Life In The Fast Lane

The Wife was watching one of her Chinese talk shows on the low definition television set when a commercial advertisement came on. I do not ordinarily notice these things as the commercials sound just like the shows. Everything has people screaming at each other over loud background music with wacky sound effects on top. But instead of digital penny whistles and muted trombones I heard the Eagles singing a song. This caught my attention because it is not the sort of thing one hears on Chinese television. Ever. The commercial was advertising their concert in 香港 in three weeks. I pointed out to the Wife that they were the band that I was trying to watch in Bangkok. I wondered aloud if tickets were still available and if going to 香港 just to see a band might be a bit much. She casually mentioned that they would be in 台北. This piqued my interest. 台北 is cheaper and easier to get to than 香港.

My Internet told me nothing useful and the Wife’s Internet was doing things for the Wife. She is the type of person who will drop whatever she is doing to help her family and friends. If someone is in the hospital she will go. Right now. She even helped a friend get a pacemaker. No minor task, I say. But when it comes to doing things for me she would rather wait until later. And later usually means procrastinating until there is no point in doing it at all. Looking up concert information is not quite as important as heart surgery, but it would be nice to be somewhere on her list of priorities. I know I will never be above her mother, father, shopping, brother and sisters, eating, the rest of her family, complaining, friends, but I would like to at least be on the list.

Eventually I got her to do what I wanted. And she complained every step of the way. At first I simply wanted to know if they were indeed playing here. The Wife has a habit of stating assumptions as fact. Of course they would come here. Why not? Because very few “Western” bands come this side of 香港. Not many play 香港 either. Asia in general, outside of Japan, is mostly ignored by artists who are not from Asia. The Eagles are not the most popular band around here. They are not a big KTV band. Outside of “Desperado” I doubt any KTV machine anywhere in the country has any of their songs. I have never seen any of their CDs in any store. I doubt many of my students have Eagles posters next to 5566 and Hello Kitty. This is a place where Paul McCartney CDs are hard to find.

But according to the Wife’s Internet, Eagols were here with their #1 Super Hitsongs “Hotel of California” and “Peace and easy Feelings”. Good enough.

The concert was sold out, she said. So much for that. I assumed it would be since I was just hearing about it while they were advertising future shows. Then she told me it was on Saturday, the day of our wedding reception. I could not have gone anyway. But then she said that another day was added since the first day sold out almost immediately. When I asked her if that was also sold out she told me to wait. Every piece of information comes slowly and requires me to ask what I consider an obvious question. I then have to wait for the next tiny fragment of what I want to know before asking the next obvious question. This process used to bother me and I still wonder why she cannot anticipate the next question, but I am used to it by now.

The additional show was on Sunday. In three days. I assumed it had to be sold out but the Wife said it was not. So I asked her how much tickets might cost. There was more waiting. When she found the website that sold the tickets she showed me their seating map. It looked like any other stadium concert map. This was surprising for several reasons. After a difference of opinion on how to read the map, we decided to do it my way since that only required one step, while hers required loading a separate page to see the seat section and another page to see a price list. Changing pages is unpleasant with the Wife because she will not wait more than half a second for it to load. She either closes it and tries again or opens another window to do something else.

There were many seats available, though the most expensive floor seats were gone. This did not bother me since they were far too expensive and I do not particularly care for floor seats unless I am near the front. I like the tiered effect of the bleachers. Twenty rows of people bouncing up and down in front of you on the same level is never fun. Then it occurred to me that this place would be full of tiny Chinese people. Sitting on the floor would not be so bad.

After I asked the Wife how I might go about purchasing one of these available seats and waited for her to find the answer, she said that we could not buy tickets from the website that sold the tickets. Some people might find this peculiar, but I have lived here for some time. I would be surprised if the website that sold the tickets actually sold the tickets. But there was a ticket office where one could buy tickets by phone. So I asked her if we could do that, and waited for her to find the answer. We could not since we were doing this after they had closed and it was too late for them to mail tickets to us anyway. I asked the Wife why the tickets had to be mailed. In my opinion there should be a way to pick them up at the stadium. So I waited for her to find that information. There was, of course, no way to buy tickets and pick them up at the stadium. That is crazy talk. I then offered the opinion that it is rather stupid to have something on sale that no one can buy since it is too late to mail anything. The system assumes that people will buy tickets well in advance. The system also failed to realize that in this case the second show was added well after well in advance had come and gone.

The Wife then remembered that we live in a country where there is a 7-11 on every corner and every single one of them is open 24H. But I still had to ask her if it was possible to buy tickets there, even though she knew what we were looking for and she was the one who brought up 7-11. So she looked into that while I waited. She eventually decided that we could and that we should go there tomorrow. I suggested that tomorrow might not be ideal as we both had to work and that was the day she was going to do all of her last minute wedding reception tasks. She likes to do as much as she possibly can at the last minute so her day was fairly full. I thought we should go to the 7-11 downstairs right then and there. She did not want to because that would interfere with her policy of putting things off. She also completely lost interest when she realized that she would be unable to go to the concert. Since Sunday night is almost always followed by Monday morning, and since she had to work on Monday morning there was simply no way she could be in 台北 at midnight and at work seven hours later. I could do it since I always go to work much later in the day and I did not have to work at all on that particular Monday as it was a minor public holiday commemorating the massacre of thousands of innocent civilians at the hands of a previous regime’s government forces.

After I convinced her to go with me all the way downstairs even though it was not for her, we still had to go to the website that sold the tickets but did not since it had the seating map. I wanted to write down a few seat numbers from which to choose. The Wife assumed that 7-11 would have the same seating map. I relied on my wealth of experience in the inefficient ways of the Chinese to deduce that there would be no such map at 7-11. One of us was correct. I seem to be complaining about her a tad too much here so I will be discrete and not mention that she was completely in the wrong.

The easiest stage of this night’s ordeal was buying my ticket at 7-11. We simply told a small machine what we wanted and it printed out a receipt. The receipt was given to the sleeping clerk and he printed out what looked like it could be a concert ticket. One of the greatest aspects of living here is that one can do pretty much anything at any 7-11 at any hour. You can buy junk food, drinks, fresh eggs, thousand-year-old eggs, stale bread, phone cards, disposable underwear, concert tickets, pay utility bills, credit card bills (below a certain limit), parking fines, make copies, scan, fax and print photographs. But they do not have Pepsi.

I had no idea where the stadium was, but I was not about to ask the Wife to help me find it. She had just spent an hour doing something for me in which she gained nothing. We were at her limit. I assumed I could find it later. Just as I assumed that going to 台北 and getting a hotel for the night would be as easy as it always is. I was completely in the wrong.

Life with the Chinese
Surely makes you loose your mind
Life with the Chinese, 哎哟

The Wife spent the day after all of this excitement doing wedding reception business. After I got home from work I went to my Internet to find this mystery stadium. My Internet was uncooperative. The Chinese websites were all message boards with people talking about whether they would go or not. Mostly not. There was no useful information. But I did learn that one middle aged Chinese virgin would rather die a thousand deaths than go to an Eagles concert. Unfortunately this told me nothing about the venue. The English websites were mostly press releases from last year announcing their intended arrival. Everyone else knew in December that they were coming. I found out Thursday night.

The Eagles’ website said that they were playing at a stadium that the Google said did not exist. I decided that this was because the Eagles’ site wrote the Chinese name in English while the Google site writes Chinese names in Chinese. The Eagles’ site also said that they were playing in Japan on Tuesday, so it seemed unlikely that they might add another show Monday night.

Saturday was the big wedding reception. I knew that the best course of action was to not even mention this concert to the Wife at least until the end of the day. That would give me Saturday night and possibly Sunday morning to figure out where I was going. This did not cause any concern since 台北 is easy to get to and I have never had any problems finding a hotel once I was there.

After the Wife returned from dinner with her family after we spent the afternoon with her family, she agreed to help me find the stadium. This led to more Internet adventures where hers said one thing and mine another. I chose to believe hers since mine had already proven useless. But her Internet said that the stadium was not actually in 台北 even though everything we had seen so far, including 7-11, told us that it was. It was in a suburb about an hour outside of town. It was like taking the train to Penn Station only to find that you really want to be in Scarsdale. It is not impossible to get to, but the subway does not even come close.

Usually when I go to 台北 I take the high speed train into the city and take the metro wherever I need to go. I know of a few hotels where I can always find a room on demand. This was what I had planned to do when I realized that I would be going there to see the Eagles on sixty hours’ notice. But the Eagles chose to play in a city that was not on the high speed line. Nor was it on the low speed train line. It was not close to any of the stations and nowhere near the nearest MRT stop. The good news was that this town had a hospital owned by the Wife’s hospital. This meant that I could stay at their hospital hotel. The hospitals owned by the Wife’s hospital keep tiny hotel rooms for family of patients and select employees. But there was not enough advanced notice to book a room.

More good news was that the hospital has a free shuttle service from the nearest high speed train station to the hospital. This was very good since a taxi from the train station would be expensive and we could not find any other way to get there. But the shuttle does not run on Sundays (the day I would go there) and this particular Monday (the day I would return) since it was a minor public holiday commemorating the massacre of thousands of innocent civilians at the hands of a previous regime’s government forces. But we booked a hotel room across the street from the hospital anyway since it was relatively close to the stadium and employees of the Wife’s hospital get a discount. The hotel also had a free shuttle to the stadium.

The next day I took the train to 台北 and a very long taxi ride to 龜山. They would not give me the Wife’s discount at the hotel. Not because I am not the Wife but because they were giving me an “executive suite”. I did not need an executive suite. I was planning on leaving in 18 hours. I simply needed a rat-free place to sleep. I do not ask for much from Asian hotels, but I do like to sleep without rats crawling on my face. I am spoiled that way.

The executive suite was a larger than average room with a separate sitting area and a kitchenette, which in Asia means a sink near the tiny refrigerator. It was the kind of room that Chinese people look at and think is fancy. The rest of us see the 40-year-old décor and questionable stains. What made this room more executive than most was that it was in the corner and as such had far more windows than most Chinese hotel rooms. There were two.

On the long taxi ride to the hotel from the train station we passed the stadium. This showed me that it was too far to walk but a reasonable taxi distance should the shuttle bus have issues. The people at the Chinese message boards who went to the concert on Saturday all complained about traffic at the stadium. Driving by on the way to the hotel I could see why. There was construction on the only street that leads to the stadium, reducing five lanes to one in each direction. It looks like they are expanding something to go directly to the stadium. This will probably be very useful to people like myself in the future, but did me no good on this day.

