And here's a picture of me standing in North Korea

For you dad. South Korea pictures to go up this weekend ... I promise!

Ooooh-wheee Soooo many funny things...

That I want to blog about and would gladly tell most of you in person, but probably shouldn't post publicly. Thus, I've decided to come up with a standard password for semi-sensitive posts. Email me if you want it.

Conversations with my hairdresser

I have a Chinese tutor three times a week for an hour. I've been working on catching up my reading, so I don't feel like my vocabulary or grammar is improving much. Sometimes I worry about that, but then I remember that I started learning to read because I'm at a point where if I don't, it's going to hurt my ability to progress.

So it was reassuring last night to go out and get my hair did down the street. I've used the same guy a couple times. And while it's not quite on par with the cuts I used to get near Rodeo Drive ... 30 kuai ($4.50) for a wash, cut and blow isn't anything to sniff at.

My guy, Hui, is from Chongqing. We chatted the whole way through. When a Malaysian guy walked in, he was able to tell me he was an aboriginal dancer performing at the Expo. We debated whether or not the terracotta warriors are boring. And he told me I did a pretty smart job cutting my bangs, for an amateur. 

Hui is especially curious about my "mixed blood" boyfriend. He keeps telling me he must be very handsome because all bi-racial people are good looking. And I keep telling him, yeah, some. I'll bring him in sometime, talk to me then.

Then Hui asks me if he speaks Japanese, because he knows Taiwanese people who can. I explain no, no - his family came to Taiwan in 1949. Hui says, 'ah this is Chinese people's very special year.' And you can really see the pride in his face when he says it.

And then I say, yeah, but that's the year my man's people "pao zou" (ran away) to Taiwan. 

Hui gets a huge laugh out of this, "Oh! You're very lihai - we wouldn't dare say that to your boyfriend!"

I left with a decent haircut, and it was nice to have an hour of conversation practice that didn't really make me work that hard.

I blogged about Liu Xiaobo last week, but there's even more good news! A bunch of Party veterans spoke out against censorship and called for free speech. I could piss and moan about China all day (aaaaaall day), but there are things to really be optimistic about. Exciting stuff.

Medical Diagnosis via Text

The power was cut at our office today so we're all working from home and I'm taking the opportunity to blog a bit. This is too funny to wait and I started working at 7 a.m. and will probably be working well past six, so that's my justification:

As some of you may remember, I had my first cancer scare at the visa renewal office. While I waited, I took my first look at the report from my immigration health check and wound up texting my boss so he could use the Internet and tell me if I was going to die from "bladder poly" or "scoliosis."

Turns out, I'm not. I have a janky spine and a blip on me organs, nothing interesting. This is just how the PRC delivers health info: There's no assuring voice, no explanation, just a stack of paperwork one functionary hands you so you can pass it to another functionary. And in the interim, you have enough time to peek at it and go, "oh shit, is that serious?"

This morning the tables turned, my friend Jess is in the visa office and texted me: "Omg what is sinus bradycardia? Google it! Health thing says I have it! Am I dying?"

To which I reply: "It means you have a slow heart rate. You'd probably excel at free diving, says wikipedia."

Her: "I do excel at free diving! I was just talking about that the other day - thanks!"

At least we all have friends to text message while we wait in that office. That significantly diminishes anxiety time.

Crunch Week

All the magazine copy is due next Monday. And yesterday I didn't accomplish anything I wanted to because I spent half my day subediting a piece the government requires us to run (yeah, they can do that) that came with the suggested headline: "Altruism should be put forward in the human nature."

AAAAH!

Sometimes I get to go out and talk to cool people and learn neat things and I think my job is awesome. And then I always have to hustle back to the office and complete something that makes me want to tear my hair out.

But a cool thing happened this week - some guy contacted me through Facebook because he read my article and wants to interview one of the people I profiled for a job! She's really excited because she's been looking for something new.

I love when things like that happen based on something I wrote. One time I wrote a little story on a charity dog wash being held by a second grade class and someone who read about it wound up giving 1000 to their cause. That was pretty cool too.

Toodles!

Liu Xiaobo!

Oooh, I'm being bad and blogging from work but this is so exciting! Human rights activist Liu Xiaobo just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Last year he was sentenced to 11 years in jail for dissidence.

From the BBC:

Liu, 54, was jailed for 11 years on Christmas Day last year for drafting Charter 08, which called for multiparty democracy and respect for human rights in China.

Last month, the Chinese foreign ministry warned the Nobel committee not to award him the prize, saying it would be against Nobel principles.

Mid-Trip Update

I spent several fun days in Seoul, overnighted in the city's fanciest digs, stepped into the axis of evil (albeit in a UN building located right on the demarcation line in the joint security area), drank soju for the first and hopefully last time...(pictures of all this to follow when I get back to Shanghai)

The low point of my trip was Sunday night. I took a bus to the coast and checked into a motel. The old lady at the front desk made a mistake counting my change and came banging on my door five minutes later demanding I return 20,000W (20USD) to her. I refused, because I wasn't about to pay for my room twice. She explained herself several times, demanded I count my money, tried to intimidate me, yelled, said her husband would be mad... She was just an old lady but having anyone try to scare you when you're alone in a foreign place is kind of unnerving. Finally she gave up. Then I went out for dinner and some guy mistook me for a Russian prostitute. Dinner was blah, I went back to my room to watch TV and it occured to me I could change my flight back to Shanghai...

But Monday morning the old lady apologized several times (she recounted her till and realized I was right) and I made for the mountains. Blue skys, trees, pretty scenery - it's nice up here. And when I was on a hiking trail I ran into a friend from Shanghai! So today I'm meeting up with her group and we're all traveling to the Penis Park in Samcheok together (apparently some sort of ancient Korean homage to the phallus).

I don't think I've spent so much time concentrated on my inner monologue since before I had siblings. I used to talk to myself all the time as an only chld, and have pretty much avoided extended periods of time alone since then. I've had writing instuctors over the years talk about how writers "crave solitude" and I always used to worry about it because, um, I don't.

This trip has been a challenge, but I knew that going in and I wanted to see if I could do it. The traveling part is easy enough but I don't especially care for being alone. That said, I met up with friends of friends in Seoul and was surrounded by friendly people on my DMZ tour. So it's been solo-travel lite. But the hostels are pretty empty, as it's off season, and the other travelers I've seen around haven't really been friendly (though I've gotten plenty of "Welcome to Korea!" from Koreans, which is nice).

As for the other travlers - Sometimes you go places and there's that immediate connection - "hey! we're both traveling!" and then sometimes there's this passive "I'm going to ignore you because you're infringing on my lone white traveler experience" thing. I smiled to people I passed on the hiking trail yesterday and plenty of the white folks didn't smile back! What's up with that?