Picture of the Week

Horse: It's whats for dinner.

When monkeys attack

In the grand tradition of inappropriate hiking footwear, here are the glorified ballet slippers (yes, those would be ice crampons tied on with string) that I wore to climb the snow-covered mountain.

But both I and Carolyn of the volcano-hiking flipflops were put to serious shame by the Chinese women, who strapped the crampons onto the bottom of their bedazzled leather knee-high stiletto boots, and marched up the damn mountain.

Accompanied by a slightly grumpy German from the Chengdu hostel, I spent two days hiking Emei Shan, one of China's four ancient Buddhist peaks, a misty mountain covered with bamboo, tea plantations and monasteries. We spent a surreal night in a tiny freezing room in the amazing Qingying monastery perched on a riverside cliff and dripping in so much verdant green it felt almost lewd to my plateau parched eyes, then broached the icy peak. Vendors along the path tried to sell us food to feed the famed mountain monkeys, and then tried to sell us sticks to stave off monkey attacks -- which turned out not to be a joke, as I ended up wrestling with not one but two of the adorably malicious little apes who leapt from the trees and tried to abscond with my bag while the slightly grumpy German was rendered useless with laughter.

Near the top, we tried to decide whether to pay the extra money to take a cable car all the way up. It was cold and snowy, and the slightly grumpy German felt the views promised to be the same white walls of fog you could see down at the bottom for free. Finally I went on by myself, because why the hell not ... and in the last few seconds of the cable car ride, burst through the walls of white onto an absolutely sunny summit topped with a giant golden Buddha statue and surrounded, island-like, by a sea of clouds.

There might be a life lesson in there somewhere, but I hope not. I hate it when perfectly good hiking trips are ruined by life lessons.

Crumbling clay men, lazy pandas and other wonders of China

Train travel in China is not for the claustrophobic, or sticklers for 'personal space,' or anybody who can't find the soothing lullaby in the sounds of 20-30 old men in apparently severe respiratory distress.

Myself -- armed with a pair of earplugs, an iPod and a jar of peanut butter (brilliant idea, Beth) to stave off the always ill-advised late-night impulse to buy train noodles -- I am a master of China train travel.

A few days ago I left Xi'An, which is perhaps most famous for those warriors (which are fine, I guess, if you go in for miles and miles of ancient crumbling statues. Which, OK, I kind if did), but will always remain most memorable for me because of its pancakes. Yay pancakes.

Chengdu has not been the sunny, 50-degree paradise that Weather.com promised, but it has its charms. It's got that misty narrow alleys of ornate wooden buildings thing going on. And there are pandas. Which I haven't seen yet because Carolyn pretty much ruined it for me by pointing out that any animal that has got itself on the endangered list by virtue of being simply too lazy to procreate perhaps deserves extinction. (There may be other factors, but who wants to risk the wrath of China by googling it?) Also, if we're being honest, I may be putting off the panda experience because the little beasts are apparently active for all of one short hour early in the morning, so any panda-viewing trip starts long before what I consider an appropriate time to be out of bed whilst on vacation.

Next on the list: Wandering some nearby sacred mountains inhabited by marauding monkeys while pondering the meaning of life ... and whether or not I have the fortitude (or lack of rational decision-making skills) to stick around for another year.

I am one of those travellers

I'm not usually one of those travelers who likes to hop from oasis to oasis of Western comforts and then congratulate myself for my intrepid foreign adventuring. I hate group tours and people who think the solution to the language barrier is to raise their voice and continue speaking in English.

And then, after a surprisingly uneventful 14-hour train ride in a coffin-like bunk, I arrived in Xi'An, home of the Terracotta Warriors. And it turns out, I am a whore for Western comforts!

It started with the taxi ride to my hostel: The driver knew a few words of English, which he happily shouted out as they occurred to him, and we had a lovely conversation on the narrow spit of land where our languages overlapped. ("America!" he said. "Meiguo," I agreed. "Obama!" "Absolutely! Obama!" Then he said, in Chinese, that speaking English makes him very happy. And I said, in English, "Me, too!")

And then the hostel. An English-speaking staff! I swear I got a little teary-eyed. I had coffee and pancakes while I waited for my room. Pancakes are the food of gods, I tell you. Then I wandered the city, and wonder of wonders, nobody stared at me as if I was a little green emissary from another planet. Well, almost nobody. And the place is fairly crawling with other Westerners, which is hugely odd, since I'm used to being the only white girl around, so it's a shock to the system to actually understand the conversations around me. (Actually, that's a pleasure that's starting to pall quickly, starting with breakfast this morning where an American "like ohmigod" kind of girl at the next table held forth for an interminable half-hour on how espresso isn't coffee. I think I was starting to forget how much most people annoy the hell out of me. But I digress.)