At the hotel they told me that the shuttle bus operated on Saturday night only. The Wife had previously suggested that I leave early if I took a taxi since there would be heavy traffic. I was going to leave early anyway since the shuttle would face the same traffic, and probably more since taxis have a way of ignoring all rules of the road.

The taxi ride from the hotel to the stadium took about ten minutes and cost me 100元. This was very reasonable since the meter starts and 70元 for locals and 85元 for foreigners. There is always a price difference for foreigners. This would cause me problems later.

I’ve got a pissed off Chinese feeling
I know they will let me down
‘Cause I’m already stranded in some town

Inside the stadium I found that I had a very good seat. From the website that does not actually sell tickets I simply picked the closest available seat that was not in the highest price range. I had no idea it would be so close to the stage. I was within spitting distance of the people in the front row on the floor. Since there was absolutely no press and only two people filming the show for the large video screens, the people in the front row were within spitting distance of the people on stage. I was only two loogies of separation from Glenn Frey.

The stadium itself was very small. It looked like any other old stadium, but to scale. I have no idea what kind of sporting event could be played there. Perhaps there is some miniature Chinese version of basketball. Maybe it is a ping pong stadium. I could easily see why the first night sold out so quickly. Air Supply and Tony Orlando could sell out here. Those are probably bad examples since they are far more popular than the Eagles and they actually do sell out. It would not take much to sell out this stadium.

One of the first differences I noticed about seeing a concert amongst Chinese was that they are not the most rambunctious bunch. Where I come from the audience erupts in applause and whistles every time a roadie walks on the stage, no matter how far in advance of the opening bell. This audience did not react at all. I was a little concerned that the Eagles were about to face a silent crowd. But what everyone else in the audience probably knew was that the show did not begin until a Chinese voice from above announced that it was starting. The lights then went down and everyone cheered.

The band opened with an a cappella version of “Seven Bridges Road” immediately followed by “How Long” from their latest album. Glenn Frey then announced that they would be playing a lot of songs from Long Road Out Of Eden to which nobody cheered. Frey did most of the talking that night. In English. He did not even try to hit us up with some Chinese. That was Timothy B Schmit’s job. He was the designated China talker. He said “你好” a few times and “你好嗎” once. And it made him very popular. The audience went crazy when he sang each of his three songs. When he announced that they were about to do a song from Hell Freezes Over, the audience erupted in cheers and applause. Maybe that is the most popular Eagles album around here and Schmit is their favorite. But knowing the tiny amount I know about Chinese culture I think it was the fact that he spoke a tiny amount of Chinese.

Despite Schmit’s Chinese appeal, the second most popular song of the night was “Hotel California”. It started with a trumpet solo, but you could tell what song was coming. At least I could tell. The audience did not react until the guitars came in. There was absolutely no initial reaction to Don Henley’s “The Boys Of Summer”. That one has a distinctive drum/guitar opening but no one seemed to recognize it. Joe Walsh got the same treatment when they did James Gang songs “Walk Away” and “Funk #49”. I did not recognize “Walk Away” either until he started singing. They changed the music considerably. And all of the Long Road Out Of Eden songs were met with opening silence. Every time Frey announced the titles of each new song, he reminded us that the album is currently available for purchase. His whoring was all the more amusing since that CD is not actually available for purchase at our local retailers. The only solo song anyone seemed to recognize was “Life’s Been Good” and just before singing it, Walsh told us a little story and got the crowd worked up. They might have been excited by his antics more than the song. Walsh is supposedly sober these days, but he seemed just as off as ever. In between trying to sell the new album and telling stories that most of the audience likely did not understand, Glenn Frey invited people to sing along.

In the band’s home country, people clap, cheer, whistle and call out song titles and “Free Bird” in between numbers. Around here it gets very quiet in between songs. It was an unusual experience. I could hear people move equipment on stage. It was just like the time the Wife and I saw the New York Philharmonic, except that the seats were more uncomfortable and the giant speakers probably caused more hearing damage than I really need at this point in the game. This was a tiny stadium but they had speakers suited for an American arena, and from where I sat I could have easily heard them with the little speakers they have on stage. I believe it was Shakespeare who said, “If thine music is of an infortuitous mien, peradventure thou hast encroached upon the tusseled shores of the aged.” Verily.

But it was painfully quiet in between songs. So I did what I could to make the band feel welcome in this strange land. Don Henley and Joe Walsh had played solo songs, so during one of the quiet gaps I yelled out, “Smuggler’s Blues” to which Glenn Frey chuckled and responded with a simple, “Oh, shit.” I will be amused if they include that on the live CD. I will also be flabbergasted if there is a live CD of this show.

I have often said that “monkey see, monkey do” should be the national motto. In that spirit, other people started shouting song titles. I guess they needed an American to show them the way. But people kept shouting “Rocky Mountain Way” right after Walsh did a solo song, as if he would have two songs in a row. He did not have that plastic talk box guitar hose that he sticks in his mouth so there was no way they were playing that one, although in other countries it is part of the encore, according to their website.

After about 45 minutes, Henley announced that they were taking a short break with a joke that five people understood. As the band left the stage, the audience started shouting “encore”, which sounded very much like the way my students pronounce “uncle”. I could not understand why people were shouting “uncle”. It took me a while to realize that more than a few people in the audience thought that the show was over. But when the lights came up, the Chinese voice from above announced that it was only intermission. After what I went through to get the tickets and make my way to this little stadium I would have been ever so pissed if the concert only lasted 45 minutes.

One of the second differences I noticed about seeing a concert amongst Chinese was that I could not smell any marijuana anywhere. No one was passing joints around and no one raised lighters during slow songs. This is the first concert I have ever been to where I could not smell Mary Jane being passed around like the cheap little whore she is. Being in a country that executes drug traffickers might have had something to do with it. I guess Joe Walsh had to get sober before they could come here.

There were three large video screens; one behind the band and two off to the sides for the people in the cheap seats. I could not see the side screen from where I was sitting but half of what was shown was filmed by a woman working in front of me. Everything she shot was from the same angle as my line of sight. They also showed prerecorded images that were largely obvious; pictures of New York during “In The City”, clouds during “No More Cloudy Days” and the video for “The Boys Of Summer” during “The Boys Of Summer”. It got more interesting during “Life’s Been Good” when they showed footage of a much younger Joe Walsh acting like a much younger Joe Walsh and when things got political during “Dirty Laundry”. I have a feeling that Don Henley is not a big fan of Fox News. The message of “Long Road Out Of Eden” is anti-imperialism, specifically American imperialism, and the video footage reflected that. I could not help but wonder how many people in the audience understood what they were watching, or indeed what they were hearing. “The road to empire is a bloody stupid waste” does not translate well into a language and culture that proudly remembers being ruled by emperors for thousands of years. There were also pictures and themes from middle America during “Waiting In The Weeds” that would mean nothing to people who are unfamiliar with hayrides and county fairs. The Eagles are a very American band, and probably best appreciated by Americans. Watching these images and listening to these songs, even when they were shitcanning the American Dream, especially when they were shitcanning the American Dream, is the closest I have ever come to feeling homesick.

Another difference that I noticed about seeing a concert amongst Chinese was that there were no concession stands anywhere in the stadium. I was expecting to see lots of deep fried animal chunks on sticks, but there was absolutely nothing. This is a country where you can literally buy food on the street from some dude’s truck. Movie theaters and internet cafés have large menus. You can buy food on trains, buses and in temples. Food is available practically everywhere. Except at the Eagles concert. Fortunately, there were no filler songs. Stepping out for a jumbo beer was not an option. And this is a country where men love their beer. There were t-shirts available outside, but they looked like someone made them in their garage. And they probably did. I wanted to get something with some Chinese, but the three options only had the name of the band and some of the Asian cities. The European leg of the tour probably has much better t-shirts.

After a second half that was much longer than the first, the band left the stage to more cries of “uncle”. They played “Take It Easy” and then pretended to leave again as the lights slowly came up. Then the stadium dramatically went black and a single spotlight shone on Don Henley. When the piano started playing “Desperado”, the audience exploded. Maybe not literally, but that is how it sounded. The cheers put Timothy B Schmit’s Chinese applause to shame. For the only time that night I could hear people singing along.

“Desperado” could have easily been the only song most of the people in the audience knew. Like “I Will Always Love You”, it is one of those songs that has been recorded by every Chinese singer. And like “I Will Always Love You”, I have never spoken to anyone who seems to know that the big famous version that all the Chinese singers copied was not the original version. The Wife and others always thought the Carpenters’ “Desperado” was the original. The Chinese would probably prefer a Carpenters concert to the Eagles, were that possible. And when I played Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” to the Wife, she said she preferred the original, meaning Whitney Houston’s version. Dolly Parton will likely never come here. Whitney Houston probably lost her voice to all that blow she did when she got married. The Carpenters are mostly dead. The Eagles are the most this country will ever get.

It was a pretty good show. Not as good as Peter Gabriel’s “Growing Up” tour, but much better than Paul Simon’s “Born At The Right Time”. The band looked like they had seen better days, but they sounded good. Henley and Schmit can still hit the high notes and Walsh played some funky guitar riffs. Don Felder’s replacement, Steuart Smith, is probably a better guitarist than Felder. The backup band seemed to be enjoying themselves and no one phoned it in. I was a little concerned about that, considering the location. This is not exactly their target market. My main complaint of the show was that Henley spent very little time on the drums. He only played on a few of the biggest hits, and spent most of his time on guitar. With Walsh, Frey and Smith, they really have no need for another guitarist. Walsh and Smith had some shredding solos, and even Glenn Frey made a decent effort of it. Walsh and Frey did an amusing guitar duet on one song. Don Henley’s limited guitar skills were not required.

My plan had always been to take a taxi back to the hotel after the concert. Even before I knew that there was no shuttle bus on Sunday I assumed that it would not run so late at night. This is a place where very little public transportation operates after 10pm. With hundreds of people gathered in the same place all wanting to leave at the same time, there will always be taxis.

An inconvenient truth about Chinese taxi drivers is that they are some of the greediest racist bastards on the planet. In the middle of large cities where there are multiple transporation options there are fewer problems. In the middle of nowhere when the demand equals the supply, things get interesting. The taxi ride to the stadium cost me 100元. Several taxi drivers offered to take me back for 500元. That seemed a little high. I got some Chinese people to get a driver down to 200元. Prices are always much lower for locals. But as soon as I got in the taxi he told me 400元. This is the kind of thing that annoys tourists and turns people who normally remind you of Donna Reed into the typical angry American. Sometimes some people are not wild about getting screwed six ways to Pittsburgh. But I have lived here long enough to expect the worst from people who equate a white face with an unlimited expense account and a willingness to flush money down the toilet. I not only accept the racism and greed, I expect it.

