And Now for Something Completely Different...

DURIAN:

So have you ever been to the fruit section of an Asian market, and seen a very large spiky brown fruit thing, that is of questionable edibility? That is a durian, a fruit that I have heard described as having a delicious taste with an intensely awful odor. Well, thanks to my travel buddy Jose, this morning I had my first opportunity to try this exotic fruit.

The Smell:

It sort of tastes smells like...actually I think Jose probably had the best description: "like garlic, onion armpit." And that my friends, is probably the most apt description that one could come up with. It's not that it smells bad per say, in fact, if someone was sauteing onions and garlic in olive oil, I would find the smell to be quite to delicious. It's just that, when a similar smell is coming from a great big brown, fruit-like thing, it's a bit odd.

The Appearance:

The whole things is kind of a shame because the durian is actually an incredibly well designed fruit. When you cut open the durian, you'll find neatly divided sections of large portions of yellow flesh that pull easily away from the pulp of the fruit. It's almost as if each section of the fruit becomes it's own single serving bowl of durian, perfectly portioned to feed one hungry, albeit somewhat daring, individual. The texture of the fruit is very soft, and somewhat gooey, almost like overripe banana. Incredibly easy to eat, you need merely to arm yourself with a spoon, and dig in to your heart's content. Of course, that assumes that your heart is content with garlic-onion-armpit smelling fruit.

The Taste:

Well, I can't say that I wasn't warned about eating durian. It's just that the experience of eating the fruit was completely different from what I had imagined. Based on previous descriptions, I was expecting something that smelled of rotting meat or vegetables, but had an intense, sweet, tropical fruit taste. Smell: bad, taste: good. Instead, it tasted like slightly sweet onion-garlic-armpit overripe banana. You can hold your nose, you can breath out when you take in a spoonful, but there's no getting past the fact that the smell is pervasive, and that we taste with our noses as well as our tongues. Add to this the soft, gooey, slippery texture, and you have a less than desirable dining experience. Granted, the one we ate may have been a little under ripe, but my other travel mate, Chris, described a ripe durian as having a sweeter taste, but at the trade off of smelling like rotten vegetables. Yech...

Good News, Bad News

Visa update: So our visas were submitted for extension today and yesterday. The good news is: our applications were accepted with virtually no trouble whatsoever (except for my friend Jose, his PSB agent made him go all the way back to our Hostel and pay for an additional night just to get a Temporary Residence Permit that was less then 24 hours old). The bad news is: they won't have our visas processed until Oct. 6, which means we don't get our passports back until Oct. 6, and we can't stray too far away from Beijing until we pick up our new visas. On top of this, they grant the 30 day extension from the day you submit your application, which means my visa is only valid until Oct. 24. This gives me 18 days to figure out where I want to settle in China (which definitely won't be in Beijing). Right now my plan is to go Chengdu. So, if I get there, and I decide that Chengdu isn't the place for me, I'll have maybe a week of breathing room to find a better place to settle before I have to resubmit for another extension. The whole thing is just a tremendous pain in the ass, and more likely than not I'm going to find myself in Hong Kong at the end of the month (where I can stay for 90 days without a visa) so that I have more time to consider what my next steo will be.

Anyway, that's about it for my boring life right now. I promise that I will try to start writing more about China and less about myself in the future.

Screw the Olympics

Okay, so back to the present. Right now I'm in Beijing with my new friends Chris, Ron and Jose, all of whom I met on my meditation retreat. The four of us have been here for about five days now trying to get our visa extended for another month, and it's been a complete bitch trying to get this done. Let's go through what the lovely municipality of Beijing requires for a visa extension shall we?

1. Your passport - easy enough
2. A temporary residence permit - In the best case scenario, these just means that we need proof that we stayed in a hostel the night before. In the worst case scenario, we need records of where we have stayed the whole time that we have been here.
3. An active account at Bank of China, and a current Certificate of Deposit (CD) demonstrating that you have the equivalent of $3000 US being held at said bank. - Really? I suppose that this is to demonstrate that you have enough funds to survive in the country for 30 days, but do you have any idea how long you can survive in China with 21,000 RMB?

