So there are two circumstances that must obtain before I get up the energy to post to the blog:

1. Boredom
2. An elevated sense of well-being

Funnily these things seldom coincide. My sense of well-being plunges with boredom. (This is why I don’t care for TV. It drains my energy yet does not relax me.) OTOH I am seldom bored in China. Daily life is still too interesting. And by “interesting” I mean “maddeningly frustrating.”

I’m writing this now because I can. The week between Christmas and New Year was a toxic combination of boredom and deflated ego. I felt completely defeated by China. I couldn’t stop looking backward at Oregon and America, and every daily interaction utterly enervated me. When I discovered axoplasm.com was on the blacklist that was pretty much the right hook that KO’d me.

I remember waking up early sometime around at that point, after a fitful night of poor sleep. I trussed up Bismarck for his morning walk and stepped out into the icy cold filthy dry pitch black morning. We made it about three blocks and I had one of the lowest feeling I’d had since we arrived. I don’t know why. Bismarck kept sniffing around the park, unable to eliminate because his timing was off. Something in me snapped, and I didn’t feel human. I can’t explain the feeling any more than that, I can’t find human words to describe the sensation.

The closest approximate feeling I’ve experienced was this one time when I was camping and high as a kite on psilocybin...I crawled out from under a bush, filthy with mud, and saw the Milky Way sprayed across a night sky aglow with stars. I had an indescribable sensation that I wasn’t lying on my back looking up but standing with my back to a wall looking out. Everything about my life as a human being felt hollow and false: why would an animal wear clothes, use tools, ride around in a car, sleep under a roof? I mean this all in a mind-expanding Kerouackian Buddhist kind of way.

Well about two weeks ago I had the same sensation, stone cold sober, but in reverse. The pollution, the unheated apartment, the shitty job, the allergies that just won’t quit already, the profound isolation from all the people and places I love, it all conspired to make me feel, I dunno, not human. OK here’s the profound revelation: human beings are tied to places. You are where you come from.

My soul is always a big empty place with clean skies and clear water you can drink with your bare hands. I will always be the smell of fresh cut grass and black earth and rain on pavement. China won’t beat that out of me, and I won’t ever shed it. I can’t shed where I come from like dead skin. I will always be the English language, shovelling snow, ice cold milk, barking dogs, beer with friends, baseball on the radio, freight trains in the distance. That stuff is who I am, sure as I’m five-foot-six.

Last night (Michelle’s final night in China) we went to Riyuegu hot springs, a shwanky resort in Xiamen’s outer suburbs. They have a bazillion little hot tubs, most of which are infused with some kind of botanical: tea, ginger, coconut, etc. ALso beer hot tubs, wine hot tubs, coffee hot tubs. This is not as fantastic as it sounds. Like all red-blooded American men, I have long fantasized about a hot tub full of beer, but the actual beer-to-hot water ratio was pretty low.

They did, however, have a spring full of teeny tiny fish. Some kind of cichlid, perhaps. You lower yourself into the pool and fish (slowly) swarm you and suck at your skin with their teeny tiny sucker mouths. No, they don’t have teeth. It was incredibly tickly. The theory is they’re eating dead skin but I think it was more likely they were just eating dirt. They loved my feet.

Jenny got a massage that left her in physical pain. I don’t like massages to begin with (and thus declined to get one), but this was the third such experience I’ve heard of in China. Here’s Paul’s travel advice for China:

1. Don’t get a massage. There’s a reason it’s cheap.

Afterward we ate a late supper at the House, a shishi Western restaurant. We were seated in a small room next to a table with a couple of guys speaking German. I realized that I can understand spoken Mandarin better than spoken German. I studied German for six years and majored in it in college. I can still read good German. But there’s nothing like living in a language for learning to speak it.

For Michelle’s pen-penultimate day in Xiamen, we had a big ol’ Chinese-o-rama. Jenny was “sick” and stayed home with Michelle, they visited the big local temple and had lunch with the monks, which was apparently a really great experience. Michelle had a signature chop carved for her boyfriend, Otto. It read 奥特 (Aote, the e is pronounced like “uh”), which is kind of meaningless. That first character 奥 appears in a lot of foreign words, like Oreo, Australia, and Aomen (Macau). It has a vague meaning kind of like “mystery”. 特 means “special”. This is the problem with foreign words in Chinese: Chinese people don’t regard them as meaning anything, but you can look up the characters in a dictionary and give yourself a pretend meaning. Like “Mystery Special.” My name is 保罗 (Baoluo), which we can pretend means “Defend Talkative.”

That night we ate at what is fast becoming my second-favorite restaurant in town, Revolution. On the one hand, they serve pretty straightforward “Northeast” style food, which is close to “Chinese” food in the U.S. But Revolution is done up in Maoist kitsch. The staff are all twentysomething kids who wear Mao hats and shoulder bags and shout slogans about comadreship. The place is decorated with old Communist propaganda, and they play stirring anthems. It is insanely popular. They have five branches in town and they are always packed. I think Maoist nostalgia is like 50s nostalgia in North America. So Revolution is Xiamen’s version of Jack Rabbit Slim’s.