The walk back to the hotel took me about an hour. That is probably not much to a healthy, physically fit person. But it was interesting in that I have likely never walked so far while surrounded by so little. Half of the time I was walking in the street with dirt fields on either side of me. Walking in the street is not generally a smart move when there are Chinese drivers about, but there were none here. This in itself is noteworthy. Even in the tiny farm village of 崙背 I could never get very far without encountering others. I did not walk in the fields because there was little moonlight and the millions of stray dogs that foul the countryside literally foul the countryside.

On a dark Chinese dirt road
Stale air in my face
Warm smell of open sewers
All over the place

When I finally wanted to go to sleep I pulled back the hotel bed covers to check for tiny insects and leftovers from the previous tenants, as I always do. This is a lesson I learned from years in Asia and finding dog shit in a hotel bed. The bed at this weekend’s hotel was feces free, but there was a large greasy stain on the bottom sheet. When I called the front desk, the woman who sounded half asleep seemed surprised that I wanted to change the sheets at such a late hour. I tried to explain that changing them the next day would do me no good. She wanted to take the Chinese path of least effort but I was insistent. By 4am I had given up on the quaint notion that I was going to get clean sheets and tore the bed apart and went to sleep on the cleanest sheet of the lot. Four hours later the phone rang. I ignored it, but it had already woken me. The very long taxi ride to the train station cost me 350元.

I cannot recommend a visit to 龜山, and bands should probably find a better place to perform, but Eagols put on a good rockershow.


© Someone

My Fifth Or Sixth Chinese Wedding

I have been to a few Chinese weddings. The Wife generally drags me kicking and screaming. I have been to the fancy style wedding at an expensive restaurant with long table cloths and shrimp steamed alive before my eyes. I have been to the street wedding under a big tent literally in the middle of the street with a pack of cigarettes on every table and a stripper on the poker/bingo stage. Both styles had KTV, of course. I have even been to a wedding where I actually knew the people who got married. That was unusual, and nothing like the others. But on Saturday the Wife dragged me kicking and screaming to what will probably be her favorite wedding.

Wedding is really not the appropriate word. Most of the weddings I have been to were wedding receptions only. The actual marrying of bride and groom took place at an earlier time and place away from my presence. Except the wedding of the people I actually knew. That was a marriage performance ceremony without reception. So technically, by Chinese standards, those people are not married.

The Chinese place very little emphasis on the part where you sign the papers and are married. These are mostly uneventful and unceremonious ceremonies. The Wife and I were sitting on dirty little chairs in a dirty little government office when we signed the papers. The reason she did not feel bad about that is because she knew she was going to have an expensive reception sooner or later. The reception is the part that counts. The reception is where the bride and groom dress up all fancy and everyone eats overpriced food and takes far too many pictures of everyone else. The reception is where the real money is spent. And made.

Where I come from, and in most of the civilized world, guests at weddings and/or wedding receptions bring gifts for the bride (and groom). This is an essential rite of passage in the young couple’s life. Without a wedding reception it would take years to accumulate enough appliances to fill the darkest cabinets in the deepest bowels of their kitchen. One can never be complete without boxes of crap hidden away somewhere that will never see the light of day.

The Chinese do it a little differently. There is very little need to fill cupboard space since no one has a real kitchen. With toasters in short supply it became necessary for the Chinese to find something else to give the recently wed. Since the Chinese are not an especially creative bunch, they choose to give the same gifts they give during the New Year, at select birthdays and when someone has a baby. They give red envelopes with cash. Anyone who knows me might assume that I like this custom. And I might if someone would actually give me some red envelopes. But a funny little detail about the intricacies of red envelope giving is that one usually only gives red envelopes to those who have themselves given red envelopes. The red envelopes I hand out to the Wife’s niece and nephews are from the Wife. And she makes sure everyone knows it. Since the amount of cash in any given red envelope on any given occasion is generally commensurate with the amount of cash the giver was recently given by the recipient, I would rather just keep what I have and let everyone else do the same. Giving you $20 so that you can give me $20 might be the Chinese thing to do, but I am not Chinese.

The envelopes are red because red is lucky and keeps away the evil spirits. Obviously. Some people use gold envelopes because gold is a precious metal and symbolizes wealth. But those people are doing it wrong. Red is the way to go. What use is wealth when you have all those evil spirits kicking it on your couch and eating all your dried tiny fishes. What I point out to the Wife entirely too often, and probably should not since this is her culture and these traditions go back thousands of years before my ancestors knew how to use a toilet, is that for all the time and energy billions of her people put into the superstitious practices that are supposed to make them wealthy and lucky, very few of them are wealthy and lucky.

I knew long before I married the Wife that she would want a wedding reception. Normally I would not take issue with this. What radiant bride does not deserve a special day to gather with those nearest and dearest to her heart and say, “Look at me, bitches.” But I also knew that Chinese wedding receptions are prohibitively expensive. People put themselves in debt to pay for their receptions. This may not mean much to Americans who put themselves in debt to buy a new CD player, but the concept of owing money to lenders and credit cards is new to the Chinese. These are people who still buy cars with big fat wads of cash after they have saved up for years.

Going cheap is not an option. You cannot Jew it down if you want to save face. Spending money on receptions, cars, clothes, houses, furniture, KTV machines, pretty much anything, is a competition. The more money you spend, the better you are. If they spent more money, you lose face. If you spent more money, you win.

Not being Chinese, I never had any interest in going into debt to pay for a reception. I made this perfectly clear to the Wife long before it was too late. Taking immediate family out to dinner is acceptable. Buying food that costs ten times more than a nice meal for one hundred people I will never see again is not. My complaint is not so much in spending too much money on a big party as it is the motives these people have for spending too much money. I let the Wife know that if she wanted to brag about how much money she spent she would have to do so with someone else’s money.

And that is what she did. She borrowed money from her family and made all the arrangements without me. It is not that I did not want to be involved, but I am not the best person to go to for advice on planning the perfect Chinese wedding reception. She asked me many questions about American customs, but none of them fit in with her plans. Some are simply too bizarre to even contemplate. Dancing at a wedding? A large cake? Crazy talk. Since there do not seem to be any ovens this side of Hawaii, a cake would be difficult. Putting some Duncan Hines mix into the toaster oven rarely works out. And dancing would probably just interfere with all that KTV.

The Wife wanted to walk down the aisle, something not done at all in her culture, but I pointed out several times that this was a reception, not a wedding. And we got married four months before the reception. And her father is not the youngest person in the world. A walk down an aisle might be unlucky. She also wanted to play some traditional reception game where the bride is blindfolded and has to touch a few men to guess which one is her husband. Until I told her that it reminded me of a game we used to play in college where the blindfolded girl has to pick her boyfriend without using her hands. And she wanted me to make a wedding mix CD. I did that one. No one can say I am not participatory.

The reception was at Smoking Jio’s, a “Tex-Mex” restaurant that has neither Texan nor Mexican food. I have no idea why she chose to do it there. One of their restaurants was the site of our first date, but not this one. She did not choose to do it there for me. The food at the reception was typical wedding reception food and not anything found on the Smoking Jio’s menu. They made a salad for me. This is usually what happens when we go to formal events and family dinners. I get a salad, as if the only two food groups are fish eyeballs and lettuce. Smoking Jio’s has pretty good simple salads while what they gave me at the reception was “fancy” and terribly subpar. Not that it mattered anyway. The Bride and I spent most of the reception wandering from table to table and having our pictures taken. We both appreciated the irony of picking up something for dinner on our way home from the most expensive meal of our lives.

The Bride’s original guest list was 75. This quickly grew to 125. 150 people showed up. I knew about 15 of them. My guest list was considerably smaller. Only three of the people I sent invitations to live in the country. Only one of them showed up. Sending the invitations at the last minute may have played a part, but the Wife loves doing things at the last minute. In deciding who to invite, the Wife had to take several traditional factors into account. Obviously everyone she is related to would be invited, regardless of how seldom she sees them or if she can even recognize them in a crowd. Friends and acquaintances she has spoken to within the last ten years were invited. As were coworkers with whom she has a cordial relationship, and the people in charge of the hospital. Not inviting your bosses is unlucky, even if you would rather skin puppies alive than be in the same room as them. She also invited classmates from years ago and various old professors. When inviting acquaintances it is important to remember whether or not you were invited to their wedding and how much money you gave them in the red envelopes. If they are not married then you have to think about how much money they might possibly give. If you gave them under 2000元 then there is little point in inviting them since they will likely give you under 2000元. Any single people who will probably give under 2000元 should also be ignored.

My side was a little easier. I simply invited the three people I know in the country that the Bride also knows.

The traditional practice at wedding receptions is for guests to give their red envelopes to designated people sitting at a table near the entrance. These people have one of the most important jobs of the day. They count the money in each envelope, write down in a ledger who gave exactly what and keep a running total. By the time the last guest arrives they should know how much money the bride (and groom) received.

At least this is how it is supposed to work. The Bride assigned a few trusted coworkers to this task. They failed miserably. When the dust settled and all of the guests had gone, only a few names were written in the ledger and none of the loot was properly counted. So after what seemed like an eternity (but was only three hours) of posing for pictures for people I will never see again, we spent the next hour with two of the Bride’s sisters and her oldest niece counting envelopes and cash. The procedure was surprisingly efficient and everyone except me knew exactly what to do and how to do it, but it was not too terribly romantic and made me see the entire affair as a business transaction, which in many ways it was.

After all of the names had been written down and all of the money had been counted and recounted, we had a grand total of 249,000元. Not exactly petty change. This made the Bride very happy. She reminded me that I had been against spending too much money as I thought that her prediction of making a profit would come to naught. Since this was her wedding reception and I am toying with a little experiment of not being an asshole, I neglected to point out just how much this little show cost to produce. The meal itself was 138,000元. This was a total surprise to everyone. Apparently a set price was never agreed upon beforehand. They simply served the food and handed the bride a bill at the end. This seems to be the way things are done. Everyone just assumes that there will be enough red envelope money to cover the bill. I think this is a very dangerous policy.