After this is all sorted it out, and it is for two of us, we then have to go to the Public Security Bureau (PSB) and then maybe, just maybe, if they're in a good mood at the visa office, they won't kick us out of the country immediately. If we're incredibly lucky they might even grant us our 30 day extension. More likely than not however, they'll ask us for additional paperwork and we'll spend the next few days trying to get this sorted out. Either way this won't be resolved before our current visas expire, and if things get really messy we'll have to try and catch a train to Hong Kong, (where we can stay for up to 90 days without a visa) and then try to get our visas renewed there.

So what have I done all this time that I've been in Beijing? I saw the Lama temple with Ron for about 45 minutes, the four of us strolled through Temple of Heaven park for about 90 minutes, and we all paid a couple of visits to the Wangfujing shopping district. What happened with the rest of the five days that we have been here? Well...

Day 1: Arrived, found a place to stay, slowly became aware of the horrible pain we would have to endure in dealing with our visas, went to bed.

Day 2: Our first attempt at trying to find the PSB. We got lost on the way there, we were yelled at by some cleaning lady for strolling through a public park, and then we arrived just after the place closed at 4:30. On a lighter note, we did go to an amazing vegetarian buffet restaurant located near Lama Temple. I ate enough to make even my family in Naples proud.

Day 3: After determining that day 3 was definitely Saturday, we arrived back at the PSB to discover that day 3 was in fact Sunday. The PSB is closed on Sunday.

Day 4: Did some stuff, found out about more pain, can't really remember, memories seem to be melting together at this point...opened up our accounts at Bank of China. The two girls working there were extremely helpful, they spoke pretty goood English, and they remained quite cheerful given all the crap they had to put up with while trying to get all of our papers in order. By the end of it one of the girls was biting her lip pretty hard though. That night we went to see the Mummy 3 at a theatre in Wangfujing. The movie probably isn't great in the first place, but it was made far worse after it had been dubbed into Chinese, and we had to spend the whole movie reading English subtitles. The younger Chinese actress in the movie is stunning however (Isabella Leong). If anyone has her number please e-mail it to me.

Day 5: Went back to the Bank of China, put the girls there through a solid dose of additional pain, and then headed over to an office to pick up Temporary Residence Permits. Upon arrival, we discovered that our contact couldn't actually help us out unless we produced records documenting all of our activities in China. Obviously, this wasn't going to happen. Fed up with the whole business, Ron and I took a taxi over to the Lama Temple, and the two of us basked in the irony of a Tibetan Buddhist temple being located in the middle of Beijing. We then returned to the Qianmen area south of Tianenman, and booked ourselves in a hostel nearby that could actually provide us with a Temporary Residence Permit.

So, nearly a week in Beijing, with a lot of money spent, and we've accomplished almost nothing. There was a time when all you needed to do to get your visa renewed here was walk into a PSB with a valid passport and a bit of cash on hand. Now, thanks to the Olympics, China has become extremely strict about who is allowed into the country and for how long. A lot of people around here think that things should loosen up a lot once the Olympics and Paralympics fade into memory, but for now at least visa renewals are an enormous hassle. To add insult to injury, because I have an American passport, I actually have to pay much more for a visa in China than if I held a passport from Europe. This is thanks to US policy screwing over Chinese citizens when they come to visit the US, and making it much more expensive for them to enter the country, so the Chinese are retaliating by making visas much more costly for Americans. So stupid...

Muslim Districts Are Awesome

Sep. 1: I arrived in Xi'an. After losing my papers that I needed to find my way to the hotel and contact my meditation group, I was essentially lost in the city. Fortunately, there are Starbucks over here, they have WiFi, and I had my computer. I spent two days in the city initially, before leaving with my meditation group to go to Mt. Wudang, and then another three days there after finishing the retreat.

