I headed down to the bus station and came across an Israeli named Ted who was having issues getting a bus ticket to Xiahe because China is all up in every foreigner’s grille about going there. You need to give a photocopy of your passport and your visa to the bus station, which has no facilities with which to make them. There’s a print shop across the street, but it very conveniently isn’t open until after both buses leave for Xiahe for the day. I attempted to help him out, pointing him towards a few hotels that might help him… but I didn’t see him on the 7:30am bus .

The scenery from Lanzhou to Xiahe (夏河） was actually very different from the scenery from the Lanzhou airport to Lanzhou. That is, it has the notable addition of the color green.

That’s more or less the scenery you see for a few hours. Hills. Mountains. Some green. It’s really cool at first, but then gets boring after about the first 10 minutes of your 4 hour bus ride.

Thankfully we got to spice it up a bit with a drive though Linxia (临夏）!

So we got to Linxia and I saw this baby in the distance. I was all, “Man this thing is way fucking bigger than the one in Hangzhou!” so I took a picture. Then I saw another and was like, “Wow two mosques!” Then the bus kept going through Linxia and I eventually lost count of all the mosques. Counting the minarets would have been even more foolish. It was the most Muslim place I’ve ever seen. Even the mannequins had headscarves on, which I found strangely charming!

We didn’t stop in Linxia, however. We kept on trucking from Islam-land to Tibetan Buddhist-land! I actually found it almost jarring how quickly and completely this change happened. I mean, one second you are in Huiville (Hui are Chinese Muslims, not to be confused with Uighurs who are Muslims who live in China but are more closely related to all those -istan dudes to the west of 天朝) with little white hats and lamian stores as far as the eye can see, countless minarets and old dudes with five mile long beards, the next everyone is bald and wearing entirely too much clothing for the warm weather.

Here’s the Labrang monastery! Whoaaa!!! It’s big!

It is big. This part of China is often referred to as “Little Tibet”, and with good reason. Most Tibetans I talked to actually consider small places like Xiahe and Langmusi (Where I would later visit) much more authentically Tibetan than most of Tibet. This monastery, for instance, is the real deal. There are no real entry fees, pilgrims and monks are walking all over, you can see Tibetan nomads in the mountains every which way, and the monks are constantly in class or debating scripture to each other. It’s a real, living, breathing monastery.

The Tibetans and monks are pretty friendly to foreigners, and maybe a little less so to the Han tourists. I had the following conversation with a monk, for instance:

Monk: HELLO! WHERE ARE YOU FROM?!
Me: America
Monk, pointing to himself: Tibet
Me: 西藏 (Chinese for Tibet)
Monk, waving hands: No! America good, Tibet good! 西藏 is China… China bad!

He then high-fived me and we were bros or something. It was cool.

Just another to show the scale of this place. Most of that is dormitories for the Monks. Labrang used to house over 4000 in its heyday, but nowadays the Chinese government caps them at about 1200.

SOME LOSER RUINING THE VIEW.

But before I was in Xiahe I was in Lanzhou, which is not as great.

Getting to Shanghai was a bit more of an ordeal than I had originally anticipated. I was told my numerous friends in Hangzhou that they had never had any issue just showing up at the airport bus and hopping on. I managed to nab the very last ticket for the 5:30 bus I needed, and was the first person there to buy tickets in the morning.

LUCKY!

Anyway, the bus ride was pretty uneventful until we got to Shanghai. Due to the Expo or something, we had to sit for about 20 minutes on the bus while at the entrance to the aiport while dudes checked everyone’s documentation. I had a couple hours before my domestic flight and no baggage to check, so I was fine; the Japanese dude getting ready to get home was a bit worried, however.

The flight was uneventful, other than, as always, the Goddess of Travel (due to her eternal hate for me) decided to delay my flight once more. I ended up getting to Lanzhou late and having to spend the night in the city of Lamian.

Since I was there, I decided to have some Lamian at the source. I thought it’d be like eating chocolate at Hershey Park, drinking Coke in their main plant down south or going to wherever Chick-fil-a grows their delicious chicken… and it pretty much was!

This is 羊肉面片 (yangroumianpian).

It is amazing. It’s better than any lamian I’ve ever had, and was more or less the most common thing in Lanzhou. It was also the best thing in Lanzhou, as the place has nothing else going for it but a lot of sand and dust. (I did find the most un-pianzi-y hotel in the history of China though!)

Anyway, tomorrow starts my big holiday! Ten glorious English free days! Woohoo~~~

Rather than do a normal relaxing vacation, I decided to go trek around ethnically Tibetan areas in Gansu and western Sichuan! Whoaaa!!!~~~~

But wait, Paul, why don’t you just get your ass over to Tibet itself?