Everyone (in this country) who was invited was given a box of wedding cookies. This is a tradition that I am completely against. I have nothing against cookies per se, even though these are not what I would consider cookies, but wedding cookies are far more expensive than they really need to be. As with everything else wedding related it is important to overpay in order to brag about overpaying. Each box of wedding cookies cost 300元. That is over US$1,000 for tiny, dry, stale “cookies”.

The Bride also had to have three dresses at the reception. The bride is supposed to change at certain times and wear various lucky colors as stipulated by superstition. The dresses cost 4,000元 each; a reasonable price for a nice formal dress, but a bit much for something she will likely never wear again. I wore a custom tailored suit I had made in Thailand, but I am not including that in the price tag because I told the Wife that any of the profit would be entirely hers since I was not about to pay for anything. And tailored suits from Thailand, as with most things Thai, are the exact opposite of expensive. Though their weddings are probably ridiculously expensive, too.

Our wedding rings cost 20,000元. I delayed getting rings as long as I could, especially since the Wife will not wear any ring at work and rarely wears it anywhere else, but having a reception without wearing wedding rings is unlucky. Maybe this should not be included in the price of the reception since we will have them long after it is a vague memory, but I am including them because we probably would have never gotten them had we not had the reception.

The Bride had 135 invitations printed at 200元 each. There was also 5,000元 worth of specially overpriced wedding candy and 5,000元 for balloons, toys and prizes.

249,000 - 138,000 - 37,500 - 12,000 - 20,000 - 27,000 - 5,000 - 5,000 = total profit, not including the Bride’s hair and make up (which could have easily cost 10,000元 to 20,000元) and renting the PA equipment for people to make speeches. There are probably other expenses that I know nothing about.

Where I come from one is not supposed to make a profit from one’s wedding, nor is it considered appropriate to publicly list an itemized bill. But around here everyone loves to brag about how much they spent on everything. The Wife does not have the faintest idea what my salary is (not that it is anything to brag about) because she would tell anyone and everyone who asked. And they all ask. I think it is no one’s business. Here it is considered very lucky to make a profit at one’s wedding and absolutely appropriate to spend beyond one’s means to make it happen. We most certainly spent beyond our means. That makes us lucky. But she did not make a profit. That makes us unlucky.

Obviously she did not pick the luckiest invitations.


The Bride and Groom (behind balloons and piñatas) honoring guests with their presence.
I cannot identify anyone else.

The Bride (and Groom) handing out wedding candy.
(L to R) the Bride, unknown, unknown, the Groom, unknown.
One of the pictures in the background is indeed Louis Armstrong.

Photographs taken by someone.

So You Want To Hijack A Plane With A Jar Of Peanut Butter

This year’s Academy Award nominations of the best large budget, heavily marketed corporate studio films of last year have been announced. As with television awards, I have not seen any of the cream of the crap. But unlike the television awards, I have actually heard of most of the people involved. I like the Coens. There was a day I could say that I had seen all of their films. That day has long since passed. I think Roger Deakins is kick ass, but a John Wayne remake does not seem the best use of his talents. And Helena Bonham Carter has always stricken me as someone with just the right amount of give you a cup of tea and kill you in your sleep.

Most of the films I watch these days are at home, on planes and in foreign countries. At home we get “Spidey Man” and “Mighty Pirates”. Anything with more CGI than script. The five movies shown in theaters are at the local Blackboster by the end of the month and heavily edited on HBO a week later. The selections on planes are not much better. But at least they rotate the stock. Some of the current Classic Movies include “27 Dresses” and “Night At The Museum 2”.

What always surprises me, and this is probably because I come from a heavily repressed puritanical country, is how the entertainment on planes is less censored than what we get on HBO. I watched an episode of “The Sopranos” at home wherein a big fat tub of sweaty cow meat was walking down a street without a care in the world one minute and bloodied and beaten the next. Clearly something had happened but there was not a hint of what that might be. I then coincidentally saw the same episode in South Africa and watched the scene in between where said fat guy has hot sweaty homo fun with some other dude and then gets into savage fisticuffs. I guess that is how big fat mafia homos like it. But at home we never see any violent homo sex, regular normal sex, drug use, references to drug use or naked lady parts. The scene in “Annie Hall” when Woody Allen sneezes on the pile of cocaine would be cut out around here. Except that they would never show “Annie Hall” here. Too much talking and not enough explosions.

On the plane to Thailand I saw nipples. I told my very own Personal Entertainment System to play “The Sopranos” and right there in the opening scene I saw a bunch of big fat sweaty (presumably non-homo) mafia dudes and a young, not at all fat woman as naked as the day she was born (from the waist up). Assuming she was born with 36D implants. For a brief dull moment I was a true American and thought that any child could turn this on and watch this. There are no parental controls on these devices as far as I can tell. Then I remembered that breasts are good and have yet to cause blindness or methadone addiction in children. At least not directly.

On the flight home I watched nothing as my Personal Entertainment System crapped out on me. Perhaps there are parental controls after all.

Whilst waiting in the hotel for the Wife to make herself presentable, I turned on the television set and saw a bunch of old dudes on stage singing Eagles songs. Time has not treated their faces well, but Don Henley sounded the same as always. Even more suprising was Joe Walsh. He looks like a man who has enjoyed a recreational drug or two in his life. But he sounds just as good or as bad as ever, depending on your point of view. I knew that Don Felder had been kicked out several years ago (I was at what turned out to be his last live performance with the band) but I had no idea who his replacement was. You would think a band like the Eagles could get Andy Fairweather Low or David Rhodes or someone less British but well known to play a guitar solo here and there. But the Wife wanted to go about the town and we were not there to watch television, so I only saw a few songs.

Chakri Maha Prasat

We went to Bangkok because the Wife wanted to go somewhere on her birthday and she still had money left on her voucher from Minnesota. When she went to Minnesota, the airline asked her to stay an extra day and gave her a flight voucher for her trouble. But the voucher was only good for her, and that airline only flies to two cities from here; Tokyo and Bangkok. We went to Tokyo in March so the Wife wanted to go to Bangkok. I have been to Thailand several times. Every trip to Thailand requires at least two days in Bangkok since the flights in arrive late and the flights out leave early. I have even stayed in Bangkok exclusively. I like to think I know the city well. I know how to get where I want to go and which taxis to avoid. I know where to eat all the food I like and where to find things I cannot get at home. I also know that if I am going to spend money and energy on a trip abroad I would rather go somewhere else. Thailand has its good and bad qualities and it is certainly a good place to visit for anyone who has never been, but I have seen it. There are many better places I will never experience. But the Wife and I have never gone to Thailand together and we had just been to Tokyo. Given the choice between the two, I would rather go to Tokyo, but it is a much more expensive city. Thailand is always cheap.

More often than not whenever we go somewhere we see the famous tourist sites in between straying off the tour book path. Vacations generally mean waking up early to go somewhere by a certain time and seeing something specific. The Wife wanted this trip to be less hectic than last year’s European honeymoon. Bangkok is not generally regarded as a relaxing city. There is serious traffic, constant construction and millions of people running around like rabbits in waistcoats. But I have seen all the requisite sites in Bangkok and the Wife is not too terribly interested. This made it much easier to take our time and not worry about missing anything.

The Wife liked the fact that I knew where everything was. All she had to do was follow me. She gets far more frustrated when we have no idea where we are going. I like not knowing where I am going but she always wants me to study maps since she has no idea how they work. We used no maps in Bangkok.

One of the Wife’s favorite things to do on vacation, and really anywhere, is to go to overpriced shopping malls and look at every single item on sale. I like to avoid shopping because it takes precious time away from seeing whatever there is to be seen, and because it sucks the life out of me. But this was her birthday trip and I had no plans to do anything else. Fortunately for me and less fortunately for her, the CentralWorld mall, supposedly the third largest shopping mall in the world, was burned down by the Red Shirts in May. Some of it reopened at the end of 2010 but it is not nearly as large.

Right around the corner is the Siam Paragon, a not entirely new mall that I had never noticed except during its construction. It is just outside of the Siam BTS station and hard to miss when it was a large frame of construction girders and giant cranes. As a finished product it looks just like all the other malls surrounding it. But the Wife loves Japanese mall basement food, which is very different from American mall food court food, and wanted to see how Thai mall basement food compares. Once inside, we both fell madly in love with the Paragon. The Wife loved all the overpriced shops and the vaguely Chinese/Thai food. I loved the brand new Krispy Kreme right at the front door.

At the Siam BTS station I noticed someone carrying a Krispy Kreme bag. I can spot that logo in the middle of a bustling commuter crowd the way a lion spots the weakest gazelle in the herd. I do not normally approach strangers at train stations but this was not a normal occasion. The only Krispy Kremes in Asia I had seen up to this point were in Tokyo and Seoul. They are supposedly in Hong Kong but I have never seen any.

The person with the Krispy Kreme bag spoke no English and I speak no Thai, so I tried asking him in Chinese where he got those donuts. That was as useless as English. I got him to point in the general direction and the Wife and I began our quest. I was very disappointed when we found two people selling donuts from a folding table on Thanon Rama I. The Wife thought it was better than nothing. I thought it was counterfeiting of the worst kind. I asked the people selling the donuts if there was an actual store anywhere, fully expecting a negative response. People who sell bootlegs on the street do not usually let you know where you can get the real thing. But this bootlegger casually mentioned that there was a store in the Paragon. That proved convenient as we were going to go there for the Wife’s basement food anyway. The Paragon also had an overpriced grocery store where all the foreigners shop and from where I bought the first Reese’s peanut butter cups and Jiff peanut butter I had seen in years.

Siam Paragon
Home of creamy Krispy Kreme and crispy octopus balls.

BTS Siam

I have been through a security checkpoint or two in my time. I have yet to do the American porn scanners, and we never take off our shoes in Asia, but my luggage and I have been x-rayed and scrutinized by undertrained low wage earners on several continents. I almost never set off any alarms and my suitcase almost never attracts anyone’s attention. So when the uniformed slackers at Suvarnabhumi Airport asked me to open my bag it was a little unexpected.

The woman making the sky safe for democracy asked me if I had any books in my bag. I did not, but I wondered to myself how that could be a problem. Are books no longer permissible on commercial flights? Do the airlines want people to use those electronic book readers instead? That would be unusual since we all know that any electronic device is capable of taking down a 747 during takeoff and landing. A few years ago I was having a bad day and considered turning on my MP3 player during the plane’s final approach just to end it all. Fortunately for the crew and all passengers on board, I came to my senses and no one had to die that day.

