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March 26 meh, blah, and ewUgh, coming back to Canada pretty much just means I have to spend my time dealing with taxes, medical plans, money, everything. It's such a big hassle. I liked it when people didn't talk about money and I didn't have to worry about it. What's with people worrying about money and success=money all the time? I guess it's good to have goals. I'm pretty unambitious so my goals are to do what I want to do. Too bad I can't even figure that one out. Oh well, time to grow up a bit.
March 11 Nothing short of death...Well, that means I get to put away my selfish behaviour yet again and head on home. Vancouver sounds like it's going downhill. Why is this happening to my hometown? Is it evolution? Into what? Why take a nice place like Vancouver, which was ready to head towards a plane of paradise on Earth without having to go to Heaven turn into crap? I guess that's just the way things are. Maybe even Heaven got tired of being good. But they probably have a better way of weeding out undesirables. Oh well, that's not why vancouver sucks. Vancouver is still a great place to be, but to hear the local kids say it isn't, well, they need to get out of their circles of drugs.
China isn't so bad. I see a few ladies jogging on the street by the side of the road. Hmmm, be home soon.
March 07 food poisoningit appears I've been hit with food poisoning while in china yet again. Yeehaw...I feel like crap. Time to get off the net and shoot water out of my ass (I have done this over 20 times in the last 24 hours...I am severely dehydrated)
March 04 Beijing, Hong KongI went all over China. I'm too lazy to write much so here are excerpts from emails...
I had a lot of fun in Hong Kong because for the 3 days that I was there, I got to be in charge and I got to do organize things and make things run a bit smoother. I bought a lot of random stuff, including a girly man purse that with Chairman Mao's face that says, "For the people" (BTW, if you actually try to say Chairman Mao with a cantonese accent, it sounds like you're saying, "Nauseous Cat" in Cantonese because "chairman" sounds like "nauseous" in Cantonese). Anyway, Hong Kong is awesome. Just think: it's Japan but everyone speaks English and the food is better. Shopping is a bit pricy there but they have areas wher eyou can bargain from everything from fake brand name bags to sex toys. Not only that, but Hong Kong is a lot more accessible than Japan. People have perfect English so there's no need to worry. I guess having English as the official language for over 100 years can do that to an Asian city. But even then, everything is pretty much Japanese. I ate ramen and ordered in Japanese, and I went to Okashi Land to buy a lot of Japanese candies and some other Japanese things. I felt really at home in HK because it was really just Japan condensed into an area smaller than Nagoya. Also, the subways are clean and people have some manners. The local HK people are just like Chinese people rude and paranoid so just ignore them.
Beijing is another story. Beijing has so much history, it's impossible to describe. It's one of those places that you just have to go and see. The modern part of Beijing is really scary and the old part of Beijing is fun. The whole city is designed so worship heaven and the emperor. There are 5 concentric circles that surround the city with gates spread around each layer of circle. The centre of the city is the Forbidden City, guarded by 9 layers of walls, with one avenue that runs through the Forbidden City that connects the centre of the universe or something like that together. Tiananmen Square is just a touch to the side of that. The modern areas of the city have to be built around this ancient part of the city and they're all connected. It's not like the ancient part of Beijing is in ruins, it's still around and guarded. However, it's only like 600 years old. The older stuff is almost all but gone. Besides, it's like the Ming and Qing Dynasties where they did all that crazy building stuff. In between these layers surrounding the Forbidden City, there are temples that are not Buddhist at all, but are even older, like from the 26th Century, BC 4000 years old temples for worshipping the harvest. The temple of Heaven is the largest construct of buildings for worshipping Heaven in the entire world. They used to sacrfice everything there.
However, visiting those ancient places is only cool to foreigners. Even my tour guide believed that. He siad that Chinese people now are concerned about making a lot of money really fast so they don't have any appreciation for the civilization that spawned them all. He gets really frustrated when he takes Chinese people on tours because they don't care. People in Hong Kong and Taiwan appreciate it more, he thought. He said the only way China's history will stay true and the image of Chinese people improve is through foreigner Chinese people because the ones living here now are not very good at protecting it.
I guess it was true once I saw a pool of sewage in the corner of the Great Wall because people didn't want to pay for the toilet. There's graffiti on the Great Wall too and that made me really sad. It's all in Chinese and they pretty much just say things like "Ah Ping was here '92" or "Jiang loves Shaomei" with hearts. But the great wall was cool too. I went to the top of one part and I screamed out, "STAY THE FUCK OUTTA CHINA YOU CRAZY MONGOL HORDS!" and people from another part of the wall heard us due to the echo and waved back. Then I said, "I AM CANADIAN" and my sister and I heard a "ME TOO!!!" from somewhere in the mountains...Canadians are so polite...
I went to the tomb of one emperor who buried himself about 9 floors down. It was deep back then so there is a gate before you enter the tomb that says something like, "You're now entering Hell" and when you come out of the Tomb, you have to pass the gate and say, "I've returned". The whole way back, you're not supposed to look back at the tomb. It's pretty weird. The Tomb is actually one of 13 tombs of emperors buried all over this mountainous region in Beijing. You can see the tombs from the foot of the mountains. and actually count off 13 tombs on the tops of 13 peaks
I also got a rubbing of the character "Luck", but there are 100 different kanji for Fuku and the Japanese used the most common one. The one I bought is rubbed off from that guy who stole from the emperor. The way he wrote the kanji, the characters added together mean something different than most others. There is a dot on the top left corner, symbolizing pearls, another one that means life, and an open "rice paddy" character instead of the closed one in the usual "luck" whic symbolizes the flow of nations, wealth and power, and this other character which is on top right which means "fortune" so the "luck" kanji all together mean something like, "fortune and prosperity everlasting". The real character is carved in stone and placed under a mountain, guarded by a 9 headed dragon. The character was stolen many times before the tablet was placed under the mountain. The dragon guards it and at the same time, no one would break into the mountain to steal the tablet because the dragon represents the Emperor and to destroy the mountain would mean to destroy China, Heaven and Earth. So no one ever touched it. Now, the tablet is on display and until recently, was put for the public to touch. Now there is a piece of plexiglass that covers it because it started to wear out from billions of people rubbing it. The rubbing I have of the kanji is one of very few in the world now because by next year during the olympics, that mountain will be closed to public.
I saw a white Dagoba, which is different than a Pagoda, but maybe it was Pagoda writen by someone with dsylexia or something. It was on the Northern Ocean, which is really a man made lake that's about a thousand years old. But it was called that because when Genghis Khan entered the area, he thought it was an ocean. Mongols never saw water before so that's how that piece of land was named. Then some monks from Tibet came and built a few things there and it's scared too.
The entire city of beijing is supposedly sacred. Astronomers from way back calculated that Beijing is the centre of China, therefore the Centre of the Universe. The whole city is built to support this belief. It's lasted fairly long, maybe they were right. |
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