Well, dear friend, that’s because Tibet sucks as a foriegner.

Why? Here’s why:

1. I can’t go there by myself, I must go with a Chinese-lead travel group.
2. Because I can’t go by myself and, despite what you may have heard, capitalism is alive and well in China, the prices for said groups are ridiculous.
3. Large portions of Tibet have been really Han-ified in the last couple decades. It actually isn’t the best place to go for Tibetan culture!

The best place to go would be Qinghai. The problem with southwestern Qinghai is it isn’t my idea of a vacation. I’d be trekking around, sleeping under the stars many nights, hangin out with nomads and stuff, running away from crazy dogs… etc. Some people love it, I don’t think I’d feel the same way.

I’m going to the SECOND best place: Eastern Sichuan. It’s a bit more civilized, but still managed to get through the Cultural Revolution more or less unscathed. It has a whole bunch of old and still running monasteries and temples, a whole bunch of crazy scenery and other such nonsense.

I’ll be starting out in Lanzhou, home of the famous lamien! Hopefully I’ll be there for like an hour or so while I wait for a bus to get to Xiahe. Xiahe has a big temple, nice stuff to see, and a living Buddha. It’ll be pretty cool.

From there I head to Langmusi, another big temple place. It has a really old famous temple that is real important for Tibetan Buddhists. Lots of people go on pilgrimages there. It was apparently a riot or something there a few weeks ago and it was all closed down, but it’s reopened to foreigners now. SHOULD BE FUN!

After that my trip gets sketchy. I’ll end up in Jiuzhaigou, eventually. How I’m getting there is the big blank in my excursion. The original plan was to go to Songpan from Langmusi, but the bus transfers seem to be pretty annoying as I’d have to spend a whole day in a little town with more or less nothing in it.

Jiuzhaigou is sorta like the Yellowstone of China. It’s a big naturey place with stuff and wild pandas and crap. Should be nice.

Here’s a map of my trip!

As I’ve been working to correct this, I find I have a much easier time remembering how to write complex characters as opposed to simple ones. This is even the case if the simple characters are things I learned ages ago. Take this for instance:

(感情) Let’s look at this little word. I have 感 down. I can write it without any issue. I struggled remembering the damn 情 more because I’d forget which “qing” it was (请, 清, 晴, 等等）. 摊 is another character I picked up and can write with ease and I had more problem remembering how to write 改, which for all intents and purposes is a ridiculously simple character. 丰富 is a word I always have issues writing from memory, whereas 翻译 I can do no prob. The traditional form of 罗 （羅） I learned one day almost 2 years ago to write my Chinese name one time. I NEVER studied or really practiced this character. I have written this character only a handful of times ever, and virtually never see it, but I can write it without any issue. I can also remember the traditional form of 让 (讓) quite easily, (Though in this case I can also write it’s simplified form, something my wrist thanks me for.) despite only ever seeing it at KTV and thinking it was crazy complicated and writing it a couple times out of masochism.

So seriously, what the hell? Does my brain like a challenge or something? I could fill pages with comparisons of some ridiculous character I can write easily compared to an easy one I can’t.

On the bright side, I can impress Chinese people on a pretty regular basis by writing a few crazy-complicated characters… on the downside for the life of me I can’t remember how to write the 经 in 经验 to save my life.

Doing pretty well at understanding most of it via context, but actually being able to pronounce those pesky literature versions of words I already know and can easily guess the meaning of is troublesome.

Hosada has been on my radar since last year when I finally caught “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” (2006, Hosada).  I had heard good things about Summer Wars and finally found a nice 1080p copy with decent subs, so I was quite happy to watch it tonight.

Visually it’s a pretty good film.  It has the unfair advantage of being the first animated film I’ve actually watched in true 1080p, but it was decent regardless.  Madhouse did a decent job with this, which is good since they’ve had a slipshod past few years.  It’s about 65% normal animation and the rest is a combination of cel shading and CGI.  It looks great overall, and even when multiple styles blend in the internet world of OZ it doesn’t jump out at you like it so often does in other films.

It’s visual style has quite a bit in common with “The Girl Who Leapt through Time” as well.  It’s simple, uncluttered, and has a very down to earth vibe going on.  It isn’t the multi-colored drug induced vomit that Kon likes to throw at us, but it also isn’t the fantastical magicy sorta stuff that Miyazaki is famous for.  The real world looks real, and the internet world looks like what I could see an internet world looking like.  I rather liked it.