Since there were no books in my bag, Security Lady looked around for an alternative. That is when she saw my jar of Jiff peanut butter.

I recently found fresh celery at a specialty grocery store in our quaint little metropolis. Celery is not common around here so I have been buying some every time we visit. And with celery one needs peanut butter. We may be heathens but we are not savages. But our peanut butter choices are lacking at best. Chinese peanut butter is no better than Chinese butter and the Vietnamese peanut butter at Jialafu is probably safe for people with peanut allergies to eat. The inferior Skippy peanut butter is widely available, but I am not an animal. Beggars and choosy moms choose Jiff. As did I when I saw some at a grocery store in Bangkok.

Whenever I get out of the bush I like to go to grocery stores and see what marvels of the Western World they carry. I can always find something that makes me wonder why I can only find it in that particular city or country. If I want almond M&Ms I have to go to Macao. For Amy’s frozen pizza rolls, Hong Kong. If I want Dr Pepper I go to Seoul. Dr Pepper is actually available almost anywhere, but the price is usually three or four times higher than Coke or Pepsi. In Seoul you can find Dr Pepper at any 7-11 for the same price as everything else.

From Bangkok I tried to bring back Reese’s peanut butter cups, those tiny boxes of Corn Flakes and Jiff peanut butter.

When Security Lady saw my peanut butter, she told me that “liquid is not allow”. I told her that it was not liquid. I showed her the Thai writing on the jar. I assume it said something about what was in the jar. Despite all of my trips to Thailand I cannot read a single word of Thai. But she was unconvinced and kept repeating “not allow” while I argued with her.

Before arguing with security personnel in Bangkok, one should be aware that several factions of whatever they call the Thai mafia hold sway over more than a few security agencies in Thailand, including Suvarnabhumi. While the Chinese mafia is pretty pathetic compared to the good old fashioned American mafia (they kidnap your pigeon rather than put the severed head of your prize horse in your bed), we can assume that the Thai mafia is better equipped for violence. Chinese people are frail and weigh less than I do. Kicking and beating people is Thailand’s national sport.

I have no special love of peanut butter, regardless of what the peanut butter cups and jar of peanut butter might suggest, but I prefer Jiff over the crap we have at home and I wanted to keep what I bought. I was even thinking about opening the seal and turning the bottle over. Surely the lack of spill would convince Security Lady that it was not liquid.

She was replaced by Security Dude. This regularly happens when there are language issues, but his English was no better than hers and my Thai had not improved in those two minutes. I told him that peanut butter is not a liquid and he tensed up as if I had said “bomb” or “citrus fruit”. He wanted to know why I said that it was not liquid. I cleverly pointed out that I said it was not liquid because it is not liquid. That did not seem to satisfy his concern and I told him that Security Lady said that my peanut butter was liquid. He assured me that it was indeed not a liquid but that it was “not allow”. I asked him why. The look on his face cannot be described by mortals. Ask a five year old about the difference between dark matter and the calcium carbonate levels in monotreme eggshells and you will get the same facial expression.

Security Dude’s point of view was that a jar of peanut butter is not allow on commercial airlines. My point of view was that this was simply an arbitrary restriction to provide travelers with the illusion of security. What could I possibly do with this peanut butter to harm the plane or its crew? The pilot could be allergic to peanuts, but how would I get it to him? I never fly first class and the flight crew never schmoozes with the people in the cheap seats. My little jar of peanut butter would have to find a way to infect both the captain and first officer and somehow disable the automatic controls that can land a 747-400 even if every single person on board is in anaphylactic shock. I would be more than a little impressed if any brand of peanut butter could do this and more than a little surpised if any of this was crossing the mind of the lackey telling me that my peanut butter was a threat to civilization as we know it.

I was also wondering at the time what any of this had to do with whether I had books in my bag or not. It occurred to me moments after my peanut butter found its way into a trash can with other hazardous materials that maybe they were simply looking for anything that they could claim was not allow. My peanut butter was more scapegoat than culprit. Nothing untoward showed up on the x-ray, but if you pull the occasional passenger aside and take away some of his possessions, other travelers may think that you are doing your job and that their irrational fear and paranoia is justified. Will taking off your shoes at American airports make you safer? Not in the least. Is 110ml of water or toothpaste more dangerous than 100ml? Of course not. Anyone who can blow up a plane with a bottle of water, a bag of stale peanuts and a tube of toothpaste can probably take out an entire city with some of that duty free crap they let you take on planes. There is probably plenty of peanut butter for sale at the shopping mall that is Suvarnabhumi Airport. I can get behind restricting guns, knives and explosives. But what is the point in taking away water, food and creams that people can replace with a little shopping inside the terminal. Or is that the point.

Remember when they wanted people to put their passports into plastic bags? What was that about? If I can make a bomb out of the Wife’s hand lotion, I probably have the technical skills and manual dexterity required to open a plastic bag. But when the powers that be impose stupid restrictions that make absolutely nothing safe it keeps people from thinking about the fact that lighters and matches are allowed and all commercial flights have oxygen tanks. I have absolutely no idea how to turn a bottle of Evian into a bomb but I know what I can do with fire and compressed gas. A better alternative would be to smash open the slide bustle in the emergency exit door with one of the cabin’s fire extinguishers and use the high pressure nitrogen aspirator with the CO2 in the fire extinguisher to blow the plane out of the sky. You can even do it with your shoes off.

But anyone who really wants to use a plane as a missile would simply take a cargo or private plane. There is practically no security at all at those terminals and some of them carry just as much fuel. Some cargo planes even carry explosives or material better suited to making bombs than lotion and toothpaste. But the next major attack on American soil will not be from a plane. Americans always assume that the next big thing will be just like the last big thing even when it is always different.

Not to beat a dead horse and spread delicious creamy Jiff peanut butter on it, but Israel’s El Al never has hijackings. And that is an airline and country that people who hijack planes really do want to harm. Yet they keep their planes and airport safe without porn scanners, shoe checks, liquid quotas or peanut butter theft. What Israel does is employ genuine security techniques like paying attention to passenger behavior and looking at people while talking to them. Israeli security would look me in the eye while I argue with them and know that I am not a terrorist but simply someone who wants to keep my peanut butter. In any other country their security will blink first.

The little woman at Wat Pho

Spread Honey On The Perpetrator’s Blank Stare

I may have already said a word or two about the Chinese being the most selfish drivers in the world. This is a point I simply can never exaggerate. I see all manner of vehicles run red lights, drive on the wrong side of the road, drive in multiple lanes at the same time, make left turns from the right hand lane, make right turns from the left hand lane, make u-turns from the outside lane regardless of light color, swerve into oncoming traffic, change lanes regardless of traffic, jump in front of cars going twice their speed, abruptly stop in the middle of the road for no apparent reason, block traffic at every opportunity and park absolutely anywhere. I do not witness these activities occasionally or once a month. I see people drive like drunken monkeys every single day that I drive. I have seen these people do all of these things at night without their headlights. I drive home on a road that has no street lights for a good twenty minutes. This stretch of road has no houses or businesses to light the street. The only light I can ever see is from my headlights and other cars. So when another vehicle comes directly toward me from the opposite direction without any headlights I cannot see it until it is entirely too close. And when I honk my beleaguered horn at them they always get angry.

The funny thing about Chinese drivers, aside from their complete disregard for the rules of the road and any semblance of common sense, is that they are always personally offended whenever anyone honks at them. When they drive dark colored cars in the wrong direction on black unlit roads at night without their headlights they cannot fathom why anyone would honk at them. Nothing in their brains register that perhaps they are doing something amiss. The Chinese mentality is that if you honk at me then you are clearly the bad guy, no matter what batshit retarded thing I am doing. And yet they freely honk their horns at each other. That is not some exotic ancient Chinese cultural prerogative. That is simple hypocrisy.

Just today I honked at a scooter driver who came within inches of hitting the Wife’s car while he drove his scooter with one hand, held a baby with the other and ran a red light to make a left turn from the wrong side of the road onto the wrong side of the road at night without headlights. I did not honk because he was endangering the baby. According to his culture he was not. I did not honk because he ran the red light or because he was driving on the wrong side of the road without lights. If I honked every time I saw such things the horn would no longer be operative. I am surprised it still works as it is. I only honked because if he had not turned his head around to look in the direction he was driving I would have slammed into him. I hit the brakes as soon as he ran the red light, but since he was driving like this is England I had far less time to stop than I usually do in similar circumstances. When he stopped, literally inches in front of me, my hand was still on the horn. He looked at me as though I had just shot his dog. How dare you honk at me, is the general reaction one gets from local drivers.

I almost always honk at intersections when I have a green light and I cannot clearly see the cross traffic. That is probably annoying to people living there but, and this is foreigner thinking, I think a collision would be worse. The Chinese roadmakers were smart enough to place directional dividers on some of the roads. This prevents cars from swerving into oncoming traffic. A good thing, I say. But the dividers are almost always loaded with large bushes or trees. This makes it impossible to see any cross traffic at intersections until it is too late. Most of my green light near collisions are at such intersections. On roads without the dividers I can usually see the cars that are going to run the red lights in enough time to hit the brakes and wonder what it is about red lights that these people find so confusing.

I usually honk at any vehicle that I almost hit while I run the green light and it runs the red light. One day a scooter monkey that I came very close to killing stopped dead when I honked at him, but not when his light was red or when a car came inches from killing him, and changed direction to follow me. I think he was trying to chase me. Chinese drivers love to chase people whom they imagine have wronged them. I suppose ignoring all traffic rules is not dangerous enough. But I find it hard to be intimidated or impressed by a tiny person on a broken down scooter. If he had a better scooter that could drive above 30km/h what would he do? Wave his fist in the air at me? He could slam his scooter into the Wife’s car. It would not be the first time. That car has several scratches and dents of unknown origin. They were most likely given to it while parked. Leaving a note is not the Chinese way. He could wave his metal rod at me. This is not a euphemism. More than a few Chinese drivers keep bats and metal rods in their cars for the sole purpose of trying to intimidate other drivers. When I honked at a driver who clearly thought that merging into another lane means speeding up to hit the car in front of him and this particular driver waved his metal rod at me I waved a finger back at him. That is the only metal rod I need. Although on another occasion I showed another driver my umbrella when he showed me his metal rod. I think I confused him.

