Yesterday I went climbing in the hills north of the house for the second day in a row. Yesterday I finally completed one of my long term goals, reaching a tower visible from the house and the road, but much harder to reach than one would guess. There are networks of nice paths, often paved, throughout Chinese mountains, especially in the more populated provinces. In Beijing there is a network of paths linking temples constructed by Cixi, the Empress Dowager who ruled China until 1908 if I'm not mistaken. She created these paths to gain merit by making pilgrimages less arduous for the pilgrims, now they are a great boon to Beijing residents, allowing for endless day hikes through ruins and past temples. Most of the paths in the mountains where I am lead to the terraces up in the mountains, or to graveyards. I believe a large amount of concrete paths are made in order to ease the construction of graves, as it requires transporting a great deal of rocks and concrete not to mention ceramic tiles and carved stone. Incidentally, smaller Buddhist temples are often located near areas with many graves, as they can organize plenty of monks for the ceremonies and people are likely to donate money to the monks so that they will pray for the souls of the deceased buried nearby.

I found that the tower I wanted to reach was built just above a temple. The denizens of said locale were friendly, and I was nearly converted by a monk who lived there. He was from just south of Cangnan, from the southernmost area of Wenzhou prefecture, and also one of the poorer parts. While I was riding the bus back from Canton, the bus driver who was from the Northeast said as we drove through that it looked like the rest of China in the Eighties, and that it was straight out of the third world. He said it in measured verse so it was much funnier than my translation. So this monk from the most southerly part of the prefecture regaled me with tales of adepts who could communicate with the spirit world, and thereby know the past and the future as well as read your thoughts. He explained that Buddhists were different from Christians in that Christians only need to believe in the religion. Buddhists train and therefore anyone can become a Buddha if he makes the effort. He also told me about a large Buddhist monastery in the US which is called 万佛城 or Myriad Buddha City which is probably in California. I just typed it into my favorite search engine, and sure enough, its in California. If anyone is interested the proper name for it is 万佛圣城 or The Sagely City of Ten-thousand Buddhas, a middling translation, but there it is. After being nearly converted I escaped while they were busy chanting the sutras. I made it to the tower, which was just a reconstruction of a previous tower. The reconstruction was an earlier one from the nineties, lots of the reconstruction of destroyed temples is very recent. I have taken several pictures of the tower from different vantages and will post them for your viewing pleasure.
After I viewed the tower I scrambled past some graves up to the path on the ridge and followed it for a distance. (The first picture in today's entry is after I climbed up the ridge and am looking down at the tower.)
The next day (yesterday) I went back again and found my way to the same path along the ridge. I walked along it through some magnificent scenery and finally found my way to a Taoist temple where I was served tea flower tea, which you can read all about here:My weblog about Tea

This is a nicely finished stone bowl. The sides are all of even thickness and it is pretty smooth. There is a lot of stone work like this. One brainstorm I had is that Some of the larger stone basins were made to be set outside to catch rainwater for drinking, and are useful because they would be harder to carry away than earthenware jugs as the big ones are taller than my knee and probably weigh just under 800 pounds. This bowl is set next to a fireplace, and looks perfect for grilling kebabs over a bed of hot coals.

The last picture is of an advertisement for horse and donkey transport. It lists a contact name and two phone numbers. I expect most of his work is bringing construction materials up the mountain for grave builders. I only included it because readers in the US might be tickled to know that a man who runs donkey caravans has two cell phones.

Strange pictures and Racism

These pictures don't really fit together, but I am going to put them in here anyway. The picture of what I assume is supposed to be eau de toilet is one of my favorite pictures ever, and needs no explaination.

I found it in someone's bathroom. If you don't know why its funny, look closer for the English writing on it.

The brand name is "Snake gall bladder"

The next two pictures sort of make me angry, so if you don't want to read a bunch of rightously indignant crap, then just skip it.

I am usually not very sensitive about culturally insensitive people, but the hypocracy of the chinese in their cultural insensitivity is just disgusting.

I have also added a nice picture of a jacket with a swastica on it. The swastica is an indian symbol that made its way to china along with buddhism. It is also a chinese character with the pronounciation 'wan.'

However, this symbol is not usually common outside of temples and religious paraphenalia.

I once saw a shirt in Tianjin that was on someones back so i didn't get to read the whole thing, but it went on about how Hitler was an effeminate man and a great dictator. the color scheme was black and red on a white t-shirt with a large swastica on the front.

This Grand Dragon wine is kind of silly by itself, but combined with the China famous brands logo visible on the lower right hand side of the bottle, which is just a sorry excuse to put the Schutzstaffel SS logo on as many things as humanly possible, it becomes another example of perhaps inadvertent white power fetishism.

