, two monks sat down in the seat next to me - an older monk and a younger one with some vision problems. The bus got quiet again, after everyone purchased their tickets. The rain got heavier as we climbed the mountain. Eventually we came upon a junction and the two travelers I was acquainted with got off to wait for another bus that would take them toward their destination. The monks got off as well. I still wondered where their bags were. My guess is that they'd decided to get off their original bus which was standing room only, and waited for another that would take them to the next little town where they could pick up their bags which the other bus would drop off.

Next our bus descended the winding road toward the city. I noticed very nice, poetic, misty mountains and I thought of taking some pictures but my window couldn't be opened so I put my camera back. A man in his 60s was busy taking pictures with his digital camera though. I thought he might be a pretty good photographer by what I could tell caught his eye.

We had almost reached the lowlands and there were probably 15 or 20 passengers. There was a family with a child. The mother was indifferent to everything except the baby, and a grandmother was holding her grandchild. I also noticed a good looking young woman in shorts and T-shirt. She sat next to a window and fell asleep. There were also a couple of old ladies, some of whom looked kind of familiar as I've been to this region before.

I can't say I was falling asleep, but all the sudden the head of the bus went up and a lady started yelling, "Hey! The bus driver is drunk!" and before she could even finish the last word the bus started rolling over. I don't remember what happened next but my consciousness was very active - I sensed danger and felt death was coming. I thought I was going to die in a very tragic way and I was praying for at least a good rebirth. Then I thought of my life insurance. Then there were no other thoughts.

I assumed I died. There was a big long silence and then my eyes started opening. I was upright in my seat. Oh. I saw blood on my pant legs. I touched my head - oh, sticky with blood. It was a different world, I didn't really comprehend it. I thought, "How come I came to this world?" and "Why would I be reborn here, with lots of blood?" Then my ears started working again and there were people moaning and yelling - the young pretty young woman obviously had internal injuries and I felt like we were in a war zone or a movie setting. My consciousness was processing this, trying to figure it out.

I looked around, oh gosh the bus was basically destroyed: the windows were shattered with shards and hanging rubber gaskets. Passengers were unconscious. I looked out the window and the visibility wasn't very good, so I was thinking, "where is this place?" Oh, yes, I recalled a traffic accident and I remembered the moment the bus started flipping. I looked beside me and couldn't see my friend, I was afraid he'd been tossed out the window, so I tried to lift myself up and I couldn't, I looked out the window, left, no; right, no. I made myself calm down and tried to remember.... deep breath....I focused on my friend..."Ok! He didn't come with me!" What a relief! So I started to pull myself together, what day is this? where's my phone? So I found my phone in my pocket. I checked to make sure all my joints moved, found I'd lost my shoes and my glasses. I saw my glasses down on the floor, under a seat so I reached down and grabbed them - minor damage, the lenses were ok, so I put them on and got a good look.

I called home, kind of happy actually, that I'd survived - really almost heroic to be sitting upright and relatively ok. Later, Wendy said that in my phone call I said, "I'm sorry, I just had a traffic accident." She tried to figure out if I'd been personally hit by a car or what, so I told her I'd been in a bus accident but I was kind of vague I guess because she thought maybe my bus had been hit by another car.

At this point some passengers had already been taken out of the bus by passengers of another bus who happened on the scene (forget anything like ambulance service in these remote locations), so I told Wendy we were going to the hospital. I also called my assistant in Beijing because he could find somebody in the city to come and help me out.

Then I saw the fare collector and I started hollering, "Hey! I need my shoes!" He found one, but my temper was pretty short and I yelled, "I need both my shoes!" He said, "Look around, everybody's hurt!" "Except you!" I said, "I need my shoes, they're so good!" So he found a square rug and said, "let's wrap your foot up in this."

Later, I asked him how come he looked just fine while everyone else was hurt. He said that at first the bus tipped and everyone got scared and then it rolled and within that first roll, the doors flew open and he was flung out of the bus. So he saw the second revolution, watching it, and it was the second roll that destroyed the bus.