In any case, I am happily embarked on my winter break: Two weeks on the road to our VIA conference on an island on the other side of China, then off to Indonesia to visit Carolyn, Thailand and Cambodia to see Molly, Charlsea, et al. I'm not even going to think of snow, Xining and six layers of clothes just to run to the corner store until March!

A motto to remember: Don't be evil

To Google and Obama: It's about time.

Sure, the Great Firewall is going to fall like a ton of bricks on everything Google-related (including my email and this blog; thank God for illegal proxies), but for a company whose mission statement is "Don't be evil," this has been a long time coming.

As a NYTimes columnist says:

It has been dispiriting to see America’s banks apparently stand for nothing more lofty than plunder. It has been demoralizing to see President Obama hiding from the Dalai Lama rather than offend China’s rulers.

So all that makes Google’s decision to stand up to Chinese cyberoppression positively breathtaking.

Speaking of Obama and the DL, it seems he's finally getting around to meeting up with His Holiness. Which is nice, if somewhat belated. I recently spent a good half hour at a banquet with some Tibetan students and professors, attempting to explain to an extremely skeptical audience why my global rockstar of a president declines to meet with one of the world's most important spiritual and (let's be honest) political leaders. (I am basically Pres. Obama's unofficial spokesperson in Xining. People ask me questions about his innermost thoughts and motivations as if I have a standing Skype date with the man every night before bed.)

He's very busy, I said. Lots going on. Wars and fiscal crises and all. They were unmoved. Finally I shrugged. China is very powerful, I said. He will. I promise.

So thanks for not making a liar out of me, pres.

2010: Year of the Tiger (a few resolutions)

I know it's customary to make New Year's resolutions for yourself, but as I sit here still hungover from New Year's Eve (yes, two days ago), what really comes to mind (inspired by Beth) is a list of resolutions that China might want to embrace in the coming year:

• Stop executing the dissidents, the mentally unstable and the merely annoying. (Those people responsible for the melamine in the milk, OK. I'll give you them.) I suppose it's too much to ask to quit jailing anyone who utters the word "democracy."
  

• This horrifying creature, with the extremely unapt moniker "Pleasant Sheep," needs to be put out to cartoon pasture. Those drug-addled eyes and creepy grin adorn everything from shoes to split pants to notebooks, and haunt my dreams at night.
  

• Sanitation: This is actually an umbrella heading for a whole lotta resolutions. Don't use the sidewalks as a bathroom. The spring thaw is coming eventually, folks, and that means a whole winter's worth of frozen excrement hits the airwaves at once. Great, hocking puddles of mucus are about as much fun to see as they are to step in. Also, consider cooking your meat thoroughly. Particularly if you've been using the cold Qinghai winter as a substitute for a real refrigeration system.

• The Internet: Just give in, already. Stop pretending that you care whether porn or pirated movies reach your huddled masses. If it makes you feel any better, open access to Twitter and Facebook has not jumpstarted the revolution in the U.S. If anything, it offers an inane alternative to meaningful interaction, which could be very useful in quelling unrest. Learn to love it.

• Squat toilets are loathesome. They aren't convenient, as anyone who has tried to balance on your heels without touching anything with your hands while holding the hems of your pants out of the worst of the filth and desperately scrounging your pockets for a forgotten scrap of tissue will attest, and they certainly aren't sanitary. Let's jump on this "Western-style" toilet trend - even if it requires posting many more explanatory signs like this. It's worth it.

• Practice a little tolerance. Yes, it would be great if you stopped persecuting the Tibetans and Hui, and reconsidered the blistering racist attacks against mixed-race children who have the gall to perform in "Idol"-ish TV contests. But if you want to start small, you could stop staring at that American girl walking down the street, and maybe not mutter " 外国人" (foreigner) every time you see her.

• This may be getting a little picky, but as long as we're dreaming ... Couldn't we all just use the alphabet? Just a thought. Something to consider. You can get back to me on that one, China.

Until then: 新年快乐

xīn nián kuài lè

(Add this to the dancing Mao and my recent accidental declaration of support for His Holiness the D.L., and frankly China will be falling down on its duties if it doesn't have me arrested soon.)