Soul Searching in Shangri-La pt. II

 So there we were at the entrance of our first ever Tibetan Buddhist monastery.  I'm not really sure what kinds of preconceptions any of us had about it, and the culture of the area.  It's one of those topics, you know, the sort of thing everyone has heard of, but most people know nothing about, and are nevertheless attracted to it because of this discrepancy.  I tried to keep my mind clean of it all, and just accept whatever was inside.

Soul Searching in Shangri-La pt. I

(Note: The next 48 hours of traveling, or so, works best as a contiguous unit, but is also around 14 or 15 pages of text in MS word. So, I’m chopping it up in three sections that will be posted in rapid section. It should be easy to figure out where to start)

So there we were, aboard what was for all of us our first ever overnight bus. I can safely say it is not what any of us were expecting. During my time in Japan, I had glimpsed a variety of long haul tour buses, and they came equipped with double decker chairs that would recline in an almost bed fashion, that looked relatively comfortable. They had toilets.

Midnight Express

So, Saturday morning we get up for our first full day together as a group of fourteen people. I’m pretty sure this whole entry is going to be dedicated to the clusterfuck of that day, so this isn’t going to progress the timeline too much, but it’s probably worth it.

Here was our itinerary for the day:

1) Eat

2) Get on a bus to go to a place called Jiuxiang

3) Come back, then get out stuff and go on a overnight bus to Shangri-la

And that was it.

All Aboard for Yunnan

Alright, so we’re going to interrupt the broadcast to bring a special report about a place called Yunnan. Afterwards, I will return to the schedule of events from Korea, as I want to try to write them down to assist my own memories anyway.

First, an introduction of sorts is necessary, I think. The lowdown of this place, and my adventures there, is that I went with a group of 14 people including myself. Most of the people who went with me are also college students from California studying in Shanghai, at Fudan University, just as I am, but a few are from other parts of America, one person comes from Spain, and another is Chinese born and raised. Our group, plus or minus a few people, were originally planning on going to Tibet, for a one week break in China known as Golden Week, which runs from October 1^st to October 8^th. 

Bon Voyage

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As always, I know it’s been a while. I’m conflicted right now about whether or not to write about Korea, or just skip to the meat of what’s going on in China. This entry is going to wrap things up in Japan, and over the weekend I’ll decide what’s next. Either way, after this entry, I’m going to skip forward to a trip I just went on a couple weeks ago to Southwest China, to the province of Yunnan.

Recommencing the broadcast

Yeah yeah, I know, it's been a long time since I last did anything in this bit of webspace.

Well, I'm pretty well settled into Shanghai, by now, and life here is fantastic. But! It's not time to tell that story yet. I've got catching up to do, so I'm going to tell the rest of Japan now, then get to Korea, although Korea might be slightly abbreviated, depending on my mood.

Where we last left off, I was leaving from Osaka towards destinations further west, and my first stop was going to be Himeji.

Excuse us for this brief intermission

Internet in Shanghai has been a bit shoddy for a bit, but things are getting better. Expect updates recommencing within a few days!

Osaka Sucks

I'm putting up the stories about Osaka right now also, because I don't know when I'll next get a chance, and I'd rather get it out sooner rather than later. For those who're just checking now, there's also a second day of Kyoto below, so don't skip it!

Osaka

By the way

I don't know who all is reading this blog, at this point, but if any of you want postcards, just email me with your address, and you'll get them from time to time!

Kyoto part 2

Well, I've had substantially less internet access than I thought I would, so this has just gotten out of hand. But I'm putting up several posts in the next few days, to catch up with being in Korea; whether or not I'll be able to put up any more updates after this weekend is up in the air; I'm going to China, and a lot of websites are blocked in China, including this one, as of the last time I checked. There might be some way for me to get around it, we'll see.

Anyway, for now, Kyoto part 2:

Kyoto to the mizznax pt. I

Currently, I’m onboard a bus to Seoul; I’m about two weeks behind in stories on my blog, so I’m going to start including multiple days of travelling per entry, organized by city.

So, where last we left off, I was in Kyoto, having marveled at its pine-lined labyrinthine secrets, but not actually doing all that much.

Leaving Fuji

Tuesday began rather innocuously. I got up as late as I could, checked out, and realized I had lost a towel somewhere in the shuffle, my UCSD towel. Kinda sad to have missed it, as it was one of the few things I had with me that showed where I came from, but life goes on. I signed up for a shuttle to take me to the nearest bus station, which would be used to take me on to Kyoto, and did my laundry. I saw a couple of blonde girls that were getting ready to take the shuttle as well; soon we found out we were going in the same direction, so we coupled our fates together for a spell, and got breakfast together while waiting for the bus to Kyoto.