By now another bus had arrived and I found it so painful to stand up. I thought maybe I'd broken some ribs. The first bus had taken the more seriously injured passengers and I got on the second bus - very painful and I started feeling weak. Other victims were there too, including one older woman who started out very spirited but declined visibly as we drove on. The photographer was unconscious. I only saw the boy with his grandmother, he was crying and his grandmother's ear was torn.

I called my assistant and Wendy and then I called my friend who thankfully hadn't been on the bus with me. He immediately went to wait for the next bus so he could meet me at the hospital.

The bus driver dropped me off at the front gate of the hospital. Other passengers had relatives or friends waiting for them there, but I just stepped off the bus and didn't know what to do. So the bus took off and I stood there until a short, young woman walked by, very modern looking. She looked at me, paused. I looked at her, paused. She said, "Hey how come you're here?" and I remembered her and said, "Hey, how come you're here?" It turned out that she's a singer I'd met before in Beijing. Then she said, "Oh I know why you're here, look at yourself, you're a mess. My father was on the same bus. Hang on I'm going to get someone to help you." I don't remember who came to get me, but then the next thing I knew I was in the emergency room and someone was calling a doctor to see me. They checked for internal injuries, saw my head wound and did a CAT scan. I was on the phone with Wendy when they started to stitch up the gash on the top of my head (she said she could hear the crying child in the background). Then to X-Ray to check my ribs (not broken).

At this point people started showing up, a grad student from my university, my assistant's dad (who had driven an hour and half to come make sure I was ok). So then I just waited in the lobby while patients with internal injuries were treated. I chatted with the singer and her mother. They suggested I stay in the hospital for observation, which was a good idea and perfectly acceptable in Chinese hospitals (unlike in the U.S. where they send you home as soon as possible). By the time I was given a room I was so hungry which was a good sign!

My assessment, after some reflection, is that I was really fortunate due to the fact that my backpack protected me from broken glass. I could have been cut badly, but the backpack cushioned my impact. I had a few small pieces of glass in my clothes which fell out at the hospital, but nothing serious. Also, my REI fleece hat protected my head. I ended up with three stitches, but it could have been much worse. I was also lucky I hadn't fallen asleep because I was able to react quickly enough to hold on tightly as the bus flipped. That's why I wrenched my waist muscles, but at least I didn't get thrown around.

I didn't know for sure that we rolled twice until later, after my friend came to meet me in the hospital. His bus, on the way into the city, actually stopped and the bus driver let everyone off to inspect the crash site. There were some witnesses who had seen it and he even told me the bus was totalled. The fact that it tipped up first, then rolled, meant that my end of the bus stayed on the ground and it was the rear end that was the fulcrum or the hub of all the rolling, so my radius was small and other people's radius was huge.

It was definitely an awakening experience, awakening from living to dying, and from dying to living. Life becomes ever more precious after the bus crash.

first of all, he's fine

I've not posted as frequently this week due to recent events that've kept me busy, but stay tuned for the next episode when Dan tells the story of last Sunday's dramatic bus crash... just so you know, he's fine - some stitches, some bruises, some very sore muscles, but thankfully no worse than that.

well, that was strange....

I've issued a retraction of the below assessment, here.


****

For the last four days or so I was unable to view the home page of the blog - I could log in to blogger and post (that's how the two before this made it in), but any time I tried to view it, in its own page or not, I was redirected to some spam blog.

I did a little asking around and I found that there wasn't a problem on the U.S. side. Yesterday morning I checked again and was able to get to it, so I didn't have a chance to see if it was just a problem from my ISP or if other computers/ISP avenues here were also having issues.

My assessment: the Tiananmen post by Devin flagged our blog and blogger was blocked (for me) internally for the few days it took for them to recognize that it was innocuous. The fact that I was able to access the blogger main site but not blogger blogs seemed to indicate that this was the case.