The story is what you’d expect with his sort of thing.  Rogue AI gets all sorts of power and has no emotions so it messes with the world, so dudes have to work together to trick it into stopping… think “War Games” but a bit crazier with a definite Japanese flair.  But… it’s well told and has a really nice style to it, even after the 10 failed resolutions I wasn’t bored.  However, the story could have been nearly anything, because this movie’s saving grace is elsewhere.

What makes the film is the characters.  They are FANTASTIC.  The story basically goes that the female “lead” (Though she’s in the movie a good deal less than many other female characters…) Natsuki lied to her family about some all-star and ends up bringing Kenji, the protagonist (classically socially awkward but kindhearted, as most anime protagonists are wont to be) as a faux-boyfriend for the duration of the trip for her grandmother’s 90th birthday.

The family is the best part of the film.  Each character is unique in some way and, while you meet some more than others, they’re all decently charming.

Now, “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” wasn’t perfect.  It was enjoyable, something a bit slower paced than most stuff I was watching back then and got me to look up who Hosada was, but ultimately it was flawed.  I’d recommend someone to watch it, but not before about a hundred other movies.

“Summer Wars” is in the same boat.  The animation, like I said, is good but not spectacular.  We don’t see Kenji really “grow” as a character as much as I’d liked, and due to the fact we have a dozen some odd family members we don’t see much in the way of character development with them either.  The story is the same crazy AI story that’s been done a million times and is taken care of in a similar way of how it always is.

However, “Summer Wars” is way better than “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time”.  The characters don’t really grow as you’d expect them to in a story, but there are so many different characters you don’t really get bored.  The interplay between all the different personalities is done well and the family feels pretty damn authentic as a whole, which I thought was good.

Overall, while TGWLTT is OK and I’d say give it a shot if you’re really into animation, I can recommend Summer Wars with far higher accolades.  It’s quite a bit different than things Kon or Miyazaki or any of the other big animation directors have put out recently (though having a surprisingly similar setting to “Paprika”… but far, far, far better), and I think that’s a good thing.  If you’re up for something new, I’d try this film.  It’s a bit different and even though it’s filled to the brim  with flaws upon further reflection and analysis, I felt pretty good about it when the credits started rolling, and I think that’s what matters most.

As a kid, even up through high school, the anticipation for a new game was one of the biggest impetuses for me to get the game at all. I craved it, I wanted it, I had to have it. I can remember that Super Mario RPG was the first game I actually had a burning desire for before it came out. I can vividly remember the trip down to wal-mart where I bought it with several months hard-earned allowance. I loved the shit out of that game.

It’d happen many other times as well. Upon seeing a commercial for Final Fantasy 7 when I was 11 or something that burning feeling was again bubbling up within me; expounded by my lack of a Playstation and having to wait for the PC port to become available. Super Smash Bros. and Ocarina of Time highlighted the Nintendo 64 for me. Even Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast and Windwaker for the Gamecube, punctuated by several PC titles, kept me waiting for games all the way through college. Half-Life 2 and Resident Evil 4 were both games me and my roommate at the time waited in agony for together for, and enjoyed immensely together.

But something happened in the last six or so years, I stopped really waiting for games. I still bought them, I still played them, they still passed the time… but it was lacking something it once had. I ended up buying games less and less, and playing them for less and less time when I did. I’ve probably beaten Chrono Trigger 30+ times, but only managed to play Bioshock through once. I relegated myself to mainly multiplayer affairs, WoW, TF2, etc… they still had a bit of lasting appeal.   The love was gone.  I thought they were cool… didn’t really regret buying them, but the feelings I had as a starry eyed youth was all but gone from the experience.

When StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 were announced I had a slight resurgence of that feeling from times of yore… but even now it’s all but completely dissipated.  Perhaps when they come out some semblance of  my former love will reemerge… perhaps.

For the last two years or so I’ve played less video games than any period in my life where I had sufficient motor skills with which to play them. I didn’t really miss them, it was just that nothing was being released that I was truly interested in like I once was. I played a few weird indie games (Machinarium, Braid, Flower), blew through them in a few hours and they were all good experiences in and of themselves (especially Flower, which I hesitate to call a game as much as a spiritual experience.), but they still lacked that feeling of euphoria I had when I cracked open the box for the first time and glanced over the manual for the first time, taking in that new game smell I so fondly associate with my youth.  They didn’t have those first few minutes of pure bliss as I got acquainted with the controls and explored this new and miraculous world.  It was just, different.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl was the point I think I realized it had diminished so much. When the initial trailer for the game was released some few years before the game itself would be back in 2005 or so, I was as eager as ever to get my hands on it. Agonizing years passed, and I eventually found myself at a midnight release. I returned home and played it for a week or so on and off and then stopped, never quite feeling it had been what I had wanted it to be.