Pictures for the last post

This was a picture of people going up the mountain in front of us, one of those traffic jams.



This is a view down the side of the mountain. Fascinating, innit? Can't see shiyyyyit.


This is almost at the top, and I just thought the clouds looked purdy here.


And here's me, at the eighth station, just a little bit away from the top. This was really the first time that we could see much of anything from where we were on the mountain, the first time that we were no longer walking through the clouds itself.


Dominic and I at the top!



This is a picture of the station at the very top. On the top of that little mound in the distance is a shrine for the top of Fuji; on the right, the brown reflective surface is a vending machine. Yep, that's right, vending machines at the top of Fuji. A little anti-climactic, maybe, but them's the breaks. Japan has vending machines EVERYWHERE, and they don't serve everything, as you've been told, only soda, coffee, water, cigarettes, and occasionally booze.

Fuji-san

(Note: Blogger's not letting me add pictures right now, so here you go, just two pictures for now)

Sooooo Monday begins. I get up early-ish, but only by my standards; I know almost every person reading this works at a real job, and gets up at 6 or 7am every day. I got up at probably around 9am, and I tried to take it easy to begin with. I had made some slight preparations for the trip up Fuji, but I needed to get some more food for sure, as well as sunblock, so I leisurely strolled from my hostel to the bus station that would take me up to “Kawaguchi-ko 5th station”, which was a halfway point up the mountain of sorts. Although you can hike from the very bottom of the mountain, most people opt to start from the fifth station, which starts at about 2,300meters up or 7,000 feet, roughly, and the summit is at 3,700 meters, or about 12,000 feet. The estimate of the hike up from the fifth station is around 4-8 hours, and then 2-4 hours down, double both of those numbers to get the figures for people starting from the very bottom.

Well, today, the real today, was pretty crappy, but I’m going to try to keep that out of this writing. WARNING: This is a pretty long entry.


In this entry, I’m going to talk about my Mount Fuji (mis) adventures. It started on Sunday; Sunday was a day almost as frustrating as today, although it had some saving graces. I was planning on meeting a Japanese friend of mine that I met years ago back in Russian class, a girl named Ai, who’s getting married to a Bulgarian guy (hence why she was studying Russian, which is mutually intelligible with Bulgarian, and actually has classes offered, as opposed to the real deal of Bulgarian). We were going to go to Kamakura, which is a beach town south of Tokyo that’s supposed to be quite lovely, and home to a great big giant bronze Buddha.

Plastic Choco-miruku

Day 3

The first, by far most important objective of the day was to take my skateboard to a skate shop and get it in working condition. I did my research the night before, and it turned out there was an all-purpose sports shop with a skating section not far from my hostel, so I skipped over there quick as I could.

If you had told me a year ago that I'd be trying to use Japanese to get my skateboard fixed in Tokyo, I probably would've thought you were high as a kite. But there you have it.

The First Day Out, or, Japanese Water Cannons

Day 2

So I went to bed at about 4-5am last night, and I managed to get at least a whopping five hours of sleep after. I didn’t have a super clear plan of what I was going to try to do this day, but I knew that it would basically involve just going to a couple districts and spending as little as possible. I also knew I wanted to try to put together my skateboard, and razzlematazz the locals with the awesomeness that is Gravity longboards. Unfortunately, I’ve got butterfingers, and I dropped a very small piece that was crucial to making my whole skateboard work, and it bounced off of my shoe into oblivion. I spent about half an hour trying to find it, to no avail, and finally went to the front desk to see if the guy working there could direct me to a hardware store, which he did. It was a place called, apparently, Doityo, pronounced as two syllables, doyt-yo, and it was only two metro stops away.

Day 1: A retrospective

Okay, its actually day 3 at the moment of my first ever travel, hanging out in Tokyo, Japan. I've been running around ragged, as you might have guessed, so I haven't had the time to make a proper update to my blog, which I really just created for this purpose. So, for the time being, I'm going to do a series of retrospectives until I'm caught up with present time.

Day 1:

Pacific Beach, San Diego, Part I

This is my home. Or, you know, the beach at the end of my street, which I've been to so many times that I think of it as my own.

There've been plenty of times when I would walk, run, or skate down here at least once a day. Being less than a mile from my house, it's pretty easy to do.

