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."

greetings from china! / past-blasting pt. whatever

helllllloooooo there, denizens of the commonwealth of livejournal!

so remember when jason left livejournal for greener pastures? how's that working out for him? well, not so well because jason doesn't really post habitually anymore but he bets that if he did then he would have a readership of like 5 million because blogspot is a happening place.

however, being behind the times does have one benefit, as it seems, which is that china decided that livejournal is apparently irrelevant enough to be let through its great firewall. for those of you behind the times, the great firewall means no facebook or youtube, some weird chinese version of google, and next to nothing allowed from the blogosphere except dear old LJ (and tumblr because i guess half the shit on there is pictures of ryan gosling and LOLcatz and whatnot, and actually trying to filter all the content would just be brain-numbing). i'm half-tempted to post something on here about freeing tibet or the falun gong just to see if anyone will notice. in the end, this means that any postings from the next two weeks as i spend my christmas break in fun places in the far east will be here. perhaps i'll try to import them over to the 'spot later.

anyway, i've only been here for a few hours, and all i can say is shanghai is fucking cold in the winter. i mean, probably at the same level or even warmer than seattle, and definitely warmer than madison, but the thing about shanghai is most buildings don't have central heating, so it's like a constant battle with the elements. the same AC unit sweating it out against the oppressive heat in the summer is now futilely trying to beat back the cold in my bedroom, and i'm pretty sure the floor will still be freezing when i wake up tomorrow.

oh well, it'll be just like the good old days. i haven't actually visited china in anything but summer since i was the ripe old age of four. i'm waiting for the rest of my family to get in tomorrow, and then on christmas we'll be journeying west to yunnan province, which is just north of tibet. i'm pretty stoked for that, since i feel like i'll finally have gotten some semblance of breadth when it comes to places visited in china.

in other news, my first quarter at the other UW is over. i did reasonably well considering how much it felt like i'd bombed those finals. also, it sounds so much less significant when i say "quarter" than "semester," even though it was really only 4 weeks shorter and just as freaking tough. but quarter is probably more accurate, seeing as the prof for our statistical inference course (the main reason why the quarter was hard) has already given us homework and reading for next quarter. in fact, the last week of class we started lecturing on next quarter's material and the guy seemed to have forgotten it wasn't january yet and made references to "last quarter."

last but not least, i'm taking it easy on the past-blasting today, so rest easy , you'll still be "winning". this is mostly because i'm in freaking china and i have no old drawings or literature to scan into the computer. be warned though, my dad just bought a portable scanner so whenever i next visit home, it's ON.

i'm just going to upload this MIDI composition i've been working on fixing up. the title is fitting, i suppose, as it's called "somewhere in the past"...it's circa 8th grade, probably my most fertile period of cranking out vaguely smooth jazz and video game music-inspired tunes, but i discovered you could import MIDI into GarageBand the other day and have been using some freeware software synths to give the tunes a little bit more substance and realism.

it was part of a trio of songs, the other two of which are entitled "future dreams" and "present tense." ugh yeah, i'm cringing right now too, but i've decided to embrace the dorkliness instead of trying to change all the titles like i did last time i put a remix of these songs out.

anyway, it's a slow ballad with some cool chord voicings i remember happening upon when fooling around on the piano one day, and features (less fake sounding now) solo viola and bassoon. enjoy!


Somewhere In The Past by R# Major

EDIT: nevermind, biostatistics ryan gosling is also blocked over here. maybe they just hate science.