Phone Blog

This message brought to you courtesy of my iPhone and the free wifi in the Ulan Bator train station. (Thanks Steve Jobs, Al Gore, forward-thinking Mongolian administrators, human progress et al.)

What a week. Buzzfeed published the article I've been working on for the past month and a half. Technology has not progressed far enough for me to embed a link, so if you want to see said article and have not already, Google North Korean and Buzzfeed. It's called:

Was An American College Student Kidnapped By North Korea.

It went over well. I received my lifetime's validation: a retweet by a New Yorker staff writer. Aw yeeeah.

Now Mommy Dearest and myself are one week into our Transsiberian adventure. We saw Beijing, we saw a bit of Mongolia, tonight we head to Irkutsk.

I probably won't post pictures until the end, but if you can't wait that long my Instagram handle is lesleslielie.

We found the food wanting on the China-to-Mongolia train leg, so now we're prepared: we have a suitcase full of instant noodles, sausage, cheese, pâté and three (yes, three!) bottled of wine, so we ought to be good.

Texas!

I arrived in Austin Saturday night. I went to Houston for two days once at the end of college, but that was just a jam-packed interview session (for a job I didn't get, wah-wah). So this is my first time really seeing Texas.

The sky really does seem bigger and bluer. We've had a ton of good food. I had my haircut at a hipster barbershop, and within two days I saw two women with the outline of the state of Texas for tattoos. I think I'll like it here.

I go back to Oregon this coming Saturday, then I'll be back at the end of October once my mom and I complete our long-awaited Trans-Siberian trip.

A brief summary of first impressions: People are friendly and more small-chatty than they are in equivalent-sized cities in the northwest. Lots of people have tattoos. Grocery stores sell Catholic candles. All the UT sorority girls wear oversized t-shirts and short shorts. This reminds me of what I used to wear to bed when I was 8 and also makes me feel extremely old and out of touch. People say "y'all" a lot. There are a lot of food trucks. I've been getting puzzled looks from James' friends when I ask things like "So what's walkable around here?" because I keep forgetting that in the US, even in most cities, people don't walk to places. Plus it's reeeeeally hot, so you wouldn't want to anyways.

I'll feel better once I have a job situation sorted out, but I do think I'll enjoy living here.

Monthly Update

It's been a month. I owe a blog. I know some of you are like, "When you don't update, I forget to check!" To which I say... get an RSS feed. Feedly works nicely for me now that Google Reader is kaput.

I haven't posted mostly because my days are very similar. I get up, I write, I hangout with family, exercise, occasionally cook, go to bed and do it all over again. My Instagram feed is all pictures of slugs and the meals I sometimes I make. Wild times.

I write in the morning. A lot of people write novels in the morning. I reckon this is because the task is so daunting and the imperative to make marginal progress so horrendous that if you don't do it straight away it just looms over the whole day.

I thought I would be close to a full first draft by now (ha ha, joke's on me!). I'm close to half way. It seems kind of crazy that people start doing this and actually finish, and that some people do it more than once.

In recent weeks I developed some mild but persistent anxiety that I was spending an awful lot of time on something that might be complete, irredeemable garbage. But last week I went to the Napa Valley Writers Conference and the chapters I showed were well received, so that was encouraging.

I've been organizing travel photos this week, which makes me nostalgic. I miss China, or rather, I miss my community that was in China, much of which has scattered to the wind anyways. Sometimes I'm afraid nothing will ever be quite so exciting. Here I was so juiced to fly a couple states over on a freelance assignment -- I got to fly to Pyongyang and Urumqi for work when I lived in Shanghai. But I have to remind myself that I've never really been an adult in the good old US of A and I really need to give it a try.

The other tough thing about this writing-a-novel thing is, pretty much, you have to write a novel inside. And the weather in Florence is always best before noon, when the wind picks up. After all that time in polluted Shanghai, I feel guilty sitting at a computer instead of walking on the beach. Who knows when (if ever) I'll have this much time to walk on the beach again! So I've decide that this month I'm going to go a bit easier, try to write in the afternoons and get outside more. The novel is going to take a long time anyways, I want to hike and kayak the coast while I can.

Happy 4th!

This is my first time celebrating in the States since 2008 and my first time celebrating at home since 2006!