But maybe I’m over-romanticizing how I felt about vidja games when I was a tyke.

Fast forward to two days ago, when I got Demon’s Souls on the cheap. I had heard about it from everyone I had ever trusted on games, they all told me it was fanfuckingtastic and I just had to give it a shot. So I did.

Oh how I did.

Demon’s Souls is, and I say this without a hint of hyperbolic flavor, the best game I have played in years, if not a decade. It’s hard, it’s rewarding, it’s epic, it’s huge, it’s long, it’s replayable, it’s innovative and it’s simply one of the best gameplay experiences I’ve ever had the pleasure of laying my eyes on.

It plays a lot like an old Western or roguelike RPG, Baldur’s Gate or Diablo or Wizardry or something. You transverse a myriad of landscapes killing everything that moves. You find new armor, craft new stuff, level up, use herbs, etc… It’s hard. You die a lot. It’s incredibly unforgiving, but also incredibly fair. When I die in Demon’s Souls, I get super pissed off, but I realize it’s only my own shortcomings that have lead to my death. This in itself wouldn’t be anything special. I could just as easily load up some old PC game and get virtually the same experience, however less pretty it might look… no, Demon’s Souls kicks you in the ass and makes you like it.

There is but one currency in the game: souls (of Demons). Everything you kill gives you some souls. You use these as experience, as money, as a reagent for crafting better gear, everything. If you die, sort of like Sonic with his rings, you drop all your souls. You also go back to the beginning of the level. If you should reach the point you died at (with everything respawned mind you) you can recover them. If you die again before you reach those precious souls… they’re gone.

But that’s not all. When you die, you come back as a soul yourself with only about 50% HP. So, not only must you get back to the point you died at, but you must do it with half the max health you did it with the first time. This game doesn’t cut you any slack. It just tells you to suck it up and get better, keep being bad and you won’t be rewarded.

I could go into the mechanics more, but just let it be known that every time you die the game gets harder. It’s also possible to lose HOURS of work with no gain in your character whatsoever if you happen to die a few times. It’s a harsh mistress of a game, and I love her for it.

As a result of it’s unwavering brutality, however, is the triumphant feeling that is more common in this game than any other I have ever played. When I used to play World of Warcraft in a very high end guild, I felt that way occasionally after beating some new encounter, and that was the entire reason I played it. When you beat a boss, be it a huge fire breathing spider or a 5 story tall knight with a lance that shoots laser beams, you know you deserved it. You feel like a fucking boss. Hell, sometimes after beating a particularly strong non-boss enemy you feel great.

The online play is innovative and fantastic. It combines co-operative things with player vs player stuff, all with very real advantages and disadvantages. Overall, it creates a feeling of tension for the player, knowing that at any time some angry motherfucker can just crash into your game and come after your life.  Killing them is another great feeling, as you feel like you’ve triumphed over pure evil.

Overall, this game is utterly fantastic and I’m glad it’s done so well. Hopefully we’ll get more games like this that have you feel like you’ve worked for something and attained it. I have no problem with the “interactive movies” like Uncharted 2 or what have you, but something about Demon’s Souls tickles me in a way that makes me feel like a kid in the basement sitting way to close to a CRT again, and I love it.

So, thank you Demon’s Souls, for reminding me why I played video games in the first place:  they’re fun.

West Virginia, where I spent my time in University was actually pretty close to New England in this regard. Weather was inconsistent and unpredictable. One day it was 70, the next 20, the next 50 with hail… I sorta liked that.

In Hangzhou it’s the exact opposite. Weather doesn’t pass through all willy-nilly and change constantly as if it were an ADD raddled child. Nope. It comes, buys a house, and just enjoys itself at a leisurely pace. The last week or so was sunny and warm and nice. Everyone was happy! Then Monday happened. On Monday the rain started, slowly but surely. Tuesday came and the rain began to fall full force. It’s Wednesday, the rain is still falling… I’d say the average rainstorm in New England or West Virginia lasts a few hours. Here I’d reckon the average rainstorm lasts about a week.

And so this is what I have to look forward to for the next week. Gloomy, cold, wet, crappy rain. I make it a rule not to ride the ‘ol velocipede in the rain, so I’ll be hoofin it as well!

The flip-side, of course, is once it’s sunny and nice it stays that way for some time. That’s OK, I guess….

But me, I prefer the crazy weather of Massachusetts or West Virginia to the predictable and boring weather of almost Southern China any day.