So where are the police? That is a good question. The local police are largely corrupt, incompetent and Chinese lazy. The local news often shows footage of police officers sleeping in their cars or having sex with prostitutes while on duty. There was an infamous photograph of a police officer leaning against his car, casually huffing a cigarette while someone was dying in a fatal car “accident” half a block away. He could have been the first on the scene and possibly saved a life, but he was Chinese and they are not the most observant people in the world. Unlike American police, Chinese police do not become cops so they can bully people and carry guns to compensate for their own inadequacies. Chinese police become cops because they fail most aptitude tests and it is a pretty laid back job. Despite or because of the inherent laziness and inefficiency that all Chinese share, there is very little serious crime. Ninety percent of a Chinese cop’s job is dealing with traffic “accidents”.

Cameras at occasional intersections issue fines to cars and trucks that run the red light or drive over 20km/h above the speed limit. The police seem to feel that this is good enough. The problem is that there are not nearly enough cameras and everyone knows where the few are. Even if you did not already know about them you can see them early enough to slow down or, heaven forbid, actually stop at the red light. A bigger problem is that they are not sensitive enough to catch scooters. Any scooter can run any red light anywhere without consequence, other than the occasional fatal collision with a larger vehicle. But the very real threat of death is not enough of a deterrent to these people. They need the state to take money out of their pockets for them to give half a shit.

And that is the main cause of the problem. No one here gives a shit. It is not that they do not know any of the rules. If we assume that half of the drivers on the road have a driver’s license then half of the drivers on the road must have passed the written test. The English version of the written test is incomprehensible, but I have to assume that the Chinese version makes sense. To pass it you have to have a basic understanding of general rules or guess very well. If at least half of the drivers know three fourths of the rules then why do ninety nine percent of them drive like drunken lemurs? Probably because they are without hyperbole the most selfish people I have ever seen in my entire life. Every one of them seems to think that they are the only vehicle on the road and that they are the masters of all they survey, which is generally only the few feet in front of them. Chinese drivers appear to be physically unable to see anyone in any other direction or other people more than half a car length ahead. Eyesight cannot be the problem. You can get glasses 24H even in the smallest towns. It is mostly a sense of entitlement that they are infinitely more important than anyone else and everyone should always move out of their way. Which is odd since Chinese drivers, and indeed Chinese pedestrians, are incapable of moving out of anyone’s way under any circumstance.

The selfishness reaches beyond the road. Someone will always push their way to the front of every line at every bank, post office, grocery store and government office. The smarter businesses have done away with lines completely and force everyone to take a number. But even then there is always someone who thinks it is their turn right now. Whether on the road, at work, indoors or outdoors, the Chinese all think they should always be first all the time.

It was in this environment that one of my favorite students was almost killed.

Sunny is a happy, friendly, polite child. At least she was before the “accident”. I noticed these qualities in her on her first day at my school because a polite child is rare around here. Most Chinese children are rude, spoiled brats. That might be an exaggeration. Most of the hundreds of Chinese children I have met are rude, spoiled brats. Any foreigner who has ever worked here will say the same. Their spoiled nature has nothing to do with income. I lived in a tiny dirt poor farm village for a few years and most of those children were rude, spoiled brats. In fact, those children were worse overall than the big city children I deal with now. And their parents could barely afford to pay for food, shelter and education. Cell phones and MP3 players were unheard of. Most of my big city students have cell phones and electronic devices that I have become too old to operate. But they are either less spoiled than their village counterparts or I have become more tolerant of the spoilage.

I am not the most polite person in the world. I have probably thanked five people in my lifetime. I cannot remember the last time I said “please”. When people say “hello” to me I usually reply with either, “Yeah, whatever” or “What do you want?” I used to blame this on my upbringing, if you can call it that. I was not raised to say “please”, “thank you” and “yes, ma’am”. I doubt I have ever said “yes, ma’am” out loud. At least not facetiously. I was raised to say, “Yeah, whatever” or “Just what the fuck do you want?” But eventually we all reach a point where we can no longer blame our parents or our childhood. I was a rude child because I did not know any better. I am no longer five years old. Not even close. I know better. My education and ability to communicate extends far beyond whatever I learned as a child. What I say and how I say it is entirely my responsibility. So when I think someone is rude that should tell you something. Most of these children are far more rude, selfish and spoiled than I ever dared to be at their age.

Some are not. A few of them say “please” when they want something and “thank you” when they get it. I even have one student who thanks me when I hand him a test paper. Most of the students are less than enthusiastic about taking tests. I have a student who should be as rude as can be. He never does his homework, he rarely pays any attention in class and he fails most tests. But when he wants to borrow a pencil he always says “may I” and “thank you”. Most students simply say, “No pencil” or “Give me pencil”, to which I respond, “No.” They all have backpacks full of books, notebooks, toys, rulers, scissors or razors, but pens and pencils seem to be a rare commodity.

Some of the students are just happy all the time. Sometimes I try to relate my own childhood to their experience in order to better empathise with whatever is going on at any given moment, but this happiness just baffles me. I used to have a student who was so happy all the time that she was prone to fits of laughter for no apparent reason. If I called her name to answer a question she would laugh before answering. And she was always smiling. I never knew why. In contrast, there was another student in the same class who would cry at the drop of a hat. I tried to be sympathetic but it quickly became obvious that he only cried when there was a test or I called on him to do something. During breaks he would run around the hallways and laugh with the other students. He was only depressed when someone expected something of him. Both of those students are no longer at the school, possibly because I no longer teach that class. Whenever schedules are arbitrarily changed and I lose a class, students always leave. Boss Lady II does not see the connection.

Sunny was always in the happy category. We had a test on her first day at the school and she asked me a question that simply blew me away. I cannot recall what she said, but she said it with perfect grammar. This is an extremely rare event around here. Grammar is not something that anyone cares about. Students, parents, other teachers all focus on vocabulary and conversation. I might very well be the only teacher in the country who tells these students what the rules are and why they make sense. I have never seen a single English book for children in this country that has the words “noun”, “verb”, “adjective”, “article”, “pronoun”, “preposition” or “conjunction”. All of my students know those words and can give examples of what they are. The more advanced students know adverbs and interjections. The few students at my school who are not in my classes have no idea what any of these words are or what they mean. I can tell most of my classes to write sentences in the simple, perfect and continuous tenses and most of the students can do it with minimal mistakes. My more advanced students can combine perfect and continuous. If I say any of these words to other students they will look at me like I am speaking in Esperanto. I once asked a Book 9 student who was not mine if something was singular or plural. She had no idea what I was talking about. They learn the difference in Book 2.

When Boss Lady II casually mentioned that Sunny was in a car “accident” I seemed to be the only one who gave a shit. Some of the Chinese teachers thought that maybe someone should send her a card or something. Fuck that, I thought. What hospital is she in? I will visit her even if it means driving for 45 minutes amongst the Chinese. In an incredible stroke of luck, more so for me than her, she was at the Wife’s hospital. This was convenient for several reasons. I could walk there, thus alleviating my need to drive around people who are hell bent on having people visit me in the hospital. I could go at any time rather than only going before work as I assumed I would since it seemed likely to me that she would be in a hospital near her home. And the Wife works at the Wife’s hospital. In fact, she is a head nurse. This means that I can easily get information that would be tediously difficult to get otherwise and I can be a hero by bringing a head nurse into a patient’s room. This is a major score to these people, though I was far more interested in the information gathering aspect.

From Boss Lady II I found that Sunny was in an “accident”, her mother was driving but probably survived since she was the one who told Boss Lady II about it, and she was at the Wife’s hospital. From the Wife I learned how the “accident” happened, what medical procedures Sunny had already undergone and which she will likely have in the future, how long she will likely be in the hospital and at home in recovery, and where she specifically was in the hospital. At any other hospital it would have taken me all day to simply confirm that she was there.

It is worth noting that I gained access to Sunny’s medical information not because I am sleeping with a head nurse but because anyone can gain access to anyone’s medical information. Knowing the Wife simply made it much faster. Privacy is an alien concept at Chinese hospitals. Any reporter can walk into any hospital and get any information about anyone who happens to be there. And they routinely do. When a celebrity is in an American hospital the news reports simply say that there is no word yet on whatever they want to talk about until some doctors holds a press conference and tell the world whatever the patient wants the world to know. When a celebrity is in a Chinese hospital the news reports immediately tell everyone what bodily orifices all the tubes are in and when the patient last had a bowel movement. I was about as horrified as I am capable of getting when the wife of a prominent politician was in a car “accident” that severed one of her legs and caused all kinds of internal damage and the television crews were right there in the emergency room with a camera in her face, asking her all manner of idiotic questions while the doctors were trying to prevent her death.

Another curiosity about the Chinese is that when I asked Boss Lady II what hospital Sunny was in, she wanted to know why. I would have thought the answer obvious, but I have spent years stating the obvious so I went against my better judgement and told Boss Lady II that I was going to pay a visit. She quickly pointed out that Sunny is no longer my student. An arbitrary schedule change some months ago saw to that. Apparently, visiting a student who was recently almost killed in a car “accident” is unusual, but visiting a former student is unheard of.

Sunny was asleep in the passenger seat. Her mother was driving while heavily medicated. Sunny woke up in the ICU with tubes in her body and surgical wounds in her abdomen. Her mother walked away without a scratch, as often happens. The asshole who caused it is unscathed while innocent bystanders are killed or maimed.

The prevailing Chinese attitude seems to be that while Sunny’s mother was obviously at fault she had no choice. She had to get home and she had to take her medications. Call me a foreigner, but I think there were other options. I know nothing about her medications or why she takes them so I cannot address that. But I am fairly confident that there were other choices to driving.

Taxis are abundant around here and relatively cheap, with rates slightly higher than Thailand and lower than Korea. And taxi drivers will probably not stare at Sunny’s mother with mouths wide open when she tells them where she wants to go in Chinese. There are also much cheaper buses, though they do not go everywhere. And there are hotels, motels and tiny dirt cheap shacks all over the place. If one cannot drive right now there are always alternatives.

Sunny’s spleen is permanently damaged. Part of it was removed during her first surgery and they will probably take all of it in the coming weeks. Without a spleen she will be more susceptible to sepsis and bacterial infections, and she lives in a place that is always susceptible to SARS, bird flu, pig flu and whatever the next pandemic will be. Most vaccines will be useless to her, and the older she gets the more likely she will develop pneumonia, renal failure and/or heart failure. She will have to take medications for the rest of her life and is at increased risk of stroke, heart attack, arthritis, bone necrosis, gallstones, kidney necrosis, ocular hemorrhaging, hypertension, various immune reactions and fetal retardation and spontaneous abortion if she is ever pregnant. But that should not be much of an issue since she now has a large scar just below where her left breast will one day be. This will make her largely unacceptable to most Chinese men since this culture values appearance above all else.