2012 - Beijing (That's Beijing)
2011 - Shanghai (That's Shanghai)
2010 - Shanghai (That's Shanghai)
2009 - Taipei (teaching English)
2008 - Seattle. And I had to work! But I was covering the parade and I interviewed Captain Sig from Deadliest Catch. (interning at Seattle Times)
2007 - Anchorage (interning at Anchorage Daily News)
2006 - Florence (ranger aide! Honeyman State Park)

Something on my Dad's satellite TV broke this week and my reaction was, "Don't you still have a warranty for that?" And both my parents looked at me: "Obviously not, it's seven years old ... Although to you it must seem like about four months!"

So much bouncing around, I'm really enjoying my extended sojourn on the coast. Today I am making chocolate cream pie and blueberry pie. Easy access to baking supplies and resplendent grocery stores are definitely two of the best things America has going for it.

Enjoy your holiday!

Best Photos from Yunnan

Most of these are on my Facebook already, but for continuity's sake, and since my whole trip log is here, I wanted to post here as well - albeit more than a month late. 

Flying Tigers wing at the Kunming Museum

Tibetan mastiff up north close to Tibet

A French lady, one American, an Aussie, and two Israelis hike to Yubeng Cun.

Along the way to Yubeng Cun

Temple in Yubeng Cun

Rock shrines made by others who went before us on the hike in

A bunch of prayer flags near the sacred waterfall

More Yubeng Cun

Hiking out

Yak attack!

Tiger Leaping Gorge

show off

The scrub brush in "heaven's first bathroom"

Sign asserts that, seriously, this bathroom is heavenly (it had a great view)

At the bottom of the gorge

This lady sold me honey

Delicious noodles made of very mild cheese

This lady sold me cheese noodles

This man sold hair (I did not buy any).

Pretty sure this is one of those inspirational signs brought to you courtesy of the local CCP.  Maybe one day I'll get motivated and translate it.

Goat cheese fried in honey? Yes please.

Another shrine along the sacred waterfall hike

The Wrong Wallet

In coming weeks, I'm going to post a few odds and ends about my trip. First order up is - what is the exact kind of wallet you should not bring on a four-month journey through Southeast Asia?

The answer: a wallet that looks like a giant wad of cash.

I brought this wallet because my normal one is a big purple pocketbook thing, too cumbersome for travel. Plus, I wanted to keep it simple, I knew on a day-to-day basis I would only need a bit of cash and maybe one card.

The wallet was a farewell gift from a friend in Beijing. She also gave me a couple stamps from North Korea (she was privy to my obsession).

I didn't realize my wallet looked like a huge wad of cash until I was in Vietnam and the guy renting me my scooter said, "Oh - I  thought you had a lot of money!" At that point, I had about six weeks left in my trip and probably should've traded it out, but I was cheap and lazy.

I was also inobservant. Since my friend had given me the North Korean stamps, I assumed the wallet was done up like North Korean money - it actually looks like an old Chinese Mao-era bill. People continued to ask about it as I made my way through Vietnam, Laos and southern China and I always gave the wrong answer, "oh this is what North Korean money looks like." Finally a Chinese person pointed out to me that, "it looks like old Chinese money..." Then I really took a look at it, and they were correct.

I wish I'd noticed earlier, because I got the most reactions to the wallet in China, and it would've been nice to contextualize them. Almost all of the reactions were positive. A lot of these reactions were just in passing, so people were maybe just being friendly. But I definitely got a few congratulatory (nostalgic?) old people, "this is very good!" Which is always a bit strange, since as a Westerner you learn from those ninth grade world history courses onwards that the Mao Era was categorically horrible.

I got one emphatic negative reaction. I didn't pay it any mind at the time because I still thought it looked like a Korean bill and I was in a hurry. I'm pretty sure the guy was some kind of driver. He was in his 30s or 40s. "This is bad." He said it two or three times, to be sure I heard it, and shook his head. Now I wish I could've picked his brain a bit.

Luckily, I never had any incidents. No one tried to snatch my not-that-giant wad of cash. 

I'm on The Hairpin

I interviewed my Mom for The Hairpin about the Better Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow award she received in high school. Check it out here.