But the laughs or surprised looks on people’s faces are interesting at least. Hangzhou is a big (or small, by Chinese standards.) with a lot of universities and foreign companies. Foreigners are a common sight. Foreigners who can speak a smattering of Chinese aren’t even worth looking at anymore. Foreigners who say “好牛！*“ when watching someone play God of War 3 in an electronics market are the ones who get the stares! When they look just like what every Chinese person considers to be Harry Potter it only makes them more curious! Never mind all the stupid idioms I’m picking up left and right then for some reason finding myself in incredibly apt situations to use. 人山人海 elicited a reaction not only from my friend when I said it in a severely crowded street, but an old grannie who was confused about if I had actually said that or if I had somehow just made random noises and that came out.

I just think it’s interesting a foreigner who has perfect Chinese and can carry on a normal conversation with someone gets by without a glance, whereas someone else who says four words in the right order gets all the attention in the world.

I don’t know whether to thank my classes for constantly badly translating their Chinese slang and making me go and reverse engineer it back in to Chinese or not, but at least my vocabulary is getting bigger… I was really confused a bit over a month ago when one of my students, upon my performing an amazing feat of mental and physical dexterity, proclaimed at the top of his lungs, “Teacher is good cow!!!” The first thing I did, instinctively, was tell him he needs an “a” in there… the second was to inquire as to what the hell he meant.

*好牛 is a very “Hangzhou”, or at least Shanghai-ish, sort of slang. From what I’ve gathered they don’t use it in the north, though variations of it do exist. It’s more or less a less profane version of 牛鼻 (though, on the internet, that second character can be about anything that is phonetically “bi”, regardless of the tone, including the letter B itself. I’m sleepy and don’t feel like looking through for the character for “cunt.” However, rest assured, if a Chinese person ever yells “Niu bi!” in your general direction, you’re doing something right. If I were to translate it based on my limited knowledge, “Fucking awesome!” would do the trick. It’s a profane way to give something a lot of praise, more or less.

The character in the upper right reads “新” or “New!” The three characters in the lower right “冰+茶味” read “ice+tea flavor”. I was really curious about this. I didn’t know whether it would just be tea flavored soda under the label of Sprite or a Sprite + ice + tea flavor extravaganza! Needless to say, I had to try it!

As you could probably tell by the picture of an empty bottle I already drank the whole thing. For the record I’m unsure whether it was tea flavored soda or sprite and tea flavored soda, but it was OK at best. It tasted a lot like tea, but with carbonation… which is weird as hell. In a pinch I’d drink it again, but it’s actually a good deal more expensive than normal Sprite so I’ll probably keep my distance for a while.

This tea flavored Sprite is merely the latest in a “LET’S PUT TEA IN EVERYTHING WE GET FROM THE WEST!!!” movement China and, I can only assume, the rest of Asia have had for some time.

Most people who have spent any time in China or Korea or Japan can attest to green tea flavored ice cream. It’s everywhere. I’m not a fan… it’s way too much “tea” for me. When you drink tea it’s diluted in water. There’s a clear barrier between the leaves and you, no matter how many of the little fuckers you stick in there. I like my tea bitter as hell too. I made some tea for a British coworker of mine and she was all “SUGAR AND CREAM STAT!!!”

Donuts, I think, are the next big thing in China. If you have some capital, come on over and start a Dunkin Donuts or Krispy Kreme franchise and I can guarantee you’ll clean up. I’ve noticed more donut shops opening up here than anything else. Hangzhou has at least 3 chains that specialize in donuts. They all do VERY well. When I came to Hangzhou last summer, we went to Hefang Jie. That’s like the big pedestrian market street in Hangzhou. While there it had one franchised building, a McDonald’s. While I was there a bit over a month ago it had added two stores specializing in baked goods, one entirely in donuts. These were, by the way, right down the street from other stores of the same franchise. And much like Dunkin Donuts on a Boston morning, they were all packed.

They have all sorts of wacky flavors you won’t see in western donut shops as well, for better or worse. Such flavors (as referred to colloquially by the expat community) as “that gross flossy meat stuff”, or “that stuff that might be cheese…” and of course, green fucking tea.

Green tea donuts are the most pleasant experience of the bunch though. This COULD be because it’s loaded up with a pound of sugar or not, but it does have a very distinctive tea flavor. I’d prefer a chocolate, strawberry or red bean (One of the few Eastern impositions that works wonders.) donut myself, but it ain’t too bad if only for the novelty.

There are also green tea [insert snack here]. I could fill a novel with all the cookies and cakes they’ve stuffed green tea into over here. What’s weirder? I’ve never even seen a Chinese person eat a green tea flavored snack.

PS. As you can notice, WordPress is for some reason unblocked over here again! We’re about to lose google, so you win some and lose some I guess.