This all happened because her mother drives like a Chinese person.

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Update: Sunny returned to school in April as enthusiastic and happy as ever, although more pale than usual.

Drove From Paris To The Amsterdam Hilton

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We did not drive. We took the train. Nor did we stay at the Hilton. We stayed at a much better hotel as far as we are concerned. The Hilton is in a horrible location within walking distance of nothing but the park. Even the Concertgebouw or Cuypmarkt would take about 30 minutes at Pi Chi speed. The closest tram line goes to a few places but one would need to change trams regularly.

Our hotel was on the Nieuwezijde, around the corner from the Jordaan and very close to Centraal Station, from which you can get a tram, train or bus to practically anywhere. John Lennon never had peace at this hotel but we could easily walk to Haarlemmerbuurt for me and Negen Straatjes for her. It was all but on the good side of Nieuwendijk so we were surrounded by food.

Comparing the food of Amsterdam and Paris is not entirely fair. French cuisine is famous all over the world and beloved by snobs and fat people who sniff their own corks before they drink their wine. The French literally invented Michelin stars. Although why people take dining advice from a tire company is beyond me. Maybe this is why people eat escargot.

Nederlands cuisine is about old salted fish and ground up mammal chunks in plastic casings made of dried intestine and skin. I would rather eat in Holland than France any day.

French cheese is soft, runny and smells as bad as French cheese. Nederlands has Leiden, Gouda and the superlative Edam cheese from such places as Leiden, Gouda and Edam. Edam from other countries cannot compare to a true Noord Holland Edammer.

Then there are French fries, which no one outside of the United States calls French fries. Except in some parts of the English speaking world where French fries refer to the American version; shoestring McDonald’s fries. The best frites I have ever had were in Belgium, which seems reasonable since they invented it. French frites are nothing special, but there is a shop in Amsterdam on Nieuwendijk near Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal that has some excellent frieten. And of course real frites are served with mayonnaise. As an American once eloquently told me in Amsterdam, “Only a fag puts ketchup on fries.”

Something the French got right was the bread. Good bread at home is difficult to get, while you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting good bread in Paris. I believe this is how dining choices were made during la Revolución. Holland is not known for its bread but there is plenty of greatness out there if you know where to look. Melted chocolate chips on toast may seem odd the first time around but once you have had it you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. And by you I mean me.

There will always be people who argue about wine versus beer. France might have the best wine in the world and Holland might have the best beer, but I have not had a drop of alcohol since 1987 so I would not know. But from what I remember Irish beer is not too bad while American beer tastes just like old cat urine. I always preferred wine to beer but my drink of choice was vodka any day. Whoever invented Long Island Iced Tea is a genius.

Brouwersgracht at Prinsengracht, facing Ronde Lutherse Kerk
which used to be a church but is now the conference center for the hotel where we stayed

In between all this gluttony Pi Chi and I managed to see a bit of the town. She claims to have been in Amsterdam before but this was on one of her whirlwind Chinese tours where they visit 100 cities in five minutes. You can see more of Amsterdam on a postcard. Because of her Chinese traveling ways she had never been to the Rijksmuseum. This is like going to Paris without visiting the Louvre or going to 南投 and not visiting the bamboo museum. Lamentably, the Rijksmuseum is in the middle of a 10-year restoration program and only about .04% of their collection is available. But admission is still full price. What really bothered me was how little Rembrandt there is now. I happen to think Rembrandt was the best artist anyone has ever heard of. His etchings are particularly impressive. There used to be hundreds on display at the Rijksmuseum. When we went there were none.

The first time I went to the Rijksmuseum I was wandering around and turned a corner to see Het korporaalschap van kapitein Frans Banninck Cocq en luitenant Willem van Ruytenburch looming prominently over a large wooden room. It was displayed in a manner befitting a masterpiece. They had a cushioned bench in front of it and you could just sit there all day. In the abridged Rijksmuseum it is against a plastic wall in a small plastic room that looks more like a modern art museum than a national museum dedicated to one of the great periods of art. There is nowhere to sit in front of it and there are security guards preventing anyone from lingering too long. I understand the need for security on a painting that has been vandalized several times but I see no harm in letting people sit in front of something they are too far away to touch. Pi Chi’s first experience with Rembrandt was like hearing about the Mona Lisa all your life and then finally seeing a tiny painting behind thick bulletproof glass from a distance.

Since the current Rijksmuseum is so small we had plenty of time to walk down the plein to the Van Gogh Museum. Van Gogh never really did anything for me but he is Pi Chi’s favorite and if you want to see his work the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is possibly the best place. I do not especially like how his work is displayed in chronological order, and the building itself seems inappropriate, but it has a pretty good collection for a single artist.

It was raining on museum day. This was a little disappointing since we had just come from Paris, which had been unseasonably warm and almost always sunny. I had wanted to take Pi Chi to Vondelpark while we were at Museumplein but it is better seen in the sun. By the next day the clouds cleared and the weather got warmer. There had been a big storm before we arrived and the local weather people said that winter would hit about a week after we left. It turned out that 10/10 was lucky after all.

On a sunnier day we went to both Rembrandthuis and Anne Frank’s Achterhuis. I have been to both several times but after the mini-Rijksmueusm I was on a mission to show Pi Chi more Rembrandt. The great thing about Rembrandthuis is that it is rarely crowded. I have never seen more than a dozen people there at any given time. The bad news is that it usually houses very little of Rembrandt’s art. Unless of course the Rijksmuseum is under renovation. Many of his etchings that were previously displayed prominently in the Rijksmuseum were now in his old house. Pi Chi was impressed by his use of light in simple pencil sketches and agreed that he was probably more skilled than Van Gogh. But Van Gogh is still her favorite. I think if I can tolerate her ingestion of duck face and fish eyeballs I can probably live with her preference for post-Impressionism over the Golden Age. This will probably cause tension between us in the future, but nothing a lifetime of subtle manipulation and brainwashing cannot fix. If nothing else, getting divorced is very easy around here. If she ever goes to Jackson Pollock it may come to that.

Anne Frank’s former house is always more crowded than Rembrandt’s. I suppose that is a good thing in many ways. Unfortunately, the rooms where she and her family hid are empty and look nothing like they did at the time. Pi Chi said she went there during her big European tour, but she still knows almost nothing about Anne Frank’s life or why she was in hiding in the first place. Man’s inhumanity to man is something Chinese schoolchildren learn nothing about. And Chinese adults curiously lack much curiosity about the world around them. I was going to use this visit as an educational tool and hope that all the available information would help Pi Chi understand that something unimaginable actually happened. But the line to enter the house went around the corner and circled the Westerkerk so we never went inside. What Anne Frank went through is indescribably worse than waiting in line for over an hour, but I doubt being rushed through what is now basically a few empty rooms would tell Pi Chi much of anything. And there is all that shopping just down the street.

Pi Chi loves to shop. I may have mentioned this before. Taking her on safari would be pointless. There is no Crabtree & Evelyn on the Serengeti. But a city like Paris has shopping toujours. While we were in Paris I convinced her that the more she bought in Paris the more she had to drag around when we went to Amsterdam. This only made her want to shop in Amsterdam more. When the weather improved I wanted to take her to Vondelpark. She wanted to shop. So I took her to PC Hoofstraat, often called the Rodeo Drive of Amsterdam by people with little imagination. I sold it to Pi Chi as the Champs-Élysées of Amsterdam because she has no idea what Rodeo Drive is and I was not imaginative enough at the time to come up with anything better. Unbeknown to her it is also very close to the park. She was happy to see a famous and overpriced clothes store whose name I cannot recall but not quite as happy to see that it was closed for some reason. My opinion was that we should move on to the park. Hers was to continue shopping.

So we compromised and went to the Cuypmarkt, which is the kind of shopping that does not make me want to decapitate small birds and is still relatively close to the park, though not as close as we were earlier. At the Cuypmarkt she looked at and touched everything while I stumbled across a bakery with the best scones I have ever eaten. I cannot emphasize this enough. These scones were the best food I had on this entire trip, and my opinion of the superiority of Hollands food is legendary, having been noted in such places as several paragraphs above.

Having temporarily satiated her shopping addiction, Pi Chi finally agreed to go to the park. She wanted to take a tram, which is completely unnecessary from Boerenwetering. It also turned out to be a bad idea since there was a bit of a marathon going on that day and the tram lines near the park were diverted. We knew nothing about this. All we knew was that there was going to be a marathon at some point in time while we were in town. We did not know it was on this day and that it went through the park. As we sat on the tram and I saw the Munttoren it occurred to me that we were not exactly going where we wanted to go. But it fit in nicely with Pi Chi’s plan to ignore the park and do more shopping at the Dam.

This led to our best decision of the day. She would go shopping while I wandered around. We were on our honeymoon and there was no conference here to separate us but we have known each other long enough to know that sometimes she should do what she wants to do while I do what I want to do.

I have spent some time in Amsterdam, though not nearly enough. It is my favorite European city in the world and it comes a very close second to the undisputed greatest city in the known universe, Nieuwe Amsterdam, often called “New York” by the locals, or simply The City since all other cities are pale imitators. There is little of Original Amsterdam I have not seen inside of the Ringweg. But give me an OV chipkaart and an afternoon and I can come up with something.

Once upon a time you had to use something called cash to ride public transportation in Amsterdam. This was inconvenient since coins must be removed from pockets and inserted into metallic devices in a timely fashion and since some of us rarely have all that much cash to begin with. Then the Gemeentevervoerbedrijf came up with the strippenkaart, which made riding a tram or bus much easier and brought Amsterdam into the computer age with other large cities that already had similar card systems. When Pi Chi and I arrived in Amsterdam I was confident that my experience and mad skills would make traveling about the city as easy as it always is. But sometime this year they changed the system and replaced the strippenkaart with the new chipkaart. And no one bothered to tell me. There is very little difference between the two and it takes about half a second to figure it out, but after telling Pi Chi how awesome I am it just made me look like I had no idea what I was talking about. And this was one of those rare situations where I really did know what I was talking about.

One of the great things about Amsterdam is that it is incredibly easy to get anywhere you want to go. Every district is small enough to walk around and going from one area to another only requires a short ride on a tram, bus or the new metro system. Bicycles are an easy way to get around if you are one of those people whose head does not explode after pedaling for 20 minutes. People who like to give out warnings will warn you that the locals ride a little faster and with less enthusiasm for traffic rules than do tourists, but where I live absolutely no one follows any rules of the road or common sense. Cyclists in Amsterdam are little old ladies from Pasadena compared to everybody on the road here.

