I FEEL A CHILL, LIKE A LONG, WHITE VEIL

Our hostel in Bangkok was located in what is apparently Thailand's Wedding District. Did you know they have wedding districts? The female portion of our readership need not answer, pursuant to the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. There were literally wedding shops on every corner, upstairs, downstairs, across alleys and over little bridges. There was no getting away from them. There were so many of them that the only way to tell if one was nearby was that Mark always turned pale beneath his sunburn and his hands started shaking. Uncanny. It was kind of like having Sting around to warn of Goblins and Orcs.

By the way, I am officially declaring the Great Facial Hair Experiment a failure. It's not so much that my sideburns totally let me down in the deal by coming in really patchy and unevenly, which could be fixed by simply omitting them altogether, but because my mustache simply failed to come to the party. It's hard to actually describe how bad it looks, but knowing Seth, he'll take a picture. I'm only keeping it because it keeps the touts at bay. They think I have mange.

We spent our first day in Bangkok in our usual way: walking the city until our feet fell off, seeing everything within walking distance. We had some quite interesting times down in the city center at the Royal Palace and Wat Pho, a massive Buhddist Temple. We ended up taking an extremely crowded river ferry down the river to the business district, where we had dinner up at the top of the Baiyoke Sky Tower, which is the tallest building in Thailand.

Awesome view of the city, and we (Seth and I since Mark is indisposed to fine seafood) were enjoying some really great sushi when a live band started up around the corner of the circular dining room. We listened for a while, trying to figure out the style of music, but like most of the cover bands we have heard on this trip, the style is schizophrenic to say the least. For a while it was Thai pop, then they tried a little metal, and eventually settled into re-makes of American oldies. However, our curiousity got the better of us when they launched into "Jumbalaya" and we just had to have a look. We went round to the stage to discover three very short Thai men playing like mad on drums, guitar, and bass in the background and three leggy Thai girls in go-go outfits singing their hearts out in the spotlights. "Jumbalaya, Jumbalaya......." I have no words for the weirdness. I think we laughed the entire 83 stories down to the ground.

If I ever decide to become an Ex-pat, Thailand is the current leading candidate. We talked with our driver to the Bridge Over the River Kwai, and discovered that if you wanted to live in Kanchadpuria, the nearest city to the bridge, you could do so quite comfortably on around $2,200 per year. The food is great, the people are very friendly, and it's really a beautiful country. In fact, the hostel we stayed at was run by an Aussie ex-pat called "Big John" who had lived in Bangkok for 10 years and loved it. In fact, that led to one of the more interesting stories of the trip. We were up late one night, discussing world politics with John and an ex-pat liberal from Utah, when he stated, appropos of something, "She was my first wife--or actually, my first Thai wife." Turns out his first Thai wife lives in Australia, while he lives in Thailand. She liked Australia more, and he liked Thailand more, so they switched countries and have been happy ever since.

We also got introduced to the wild world of Australian Rules Football, which is a hoot. Not as blatantly violent as Rugby, but more more demanding physically than American football, the games last 100 minutes, and speed, strength, reach, endurance, and jumping are all demanded of the players. It turned out that the next day was the Aussie Rules championship between the West Coast Eagles and the Signey Swans. The whole hostel turned out for it in the downstairs restaurant, as well as any Aussie ex-pats who needed a satilite uplink to the game.

As a side note, we met a lot of nice Aussies while climbing the Great Wall, and it was rather odd to be exchanging "Where did YOU watch the game?" stories with them from the top of one of the great wonders of the world. Airports won out by a narrow margin, but the other American guy with us had seen it in a bar in the Blue Mountains during his tour of the Australian prison system. You can't say you don't meet interesting people while traveling.

Beijing started out as a complete mess. After yet another red-eye flight, Seth's bag got lost on the way from Bangkok, we lost the directions and address to the hostel and had a shady taxi driver try to take advantage of the whole thing. We just wanted to get to an internet cafe to look up the address, but he took us into town and dropped us off at a random spot and demanded big time $$. We settled for a fairly stiff amount based on the fact that he had the ability to communicate in Mandarin with any police officers who might have happened to be around, and my Mandarin is pretty much limited to saying things like, "He's a vegetarian. Bring him no more rat." We ended up getting there in the course of 4 hours, two buses, two miles of walking, and some help from some friendly university students who wanted to sell us paintings.

The Forbidden City is the largest Imperial space we have yet seen. It goes on for palace after palace, courtyard after courtyard, bridge after bridge, and stairway after stairway. We walked as quickly as we could, and it took as 30 minutes just to get through the main palace complex. Tianamein Square is equally as large, as is the complex for the Temple of Heaven, where the Emporers went to receive affirmation of their status as the "Sons of Heaven."

Capitalism has definitely hit Beijing. They have defunded the Universities to some extent, and made the students and teachers responsible for raising funds. This has led to a proliferation of little basement "student" shops for artwork and painting. The students sell their paintings there with no tax or duty and no interference from the government. The professors, in order to raise more money, contribute some amazing pieces that are unsigned. If they signed the works, they would be labelled as national treasures, and purchasers would not be able to take them out of the country. The result is that you can buy some fantastic works at a great discount while making the entire art department of a major university greatful. We found three that we really liked and worked out a deadl for them. They even threw in a free Chairman Mao portrait! Mark is going to keep it in his room, next to his Ronald Reagan Stamp picture. We got through Chinese customs with them all right, but I'm a tad worried about returning to the US.

The Great Wall. Not much to say about it, actually, except you really need to see it. Our "discount" tour consisted of a bus to the Wall, and then 4 hours to climb around on it. Great fun. They gave us a massive expanse of wall to walk on, and we got over most of it, at the expense of our legs and feet.

We left Beijing at 5am and hit the airport where security was the tightest we've seen yet. They searched the bags exhaustively, and by the time we were done, we were on the run to get to the right terminal. The end result was that we ended up at the gate with 20 minutes to flight time, and $120US in Chinese Yuan, which cannot be changed outside of China at the moment because of the way they peg their currency against international value. (It's complicated, and likely to get more so). End result: 20 minutes for three tired, jetlagged guys to have a mad shopping spree in perfume stores! I parked Seth in a little cafe to drink orange juice, and embarked on a mad search with Mark for Something To Buy. The only thing we could find in our gate area was a mostly Chinese language book shop that had a few things we could recognize. Mark dropped out partway through, citing boredom, tiredness, and covetessnous of Seth's orange juice, but I manage to buy a very motley assortment of random things, including a movie called "The Seven Swords" and a 10-disk Jackie Chan extravaganza that we are hoping will have English subtitles even though there's no English on the box, a thriller written by an ex-NFL lineman (for Mark), two Chinese folk music CD's, a CD by a Chinese girl-group that nobody recognized, a map of Beijing (for next time), a book of anecdotes about the Emperors, and two 4 volume translations of the Chinese classics "Outlaws of the Marsh" and "Journey to the West." That's what you get when you force a guy to go shopping in an airport with money that has become as worthless to him as monopoly money.

Next up: Last Stop, Tokyo-the Tale of Mark in a Sushi Bar

JS®