After hitting the end of the street, and turning left around the edge of a small hotel complex, this is what I see. All of the rest of the pictures in this post are taken at various angles from the end of the pier that you can see in the above picture.

I'm gonna miss this place.

Orc Invasion Practice

This is just going to be a photo post. Taken today, 7/16, at the UCSD archery range.



Is that Orc I smell?



If you look really carefully, just to the right of my left hand, there's a blur of an arrow in flight.



Elisa's fiery reflexes catch another arrow in flight in the forefront of this picture





This one's kind of hard to see, but the arrow she just released can be seen as though still resting on the bow, but it's actually just starting to fly out. You can tell from the vibration in the bowstring.

That's my friend Elisa assembling her bow. We spend half our time at the range with her tinkering with this thing.

A Wild Sheep Chase

Okay, so I'm lagging on putting up pictures. In the meantime, though, I'm going to say a few words about stuff I'm reading. I just read this novel, "A Wild Sheep Chase", by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

Its a weird one, although anyone who has read any Murakami won't be surprised by this in the slightest. The only other work of his I had read prior was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which was also bizarre, but not only that, sometimes incoherent, or at least disparate. Partially, this was from its length; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle clocks in at about 625 pages, and frequently feels like its really three stories chopped up and interspliced within the two covers.


A Wild Sheep Chase, however, is about 300 pages, and much more coherent. Its story is such: it follows a nameless protagonist on his quest to find a sheep that shouldn't exist, that was in a photo he had used while creating an advertisement at his small PR firm. After publishing that advertisement, a visit was made by a man in a fancy suit telling him basically that a) he had to cease the ad and b) he had to go find that sheep, or else his life would be ruined in every way imaginable.


See, now apparently this sheep is in fact a Mongolian sheep god, that jumped inside the body of a boring Japanese man in the 1930s, while they were off raping the lands of Manchuria and even more southerly in China, and this man, upon realizing he was possessed by a sheep god, told the army so, and they quietly discharged him. Somewhere in the process the sheep jumped out, and shortly thereafter found its way into another otherwise boring Japanese man; this sheep god's plans for a global ... something, leads it to essentially overwhelm this man's consciousness, turning him overnight into a political powerhouse, and over the next few decades he becomes the boss of Japan's right-wing political party, but is entirely behind the scenes in doing so.


And I guess the boss is now dying. So this guy in the suit wants the protagonist to find the sheep in hopes itll help the boss, because i guess you're immortal as long as a sheep god stays inside of you.


...



Crazy, right? Well, it's all tongue-in-cheek, and the characters mostly think its crazy themselves. The protagonist is absolutely a normal, everyday guy, and reacts to this bizarre information the way you or I would.

I don't know nearly enough about Japanese politics to be certain, but I suspect that this book is mostly a critique of Japanese politics. What little I do know is that Japan, for a long time, has essentially had a one party system inheriting the throne in the wake of the emperor being forced to abdicate power after WWII, and that this political party has always been known as "the right wing". They're nothing like the right wing in places like, say, America, but are pretty hardcore.

My guess is that Murakami is trying to say something about the leaders of the right-wing being just as little as the guy who was inhabited by the sheep. That there's nothing special or distinguishing about them, but that they were just in the right place at the right time, and events forced them onto the stage whether they deserved it or not. He's clearly a critic, and its not hard to know why, even from the little I do know about Jap. politics. His work is usually critical of Japanese society anyway, and it seems like he more or less mourns modernization, but perhaps I'm being a little too harsh on him.



Anyway, the book itself is a pretty light and easy read, and has a few surprisingly delightful small characters. I guess this was written early in his career, and I think at times it shows, as he has a tendency to rely on exposition perhaps just a little too much. Nevertheless, its nothing if not entertaining, and was definitely worth my time, seeing as it was primarily a way for me to kill time while waiting for an airplane, and then getting to my destination via that airplane.


* * * 3/5 stars if you ask me.

~Kiel

'Nuff Said.

This isn't what this blog was created for, but, still.... you have to read this. Period.

Wrestling Midgets 'Killed By Fake Prostitutes'

And so it begins...

This is my first post in this blog, which will be the site of all my forthcoming adventures in Japan, Korea, China, and perhaps (hopefully) beyond.

I'm due to set out exactly a month from today, July 29th 2009. When I do so, it'll easily be the farthest from home I've ever gone in my entire life. To fill the interim until that point, though, I'll put up a smattering of pictures from my home that I'll be leaving behind. Tomorrow will be the first installment of said photos.

Hope to hear from you all soon!
~Kiel