Thanks to Blogger for sucking:

More HIGHLIGHTS:

- Yes, we got food poisoning, or maybe a stomach flu - there was some debate about that. It hit me first, like a freight train. One minute, I’m taking pictures of Lijiang at night, getting good stuff, and the next, I’m screaming at a taxi driver in Mandarin to move his ass. I got in the room and exploded like a piñata from both ends. I lost a couple of my best pairs of underwear. I spent that night delirious and incontinent. Not good times. I woke the next day feeble but alive. Another of the gang, a great girl who spent four years in MALI, also, improbably got sick. Like her, I figured my immune system was strong after my travels abroad. Guess not. Her stories of Mali make me feel like a complete wuss. The rest of us fell one by one, each getting sick in turn. One of the guys who heckled me the next day, talking about greasy yak meat and pork-face-flavored gruel, was only a few hours later puking in front of a restaurant. Taste the karma!

- One of the gang talked incessantly about his business and how he wanted to set up some manufacturing here in the mainland. Whatever floats your boat - beats somebody talking about their cat for a week, but only barely. I didn’t realize this was a business-development convention, though. He asked me and Sifu for contacts, to which we said, "Wait until we get back to the South." We were on a tour, for God’s sake. When we got back, instead of mentioning it again, he bolted. He was out trying to make business contacts by hanging around in bars. I wish him luck, but he went about the whole thing in the worst possible way. Didn’t show up for a several days of events, talked trash about what he did show up for, and then started a rumor to which sifu (the tour organizer and our kung fu teacher) bristled. One very tense confrontation later, and we’re all friends again. The lesson: Choose your traveling companions wisely.

- Don’t try and be vegan in China, especially on a prearranged tour. It’s not easy, and annoying to the rest of the gang. Learn to be flexible. "When in Rome…" mean anything to you? If you say you’re vegan here, they stare at you as if you just said you like to eat dirt. To a nation of people who still frequently don’t get enough to eat, and certainly not enough meat, it’s baffling. I suspect anyone from our Great Depression would be similarly dumbfounded.

- "Obnoxious American" is inadequate for the way some of my mates behaved, yelling, catcalling, being loud. It was funny, usually, but some of them were really bad travelers. "Man, I can’t wait to have a steak or get some Mcdonald’s!" "You’ve only been here three days!" I replied. And a few of the guys couldn’t handle the attention they received. They were always convinced that everyone was trashtalking. I told them, "Everything is different here, including customs about staring, laughing, pointing. Forget what you know." But they couldn’t get past it, to the point they got bitter as hell and started cursing loudly, everywhere we went.

- What happens in China stays in China, but I have to share this. One of the fellas was in a "VIP room," meaning he had paid to get laid. The woman undressed him and put his stuff in a closet while he took a steam. Next door, a fellow member of the gang was a little short on cash. He knocked on guy #1’s door. Guy #1 got out of the steam room and noticed that his money belt was out of his pocket and there was a towel rolled up and stuffed in the corner. He unraveled the towel and his gold chain fell out. The girl walked in and her jaw dropped. Busted. Guy #1 grabbed his stuff and stormed out. He then proceeded to yell at the english-speaking concierge until he got a partial refund. Because of the commotion, the concierge then went to all the rooms and told the girls to make their customers very happy. This enabled guy #2 to get some relief without going to the ATM.

- Ok, this too. Two of the guys without girlfriends or wives were sharing a room in Foshan. They went to a club and danced with a couple of girls. There was a complete language barrier, but they somehow managed to eventually convince them, against their friends’ advice, to come back to the hotel room. There they "talked" (drawing on a napkin and playing pantomime) and drank some more. When the "conversation" reached a lull, one guy stepped up to the plate. He pulled out some condoms and tossed them on the bed. Admirably bold move. The girls looked at him, giggled, then went into the bathroom for, in the guys’ words, "an hour and a half." When they came out, it was dueling headboards until morning.

- driving through Yunnan province, we stopped for water and gas at some remote place in the mountains. We got out to stretch our legs and one of the gang ran up to a tree and started hopping around like an ape on roids. "Weed, weed! Ohmigod, it’s Weed!" Sure enough, right there by the side of the road was a huge tall tree of marijuana, unmolested and unharvested. The lady whose house the plant was next to said, "What? Everyone around here grows this kind of tree." The crew was a little too excited, if you ask me. They were talking about it for hours. One guy said it made the whole trip for him. The guy who discovered it callously tried to take half of it with him, until I mentioned that it was in fact in the lady’s garden and he might not want to steal. Plus getting on a flight reeking of roadside leaf might not be the best way to avoid a Chinese prison raping.

- visiting the "Sports Island" in GuangZhou (Canton.) This is where all of the pro athletes and Olympians from this area train. It’s a whole island dedicated to nothing but the sporting life. It’s restricted, but we were able to walk around and see the kickboxers, Wu Shu performers, gymnasts, female powerlifters, ping pongers, and basketball players. They had three seven footers, one of them female. And we passed by the tennis players, runners, and soccer players as well. It was inspiring. I’ve been stuck so long behind a keyboard and jelly bellies that it reminded me how cool it was to once do nothing but sport. The pure, winded, exhilarated feeling of enjoying the body to the fullest - a pure celebration of being animate. I miss that. I didn’t want to leave the island. Maybe I’ll take a little of it with me.

- meeting with the owner of MonaLisa Ceramics, a huge company based near Foshan. The factory is valued at US$50 million or something like that. We called him the Chinese Bill Gates. I’d met him before, but I don’t think he remembered. He took us out to a spectacular lunch of fish, shellfish, beetles, snake, and other crazily good stuff. Our tour guides were shocked to be included in such an extravagant meal. It was here at the lunch that the Chinese Godfather’s teenage son said, "Jon, you’re a good husband. If I was a woman, I’d marry you." How do you respond to that safely?

- Back in Foshan, we ate at the same underground restaurant I had eaten at three years before. We had leopard, snake, snake heart, scorpions, ants, baby butterflies, silkworms, grubs, cockroaches, and some other earthy stuff. Elephant and Giraffe were sold out. Think I’m kidding?

- one guy letting fly the ultimate hail-mary, trying to hit on my wife’s friend on the bus to his departing flight. He tried to communicate by writing basic English and Simon-in-the-land-of-chalk-drawings scribbles in a notebook. Some of the boys were quietly laughing their asses off. But when he busted out the Costco card and said, "Here, this says I’m a V.I.P.," it almost killed a guy. Tears were spraying out of one man’s eyes, and he stopped breathing, then made me swear to get him copies of whatever was written in the notebook. Really good times.

- eating at a Chinese dinner table takes some practice. When to turn the wheel, take food, when to use chopsticks - it’s all very new to someone whose dinner usually comes with prepackaged ketchup. One guy got so fed up by his tablemate’s behavior that he stormed off. His missed the whole day, including his surprise birthday party we had planned that night. We searched the city at dinnertime, then reluctantly went to a club without him. We waited at the hotel until late, then as we were walking away, my eagle-eyed wife spotted him sitting by himself on the street. We then had a nice reunion and wished him happy birthday, ate some cake. One guy was drunk and in his grill the entire time, "Eat that cake, Ni**er! Eat that cake!" Funny, and tense at the same time. Being white, was I allowed to laugh at that joke?

a few more random pics from the 4000 I have so far.