adventures in china

This city is something else. It has the cleanest, most efficient public transportation system I’ve ever experienced. The food is incredible. Other than Dai barbecue, you can find just about any kind of food you would want to eat (and it’s all good). Nobody stares at me anymore, kids don’t point at my beard.

Maybe I’m mostly enthused about being in Hong Kong because it’s not Xishuangbanna. That’s not to say I won’t miss southern Yunnan. I’ll miss the fried rice lady who never smiles, water buffalo walking down the street, spicy food for every snack and meal, and the people I worked with.

But right now, I’m glad to be out of there. And to see Isabella!

Hong Kong the last couple days:

This is the part of Hong Kong where Isabella and I will stay – Tin Shui Wai. One of Isabella’s aunts is away on business so we’ll have her apartment. I leave the gardens to go there on Saturday!

I’m pretty sure I built this part of Hong Kong in Sim City 2000 when I was 14. And then I saved it and caused disasters to happen until the whole city was either blown up or underwater. I wonder if Isabella is actually a Sim? What if I am too? And we’re just waiting in Tin Shui Wai for some 14 year old to come and set our building on fire…

AWESOME.

No, I didn’t find this guy walking around in some forest. Not even on a path in the gardens. It was on a Chinese student’s shirt in the library! I pointed it out, but he was aware of this. The beetle is his pet. He brings it home every night and feeds it fruit in a cage, but during the day he puts it on his shirt and it just hangs out, crawling on him, never flying away, never biting, just enjoying itself.

Maybe I’m not that weird after all. I keep my pet bugs in plastic boxes.

These photos were taken by the Georgia herp guy who came here this week, Zach Felix.

From left to right – Bill, Gwen, Jocelyn, Brenna, me

I think this is a photo of breakfast, where you dress up your noodle soup with that stuff in those bowls.

These are apartments down a side street in town, sort of like the one I had for the first few days I was here.

There are a lot of dogs walking around the streets

This is where you buy dresses

This is where fishermen buy gillnets and other fishing supplies

These things are like trucks with tractor engines. I don’t know what they really are, they use them a lot in Madagascar too.

A very typical street scene. People like to hang out around stores and play cards, smoke, chat.

Street

At this fried rice place near the entrance to the gardens you can get all sorts of good food and fresh juices!

You can also order these “potato cakes”, basically slices of potatoes, fried, and then covered in condensed milk. Sort of like pancakes in a way.

Last night, some friends of a friend of Jocelyn’s showed up. They’re herp guys from a university in Georgia. Real herp guys, like the kind who spend years radio tracking thousands of copperheads and swimming with Japanese giant salamanders.

We took them to Dai barbeque. It’s mouth-numbingly spicy food that you won’t find in any other part of China, the kind of restaurant I like to eat at a couple times a week. Skewered meats, tofu, and fish are mostly what ends up on the table, but my favorite is a fiery cucumber and tomato vinegar-based salad that tastes like it belongs in Central America. Everything is loaded with MSG, and the spices and sauces painted onto the foods you pick out taste like nothing I’ve encountered before.

After dinner we went frogging, normal Monday-night work frogging, just around the gardens. The jetlagged professor and friends did well. We will go out again Wednesday night, this time to the rainforest. I’ve promised them flying frogs! I hope I don’t disappoint.

At first glance, Menglun appears as a lazy riverside town. Men carry their days catch in woven reed baskets, Dai women giggle to each other as they float down the street in colorful dresses. First impressions are sometimes misleading.

Sunday night: I’m walking the streets alone. Kids scream as they run through garbage piles, past slot machine casinos packed full of men and brothels with exhausted women glowing red in the light. I hear yelling approaching from behind, but I don’t turn around. Drunken teenagers on red motorbikes often hoot at one another at this hour. Then they pull up next to me.

I glare through the dark. Who could this be? Familiar faces smile back. “heeellloow” they say. It’s my former landlords. The ones who installed worthless window locks on a brand new apartment complex, who thought it was a good idea to house americans (the only ones living in Menglun) on the first floor, the ones who could barely look at me or say “duibuqi” to me when the police showed up after the break in. It’s those guys.

“Ni hao” I say. I don’t know what is going on. Blurred colors float over their heads as stores advertise goods with fluorescent lights. At night, this town comes alive in ways you would never expect, and I’m part of it.

The wife hops off the motorbike and carriers her 2-year old daughter with her. “Go! Let’s go!” the husband yells at me as he pats the back of the seat, signalling me to get on and ride into the night.

I tried to decline. But what the fuck. Who cares at this hour. So I straddle the red motorbike and we speed off, leaving his wife and child in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

Moments later we pull into the parking lot of my old apartment. It’s too famliar. I told myself this was home for every second of every day until the break-in. He leads me to my old room and points proudly at the new security measures – chicken wire over the window bars – so that if someone wants to steal your stuff they better bring wire cutters! Great. I nod, smile, and try not to trip on things as I follow him around.

I have a seat in the living room and look at him. I mean I look at him. Dead in the face. I give him a look that transcends all language barriers. And I see how sorry he is, and how bad he feels, and how bad he has felt. I see this, and it all melts away. My anger towards this man is washed into the Mekong. Down through thick mud and sediment-filled shoreline. Flowing past gillnets and finally into green waters that lead to sea. All of it. Finally.

We sit and drink and chain smoke until our heads pulsate with nicotine. He teaches me the word for beer, for lighter, for telephone (not that I remember them this morning) and he tells me how Americans are different from Chinese people because we are big and like to shoot guns. He saw this on television. Well, I guess he is right, I am bigger than he is and I do like guns. He gives me his phone number and I give him mine, and we agree to meet again for another Chinese lesson. But next time, I must bring “my book” (Chinese/English dictionary)

Looking into his face again, I can tell what he really wants is for me to move back in. He wants rent, he wants his wife not to be angry with him. He wants this American to have not left his stuff on a table at night, and for his wife not to have placed a table near the window. Well, me too. And I give him a look that says so. Then we sit back in our chairs, finish the last of our drinks, and fade into the night.

They are making me do all the work!

Jocelyn (left) and Brenna (right) pretending to work

A “new frog” (a species we haven’t 100% identified yet). It may appear to be a boring brown frog, but would you believe it does not have free-swimming tadpoles? We found a female full of eggs last night, and if it is indeed Ingerana liui, then she was on the lookout for a male who had dug a little hole in the mud for her to put her eggs in. The eggs then develop in the hole as the male guards them, and out of the eggs hatch tiny miniature frogs instead of tadpoles!