Xi'an

So, what did I do after returning to Xi'an? Did I go to see the Terra Cotta warriors? No. Did I check out the Wild Goose Pagoda or the Bell Tower? No. Did I do anything else even remotely related to Chinese history? No, so what exactly did I do with the time that I was in Xi'an? I hung out, with my new found friends, in the muslim district. Why? Because the muslim district is awesome. Basically the whole area is active from morning until late night, and the main streets and alleyways are filled with fun little shops, great restaurants and street peddlers. Tons of some of the most amazing dried fruit is available for sale pretty much everywhere, and really great street food and delicious sweets entice you wherever you walk. Plus, the locals in this area are particularly open minded and friendly, and you'll find a fair bit of English spoken here as well (although when the allyway sellers start using it to bargain, it's a little unnerving, as you no longer have the advantage of being able to discuss with your friends in private). Now that I'm in Beijing, I'm suffering from a bit of Muslim District withdrawal, because the Wangfujing street market area is much smaller and no where near as cool. Hopefully I'll find myself back in Xi'an before too long.

zen mind, zen mind

So, for those of you who have bothered to check my blog, you might have noticed that my postings have been few, save for one short post about my monkey incident. For these last couple of weeks I had been involved in an intensive Taoist meditation retreat on Mt. Wudang in central China. My experience was an amazing one (although at times disappointing), I spent my time with about 28 or so of the most wonderful people one could hope to meet, and I learned much about myself and my practice. Over the next week or so I will try to recount as much of my experience, mostly for my own benefit but also for those who might take interest in this somewhat bizarre life that I am leading right now.

BEIJING

Alright, so a bit of a recap on my trip starting from flying into Beijing on Aug. 29. Based on my previous posts, I'm sure that some might come to conclusion that I sent myself into some sort of far eastern nightmare, and that I'm having a miserable time right now. In fact, I even had a few friends and family send me e-mails (which I really appreciated) expressing concern that my time here has so far been last then postive. Actually, my time in Beijing wasn't entirely all that bad, although it was certainly a trying experience. Here's a brief summation of my time there:

• Flew into Beijing, everything was going great until I attempted to find a hotel; this did not go well.
• After an awful night at a really crappy hotel, I spent my morning visting Tianenmen Sq. and strolling around Sun-Yatsen park.
• Got lost trying to find my way back to the really crappy hotel.
  
• Had an incredibly fortuitous run in with an artist and his wife in one of the hutongs south of Tianenmen Sq. They struck up a conversation with me in English, and soon asked if I would like to stay in one of their bedrooms above their teashop for a very reasonable 100 yuan/night (about $15). I immediately moved out of aforementioned really crappy hotel and situated myself in a very comfortable hutong bedroom complete with working internet and shower.
• Had an enormous lunch (my only meal for the first 48 hours in country). My new hosts tried to help me out by writing out the name of a local dish on a slip of paper and instructing me to find a busy restaurant and hand the note to a waitress. Unfortunately, what I thought they had given me was the name of the restaurant itself and I spent about 30 minutes walking around town, asking people if they knew where "spicy chicken peanut cucumber...thing" was.
  
• Woke up very early the next morning, took a stroll around the few remaining hutongs of Beijing, and found myself feeling much better about being in China. After breakfast I headed over to the Forbidden City, where I met a guy wearing a Natty Boh shirt who was visiting China with some friends from Baltimore, and got swindled by an "art student" in the imperial gardens.
• Had an amazing meal at a hotpot restaurant at Xidan "cultural" Sq. (basically an enormous underground shopping mall that goes down about four floors) and passed out soon afterwards back at my hutong suite (I had seriously jet lag, China is 13 hours ahead of EST).
• Left early the next morning to catch my flight to Xi'an. My host helped me carry my bags and made sure that the taxi driver knew where to take me. Thank God for the kindness of strangers.

So, perhaps this might not have been the most exciting trip to Beijing, but it did provide me with a very necessary learning experience. I will actually be returning there shortly with a couple of new friends from the meditation retreat, and this excursion should prove to be much more fruitful.

Don't Carry Peanuts on Mt. Wudang

Was attacked by a monkey today, but I am otherwise fine. F*$%ing vermin.

FAIL!!!!

Got to Xi'an, lost the papers that I needed to meet up with the retreat group in this city. Thank God they a Starbucks here with wireless, and thank God my friends talked me into bringing my computer (I believe that was Basil and Amelia). I've been here for four days and I already almost got myself lost in a city. Oh boy...