When one explains to a Chinese person the history of the symbol, they immediately tune out, or more frequently change the subject immediately.

I didn't actually become angry until I was watching a korean drama on TV (dubbed in Chinese of course) and I caught a really hilarious joke. A character on the show farted and then someone else said, "It smells worse in here than one of those rooms they used to gas the Jews."

I am aware of the fact that there are many people that make holocaust jokes in the US and Europe. This strikes me as so much worse because the Chinese and Koreans are always whining about how the Japanese mistreated them during the war, but feel free to make fun of the Jews. I haven't seen hypocracy this blatant in a long time.

I also love how you can see all sorts of TV advertisements about how nice the Chinese are in the dealings with the Dark Continent, and then when you talk to people in the street they tell you how ugly black people are or, frequently "We hate black people." One nice person seeing how I balked a little after he asked me didn't I think black people were incedibly ugly too said "in America you think we're even uglier than black people." I balked even more at that one, and he would probably just think I was trying to be super diplomatic if I told him I don't think any race of people is ugly as a whole. I do make a point to tell people that hating black people is wrong and that we don't hate black people in America. I know its kind of a lie, but a more subtle didactic is wasted effort. A point is only gotten across by unflagging repetition and the law of Volume makes Right.

In which I exhibit a serious lack of judgement

Be warned, gentle reader, today's post is gruesome. Read on at your own risk.

I was going to include this picture at first with some others, but I have since realized that it fully deserves an entire post all to itself.

"So what exactly is pictured above?" you might find yourself asking. Well, its deep fried 3 layer meat. "What, exactly, might that presume to be?" might be the next question to occur to the enquiring mind, albeit, perhaps not the most prudent question. 3 layer meat is the skin of the pork with the fat attached and sometimes a bit of meat hanging off the very end to keep appearances up, and generally has less lean meat content than bacon. It is, in short, exceptionally fatty uncured bacon. This is then battered with a small amount of flour mixed with egg yolk. The whites are thrown away to ensure an even less healthy result. Then the unholy combination is then bunged into boiling oil until damp, then drug out and heaved in front of the unlucky victim. "What happens next?", you might ask? Well if you did, you'd be sorry.

I wound up eating most of the plate because it is a pretty cool idea. It takes a genius to come up with something that could be said to have a higher fat content than deep fried bacon. I then spent a pretty uneventful afternoon going to town to print out some papers. I met a nice meat wholesaler who specializes in Mutton, Chicken and Dog from Anhui province. I then came home and ate the last two pieces for dinner.

After dinner I suddenly felt as though I was pregnant with a black hole, or something about that painful. Anyway, I didn't take any after pictures, but my pain has so far been limited to a very short length of time and I have begun to believe in the powers of Pu-erh or Pu'er tea to stave off the harmful effects of heavy foods. I drank a bunch of 7 year old stuff and it seems to have kept the heart attack off for the past 6 or so hours; which is about all anyone can reasonably expect. It doesn't get any heavier than this. I challenge anyone to top this story with a food more oily that you actually ate. The only thing I can imagine comparing is eating whale blubber.

In Which I Involuntarily Cause the Beating of Small Children

Today I saw the cutest kid in the hallway. She was probably about four years old, and was dressed in a big padded jacket with the little sleeve covers to keep the cuffs from wearing out. Her hair was done up nicely in two little pigtails curled nicely, as cute as can be. She was furious and screaming, holding two plastic stools brandishing one at us as we climbed the stairs below her. She stopped screaming as I walked by her, but still looked like she wanted to slam me in the knee with it as I approached. I stopped to ask her what the matter was, but she wouldn't look at me. She flung one stool away and focused on the other slamming it over and over on the ground.

I thought she might have been mad at me because of what happened yesterday. I was at home by myself contemplating my next blog entry when I heard loud crashing sounds on the stairs. I tried to ignore it, but the banister is one long hollow matrix of stainless steel tubing welded together that runs from the first floor to the sixth, so if you strike it, it is very sonorous, and can be heard throughout the building. The noises did not stop and I went out to check on the source. I was afraid it was outsiders (外地人）up to something. I went down one flight and found the little girl mentioned above. She was with her little brother who she would order to bring her a plastic bottle or tin can which she would then drop down the stairwell. I asked her what she was doing. She showed me and I began to try to talk her out of it. Then her mother came out and stared at me funny like. So I explained what was happening. The mother was very surprised to see a foreigner and proceeded to decrease her feeling of awkwardness by thrashing both toddlers. I tried to tell her it didn't matter, but she was already chasing them back into her apartment smacking wildly. My mother in law says here, if someone complains about your kids and you don't hit them it might seem like you are ignoring the complaint. Maybe that's why the poor kid wasn't happy to see me.