This kind of thing makes me feel like putting keywords in every post so they have to manually go through and verify everything. Maybe I'll try to improve the entertainment value of this blog so that even the internet censors have something fun to do every day. You know, if they're going to be that uptight, let's make it enjoyable for everybody! I don't mind that I couldn't see the blog (since I had other options), it verified the existence of that realm we already knew about but couldn't prove. Well, I guess I still can't prove it, but as they say, "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT out to get you!"

coal stoves

The other day I mentioned coal-burning stoves and this morning I took pictures of this one - it's used by the folks who run a little breakfast shop out of one of the restaurants down the street from our apartment. The restaurant is owned by other people who run it for lunch and dinner, while the breakfast crew brings in all their things early in the morning and is out by about nine. These stoves are settled in the back of this flatbed bicycle.




Sometimes when we walk by they're still radiating heat. At some point I'll see if I can get a picture while they're fired up. You can see the coal "rounds" at the bottom of each channel, here. This one fits four rounds - I've seen them family sized where they only fit one round, too.

A funny thing happened on my way to the blog this morning...

Oddly, a direct-click on my own link leads to some strange spamming blog. Is it just me or is this happening to everyone else too? If so, I guess I won't be able to find out here because you'll be unable to even read this post!

Ok, off to do some sleuthing.

three bridges

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Top: Beijing canal 7/2008
Middle: 2002
Bottom: 1991

in case you were wondering where we are

Here's the trusty map of China, this time with Beijing highlighted in dark teal up toward the northeast....

and this links to the page with the map showing where Hangzhou is.

scenes from a taxi

Girls Go to Jupiter

Many of you are already familiar with sisters Iluma and Lunani, and their cousin Seawee, who have all sorts of adventures. This is one adventure you've probably never heard before, though!
______________

One day, just as Lunani, Seawee, and Iluma were getting dressed, their dad called them down and told them that some people were boarding on the first space shuttle to go to Jupiter to find out if it has a lot or a little bit of gravity. Everyone assumed it had no gravity at all. Iluma, Seawee and Lunani said that they would be back and so they ran all the way to where the space shuttle was going to take off. Right as the people on the space shuttle were about to take off, the three girls asked if they could board. The captain said yes and they boarded.

They went higher and higher and higher until they were just about to get over the asteroid belt but suddenly they landed on the wrong planet. After that they had to go back. After they had gotten back, Lunani, Seawee and Iluma went to their secret clubhouse and they planned out that they would build their own space ship and take off.
After they had taken off, their parents noticed that all the food was gone. And of course they noticed that the girls were gone, too.

They took off through the kitchen, making a huge hole in the ceiling. After they had gone past many planets, they had to go through the asteroid belt. As they went through it they were hit by rocks and other things. Eventually they passed through and got to Jupiter. There they landed.

As the girls tried to get out of their space ship, they couldn't stand, they were stuck to the floor.

They noticed that there was so much gravity that no one could even stand up. They used super magnets so they could stand up. After they got out of the spaceship they thought, "well, our parents will worry since it took 6 months to get here, and we've eaten half the supply of food, so we'd better go back."

Since it was rather cold there they had to use sun-heated beds. After two days of being there, they got back into their space ship but it wouldn't start because it had broken and they didn't know what to do so they decided they'd find other things to build. They found some old asteroids and some stuff like that. So after they built their space ship they went back home and it took three months because they had made it super-speed fast.

When they got home it was their birthday and they had a happy birthday.

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posted by Merlin

Tiananmen visit

Tian An Men Square

天安门广场

On July 7^th, 2008 at 9:30 A.M. my family, a friend, and I went to Tian An Men Square, the largest public square in the world. It is 440,000 m² and can hold 1 million people.

The layout of this square is very simple, the South side of the square has Mao Zedong’s Memorial Hall ( it holds the embalmed body of Chairman Mao, it was completed in 1977), on the North end of Tian An Men Square is the Forbidden City it was a large fortress once, but now it is a big tourist attraction. It was completed in 1417 during the Ming Dynasty. The West end of the square holds the Great Hall of People or the Peoples Congress (it was completed in 1959), on the East side is the History Museum it opened in 1961 ( right now it is under rennovation). South of the Memorial Hall is the First Gate that used to be the entrance for a no longer existing wall that surrounded the city. It was built from 1402-24, and in the center of the Tian An Men Square is the Memorial for Soldiers ( built either in 1954 or 1958, this information is not clear).

Even if this layout is simple there are almost too many interesting things to see.

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posted by Devin