Spending the day wandering around the city on foot and hopping on a random tram whenever my feet tell me to is my idea of paradise. Amsterdam is a difficult city to get lost in and the trams go everywhere. If where you are does nothing for you, get on the nearest tram and see where that goes. I did this on my first visit many years ago and always had to stop at shops to get more change. The cards make life much easier.

But this is an activity that Pi Chi has absolutely no interest in. She wants to know where she is at all times and needs to know that she is on the right path to wherever she has planned on going. Whenever we travel together I have to set aside free time for myself if I want to stray from the itinerary. But this means more shopping for her, so everyone is happy.

Concertgebouw at Museumplein

Another great thing about Amsterdam is the relaxed attitude of its people. Amsterdammeren are the most polite people in the world and the nicest I have ever met outside of Africa. This led to a very permissive policy on mild recreational drugs and a large congregation of legal prostitution around the city’s oldest church. But unlike red light districts of most major cities, children can safely walk de Wallen, though they cannot buy anything. There is always talk of crime and the city has closed a number of windows and coffee shops in recent years, but most of the criminal activity is something visitors will never see. The area is very safe for pedestrians but probably not as safe for human traffickers and drug dealers. They tend to leave civilians out of their internal disputes.

This live and let live attitude places a good deal of emphasis on the live part. Amsterdam drivers will stop at red traffic lights, unlike Chinese drivers. They will also stop at green lights or in the middle of the road if someone is crossing in front of them. Pedestrians have the right of way and drivers willingly accept this. Chinese drivers have no concept of right of way and would rather run over their own mothers than stop.

If I walk around Paris with a giant suitcase I have to move out of every smoker’s way and can never use sidewalk ramps because the person standing there is too busy smoking to move aside two feet. If I walk around Amsterdam with a giant suitcase every single person will move out of my way. When I was on a narrow sidewalk they actually stepped into the street rather than force me to walk in the street. I could not believe it. People showed basic consideration. At one point I was walking on a narrow sidewalk with Pi Chi’s giant suitcase and a man carrying a large box was walking toward me. We both stepped out into the street and not a single car came close to hitting us or even honked its horn. This is unheard of where I live. If I walked amongst the Chinese with any size suitcase I would be killed swiftly and with great prejudice. There is a city north of Amsterdam that has no traffic lights or stop signs. Accidents all but disappeared after the signs were removed. I am inclined to think that if we did that here there would be mass carnage in the streets, but no one pays any attention to traffic lights or other cars anyway so I doubt it would make any difference.

Vondelpark at that little bridge to the casino and Hard Rock Café
Note the lack of scooters and blue trucks hitting people

On our last day in Amsterdam I finally got Pi Chi to Vondelpark. It is one of the world’s great city parks, slightly smaller than London’s Hyde Park and about nowhere near the size of New York’s Central Park. Ask the typical Amsterdammer where their favorite part of the city is and most will likely pick Vondelpark. It has everything you need in a park and is completely safe for women, children, dogs and nude sunbathers. Vondelpark is one of my favorite spots in Amsterdam and I try to walk the length of it every time I visit the city.

Pi Chi was not impressed. The park is not in any of her travel books and it is not a place that she can brag about visiting.

One of my favorite places in the world

I cannot sleep on planes. It has nothing to do with any fear of plummeting from thirty thousand feet in a four hundred ton fireball. It is certainly not the excitement of the adventure that awaits. If you thought that you clearly do not know me well. I can never get any sleep on planes because they cram us in like we won a free boat trip to the New World from 18th century Africa. Serial killers on death row have more personal space than anyone who flies “economy class”. It is impossible to get out of your seat without getting intimately close to the people next to you. Unless they move. But I generally fly on planes full of Chinese people. They will not move until the plane lands and the captain reminds everyone to stay in their seats. I was on a flight to somewhere and as soon as the plane stopped all the Chinese people got up and started taking their crap out of the bulging overhead bins. The seatbelt sign was still on and a voice from above told everyone to stay seated but Chinese is as Chinese does. The plane then moved again and people tumbled like mahjong tiles. Pi Chi was alarmed. I thought it was funny. Pi Chi is a nicer person. But sometimes people need to fall on their ass to remember that actions sometimes have consequences. And Chinese people need constant reminders that they cannot all be first all the time.

You could always pay six times as much for a first class ticket but I cannot. One would think that struggling airlines would make some kind of effort to make long flights more comfortable for those of us in the cheap seats, but as long as we put up with the class system they will keep giving better service to the people who pay a small fortune and charge more and more from those of us who cannot afford it. The Airbus A380 is the largest passenger plane ever built with something like 50% more cabin space than the 747. Does that mean there is more leg room in last class? No. They simply put in more seats.

Some airlines brag that their first class menus were designed by celebrity chefs. These are not the same menus we get in low class. In fact, there are no menus in low class. Your options in low class are stale microwaved crap or stale microwaved shit. Condiments include salt, pepper and toothpick. Except on Asian flights where salt is unlucky. Your beverage selections are a tiny plastic cup of Coke, juice or water. Nobody has Pepsi because Coke plays hardball. They did not get as large as they are by being nice. Some Asian flights only serve water or tea. Except in first class.

When I booked the flights months ago I ordered vegetarian meals for both of us. This pissed off Pi Chi no end. Vegetarian meals on Asian flights are stale rice and soggy vegetables. European flights usually serve stale pasta and soggy vegetables. On one or two flights in Africa I had some kind of omelette pancake object. Breakfast is usually those plastic eggs you get at hotel breakfast buffets.

I pointed out to Pi Chi that the only difference between the vegetarian meal and the carnivore meal is a big chunk of animal in a gravy of blood and urine. The stale rice and soggy vegetables are still there. She was still very unhappy about it. She does not feel she has eaten until she can feel Thumper’s sinew blocking her colon. On our flight to Europe I got one of the flight attendants to give her an extra abdominal fat and hormone meal but she still bitched and moaned about it for entirely too long. So I let her eat the rice and vegetables on the way home. She always brings a large bag of food on any flight longer than a few hours anyway. She will never starve.

One area where airlines have improved their service over the years is in entertainment. You used to watch a single movie on a single screen at the front of the cabin. This was worse than trying to watch a movie at a drive-in. Especially when the fat salesman next to you tries to get to second base. Now even the people in the cheap seats have individual screens and a wide variety of choices. If you are on a 15 hour flight you can watch enough generic Hollywood movies and American television to make you long for the days when everyone watched the same movie on the same screen at the front of the cabin.

I have not kept track of American television since I left the country to pursue my dream of playing professional ping pong at traveling puppet shows. I do not know who most of the current celebrities are and have no idea who is in rehab right now, and when I saw a list of nominees for the latest Emmy awards I had never heard of most of the people and had never seen any of the shows. On the plane I watched episodes of “The Simpsons”, “The Sopranos”, “The Office”, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock”. Of these, “The Simpsons” was the only show I had watched previously. And it might be time for them to retire. “The Sopranos” episode meant nothing to me since I had no idea who everyone was and what the conflict was about. But I was surprised to find that the plane version retained the original language. “The Office” was incredibly banal and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock” seemed like every other formulaic sitcom. But in all fairness I watched the entire episode of each show. I started to watch episodes of “The New Adventures Of Old Christine”, “Everybody Loves Raymond”, “Samantha Who” and one of those “Law And Order” shows but I simply could not. The best television I saw on that plane was something about Jamie Oliver cooking pasta in his backyard.

The movie selection was a horse of the same color. The “family” movies were all cartoons and stories about talking animals. The comedies were movies that fans of “Everybody Loves Raymond” probably watch. The dramas were the same superhero and Michal Bay movies that litter the Blackboster at home. In the “classics” category were such iconic films of yesteryear as “Meet The Fockers” and “The Da Vinci Code”. There was nothing made before 2000.

I spent most of the flight listening to compilation CDs of piano sonatas while Pi Chi watched a vampire movie with people I did not recognize and some predictable romantic comedies where they figure out each other’s secret plan and break up only to realize that they really are meant for each other despite all their differences.

Our flight from Hong Kong was delayed for about an hour because of a medical situation. A Chinese voice asked if there was anyone with medical experience on the plane. Pi Chi was about to get up but changed her mind when she saw a few people walk toward the flight attendant who seemed to be in charge. I asked her why she was not going and she said that there were other people. I suggested the possibility that those other people might not have her 18 years of experience. She then got up and walked a few rows ahead of us and sat down next to an old woman. While everyone else went to the flight attendants, Pi Chi went directly to the patient. I have no idea how she knew that this was the person who needed medical assistance. Perhaps it is that 18 years of experience.

Chinese culture dictates that the older person in any given profession is in charge, regardless of ability. Most of the people who went to the flight attendants were nurses with very little or very specialized experience. They were all obviously younger than Pi Chi. There was an older woman who apparently spent more time in management than actual nursing, but the patient preferred Pi Chi. Another odd thing about Chinese medical culture is that the patient is in charge. Doctors ask patients what they want to do.

Once the chain of command was worked out, Pi Chi went back to examining her patient. She quickly determined that there was some kind of diabetic situation going on. I only heard bits and pieces of the entire process.

Eventually an old white dude meandered from one of the better classes. He was a doctor but spoke no Chinese. Pi Chi tried to explain the situation in English as best she could but her medical English is much funnier when there is not a medical situation. I heard her say “I agree” to the doctor and he walked away, never to be seen in lowest class again.

The reason the flight was delayed for an hour was because the old woman refused to leave the plane. Pi Chi, the doctor and the flight attendant in charge all agreed that she should get off the plane and go to a Hong Kong hospital. But Chinese patients are in charge and she wanted to go to her local doctor at home. The pilot refused to take off until someone assured him that the old lady was not going to die on the plane. I assume either the doctor did this or perhaps one of the emissaries that were sent back and forth from the mystical land of the front of the plane to the back end where all the action was taking place.

When Pi Chi returned to her seat the head flight attendant thanked her profusely and gave her a complimentary tiny plastic cup of water for her troubles. She also got a free plastic piece of crap along with her shopping. Yes, Pi Chi also shops on planes. Anyone who knows her should not be surprised. When the flight attendant asked if we needed anything else I suggested an upgrade to business class, but this was met with laughter.

I was not joking.

Moon over the Dam

Swans at de Wallen

Sint Nicolaaskerk at Damrak