After that we stopped at a ceramics gallery Jenny and I noticed some while ago, to buy some you-wouldn’t-believe-how-inexpensive decorations for the apartment. Of course, you can’t just buy some ceramics and walk out...please, sit, have some tea. Sit here, at the antique millstone we’ve remade into a tea table. The tea is pu er cha, fancy black tea from Yunnan. Hard to get in Xiamen. It will take at least half an hour to drink, because the first three flushes are no good. That’s why we pour them onto the table. And the next three flushes are still not that good, but you can drink it anyway. And where do you live? Do you come from America? Do you have children? What are your jobs? Do you like it here? Where is your sister from? Does she have children? What is her job? Have you met my daughter? She’s five years old. Isn’t she cute?

This also happens when we go to the vet’s office.

We spent a few days last week in Hong Kong. HK is, without a doubt, the most vibrant , happening city I’ve ever visited. It’s certainly a “world city,” in the mode of Paris, London, LA or New York. Paris and London, by contrast, feel like museums. Berlin has some of HK’s vitality, but feels a little provincial. Los Angeles expresses a similar scale, but spreads it so thin that all the benefits of Bigness became diluted by the heroic task of simply getting around. I’ve never been to New York, maybe HK is like NY?

For all that HK is the densest city on Earth, it remains a surprisingly comprehensible city. All its life happens at street level, within human frames of reference, in the shadow of its cyclopean architecture. It reminded me of San Francisco’s Chinatown, but on the scale of an entire city. And for all its oppressive density, HK abuts uninhabited space: the forests of HK Island, its long white beaches, the open water crossing from Kowloon to Central. Geography conspires to strip suburbs from HK, and the product is (to my mind) the best of all worlds: rurality and urbanity along a literal border. You can go to the edge of the city and look at a wall of green.

Anyway, what we did:

• Shopping. Lots of shopping.
• Rode the damn-near vertical “tram” (actually a funicular) to the Peak, which we then circumnabulated.
• Took the MTR and a bus to Shek O, a teeny beach town on the south shore of HK Island
• Looked all over for shark fins, which Michelle wanted to photograph for a school project. When we finally found them, I realized that all the herbalist shops in Xiamen also carry them. I don’t usually feel sanctimonious about this sort of thing but the shark fin really sickens me. Maybe because it’s wasteful (they cut off the fin then throw the shark back into the water to die), or maybe because this waste is in service of such a dubious idea: if you eat something from a dangerous animal, you become more potent. FWIW Viagra is really taking off in China.
• Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks. In Portland, I turned my nose up at Starbucks but when I see it in HK or Singapore, it’s like running into an old friend. Scones! Chai! Comfy chairs!
• I finally bought some damn pants. The foreigner population of HK is large enough that we can find clothes that fit.

So: check out the Flickr stream for Hong Kong photos. You’ll have to sign up with Flickr and join my friends list to see them. I apologize in advance for the hassle...but this is a relatively simple process:

1. Go to flickr.com/photos/axoplasm and click “sign in.”
2. Register with Yahoo, then click through to flickr. If you already have a Yahoo account, you won’t need to register, but you will need to choose a screen name (next step).
3. Choose a Flickr screen name then click “sign in”
4. Go to flickr.com/people/axoplasm/ again. (Hey, why can’t Yahoo remember this for me?) Click on “Send FlickrMail”
5. Send me a flickrMail letting me know your screen name so I can add you to my friends list. (If you already have a Flickr screen name, this is the only step you need to do.)

Yes, this is a hassle, but it’s worth it, honest. I post a lot of photos to my Flickr stream, more frequently than I post to the blog.

OK, so it's been, what, two weeks now? I have excuses.

The day after Christmas Axoplasm.com stopped working. In China. Everyone else on Earth can see it. After a little digging I'm 99% certain the site has been placed on the official list of banned websites. No, I don't know why and no, there isn't anything I can do about it. Government action in China is like the weather: uncaring and unpredictable.

That night we had the earthquake. OK, Taiwan had the earthquake but we felt it here. Jenny and I were having dinner with friends and talking about local wines when our host shouted "Earthquake!" Everyone thought this was a brand of Chinese wine (and it would probably be an accurate brand name) but then we noticed the Swaying. The room and everything in it moved in broad, slow circles. It was gentle and kind of exciting. About two minutes later we got an aftershock: stronger and nastier, with much rattling of plates and windows.

The quake did no lasting damage in Xiamen but plenty of damage to the seabed just south of Taiwan where, coincidentally, someone keeps all the major communications cables connecting Asia to everywhere else. Taiwan, Korea, southern Japan, and China all had major outages. So even if the gummint let me see Axoplasm, I couldn't have updated it anyway. It's taken a couple of weeks but we have some (most?) of our connectivity back, although it's still broken in many baffling ways. Upstream traffic, for example, is still bad: thus can't upload photos to Flickr.

On New Year Eve day I caught an intestinal bug. Life just keeps getting funner! Ironically, the only restaurants we ate at that day were spendy Western places. Other than some minor Montezuma's revenge-type stuff back in August we've been blessedly free of G-I distress. But this thing I had this time...it was bad. I'll try not to be graphic but what was coming out looked a lot like what was going in. That ain't right. On the third day I went to a nearby Western clinic (with an English-speaking doctor) who basically said, yep, you ate something bad.

Luckily my plumbing was groovy by last Wednesday, when Jenny's sister Michelle flew in from Portland for a visit. We spent the end of our vacation in Hong Kong, about which I'll write in the next post.