various highlights from the yunnan trip

some combination of the good, the bad, and the fairly amusing:

- christmas day: eating a dinner of wild mushroom fondue and local delights such as tiny mangoes, a strange fruit called mangosteen, and albino pomegranates.

- the weather: i miss it already, dammit...sitting in this arctic bedroom it's hard to believe i deluded myself into thinking it was spring for a few days.

- it's true: there actually is only one time zone across all of mainland china, which means that in the southwest the sun doesn't rise until 8 am, and sets close to 7 pm, whereas here in shanghai it rises almost at 6 and sets before 5.

- the tour bus: we got awoken at the rude hour of 6 am every day (remember, 2 freaking hours before sunrise)...but to make up for it, our first guide was an absolute storytelling machine. i'm pretty sure i never heard the word "um" come out of his mouth. major props.

- jade dragon snow mountains: not only were they above 15,000 feet in elevation (there was a stand selling mini oxygen tanks and everything), they were damn beautiful and the weather was perfectly sunny for pictures, which will come tomorrow hopefully.

- the terrible food: for some reason, along the way, the trip planners decided to save money and take us to restaurants where they would order some seriously uninspired junk...not joking, i could probably make a better lunch if you gave me some vegetables, a pot of boiling water and salt. as of our travelling mates complained: "we wake up earlier than chickens and eat worse than pigs!"

- the rampant commercialism: another reason i think it would significantly less lame just to plan your own trip to kunming - after a few days of being fed thinly veiled advertisement to buy overpriced silver, jade, tea, medicines, and whatever else they had the opportunity to pitch, it just got old. i mean there is something seriously wrong with a trip where you get herded through the historic district of Dali on little cars in like half an hour, missing any opportunity to take good pictures, but then stay in an obscenely huge gift shop for 3 hours full of things you don't need to buy.

- the old cities: one of the nights we weren't being taken to bad restaurants or advertised to, we got to roam around the historic district of Lijiang, which was really quite picturesque, with a merry street full of pubs that you get to by taking tiny bridges across the characteristic moats that run through the historic streets of old Chinese cities. unfortunately my family has become a little too lame to go prowl the night with, but this would definitely be one of the places i would come back to if i were to visit the province again.

- the tea garden: some beautiful and exquisite architecture and fine art was on display at this private estate in the Dali prefecture that apparently cost 80 million RMB to make, one of the few places we visited where there weren't any blatant attempts to sell us shit. the tea was also really fun, served in three courses, one full-bodied and bitter, the next milky and sweet, and the last filled with the most confusing combination of spices. also pictures to come soon.

- the rock forest: one of china's national "geoparks," full of interesting stone structures left over from an age of being part of the sea bed. again, this would have been more fun if we hadn't been hurried along with a giant gaggle of people but we did manage to get some good pictures in.

- the flower market: the culmination of trying to sell us shit was the last day, where we were brought to Kunming's local "market..." at first I was thinking "oh cool, we're getting a tour of the local artisan trades" or whatever...but it turned out to be another giant gift shop arranged like a maze so that in order to get out, you literally had to pass by every single product that they were selling.

- and of course, the awesome english translations on signs...including gems like "no burning," "please don't fall in the water," "do not tock the gondola," and "be careful of landslide."

oh hey, how's life?

why hey yourself, blogosphere. it's certainly been awhile. i just noticed all my previous attempts to move all my old posts and comments over from livejournal, which is kind of pathetic. i've half a mind to delete them, but i guess we'll just let the record stand for now. perhaps someday when blogspot gets its crap together you'll even see the old angsty stuff and the new stuff together on one page without me (pathetically) manually cross-posting every entry. now isn't that exciting?

so...life. well, what can i say? the heartbreak came and went. it knocked me down hard for a few days. actually, i was literally on the floor for quite some time, because the stupid 50 dollar wooden contraption IKEA calls a "bed" finally gave out and i've slept on the floor ever since, and i sleep a freaking lot when i have something to be upset about. i'm pretty sure i've never skipped so much class in my whole life, but whatever, those classes needed skipping anyway.

when do these things ever not suck, right? and especially because it's supposed to be really sweet when lovers visit each other for thanksgiving or whatever. i'm not saying it wasn't, because it was actually pretty nice, but it just really killed me to look back upon it after things fell apart. to remember feeling the happy anticipation of setting out for the airport on wednesday afternoon, the quiet peace of relaxing on the (actually structurally intact) couch with a drink in hand after getting us both back home with all the luggage, the bright-eyed precious fluttering of walking hand-in-hand through the prematurely christmas'ed-out shopping mall. you get the idea.

and the bittersweet sadness just kind of came in this overwhelming wave a few hours after we said our goodbyes at the airport, and threatened to engulf my entire life. i was really fearing that i would be swept away, so little did i have to hold onto after only being a seattleite for three months, and i reacted to the threat with blind anger. i may have said some slightly not-okay things. but they were only the tip of the massively offensive iceberg of resentment and anger that had built up in my brain.

i was just angry at the suddenness of it all, at the total lack of grace demonstrated by deciding to break up with someone after a stupid, meaningless fight, but letting them take you out for a wonderful and romantic night on the town before harshly bringing them back to reality just two kisses away from the security line at the airport. it hurt in a way quite unlike anything i was used to, and i hope my need for some sort of outlet was justifiable.

but, as is pretty evident from the fact that i'm writing about this, it did kind of subside as the week wore on and my class attendance fell by 100%. i kind of realized that, being the sappy and hopeless romantic that i am, i would have been in the same amount of distress given any way it could have possibly happened otherwise. i mean, who am i to say i would've handled the situation more level-headedly if we had slept in separate beds (here i would be saying "beds" with a unignorable note of irony) and kept our distance from each other on saturday? no, i'd probably just be stewing just as hard about how we had wasted the opportunity to have a good time together.

so that's it, i guess. i've worked it out in my head and am no longer angry at her. i do apologize for how i acted in the few days after it occurred, but again, i hope you can understand why i did and take heart in my resolution to move on constructively. i do have a little lingering general bitterness towards the whole world and whatnot, which i guess is not unexpected, and things aren't really so much worse than before.

maybe it's being balanced out by my relief at not living a complicated, semi-official relationship anymore. not to say i don't miss it every hour of the day...i'm just trying to grin and bear it, i guess, and move on with my life. realize that we came to a mutual decision to part, however roundabout that decision was, and actually follow through with the separation like adults, without clinging onto the past or resenting the hell out of each other. the physical distance actually helps, i guess. as do my wonderful friends, bless you all. especially the two or three of you who actually read this...keep in mind that this blog post can and should be used against me if i ever revert to crybaby mode again and need an intervention.


well, that was definitely not the most concise of summaries. you asked. well maybe you didn't, but i told anyway. props if you actually read the whole thing. in other news, for those of you who haven't talked to me lately, i am in seattle (duh) for graduate school, making music with a new band, trying to decide what to do with my life (just because i'm in grad school doesn't mean i have shit figured out), fighting a losing battle against messiness in my new apartment, fighting an even worse losing battle against bad sleeping habits, fighting a decent battle against the urge to eat out at every meal, learning how to socialize with chinese people ... among other things. there are a lot of things that suck right now and need to be fixed, and hopefully i'll have the energy to tend to them soon enough.

but those are other stories, and other novella-length rants, for other times.

goodnight!

p.s. of course i still miss you, livejournal, and your silly emoticons too.