Travel to Live. Live to Travel

In some ways, we wished we had more time in Marrakesh…but on the other hand, we were pretty happy to leave–it’s not that Marrakesh is a problem, but I think we were just weary from Fez and from a series of events which made us distrustful. On the first day, our driver (who was very nice) got in a heated argument with a local Marrakeshi and as he showed us to our riad, he warned us not to trust “anyone here.” Later, our guide proved to be a bit sexist and made constant sexist jokes, which I have learned to just ignore and plaster a false smile. Then later, at the food stalls we watched two young Spanish girls being ripped off by the waiters. They fought and fought, and finally got their money back. When the waiters tried to pull that shit on us, we flat out refused and they gave us our money back.

There’s a big culture of tipping here (well, in Fez and Marrakesh at least), which I’m not sure is indigenous or learned from the tourists–but what is expected is far more than I even tip in the U.S. And sometimes when you do tip, you’re given a withering look or a, “that’s all, my friend?”

Needless to say, by dinner the next night we just wanted to hide in our riad and not leave. =P Luckily, we had a cooking class and a spa so much of the day was filled with activities (which will be written about in another entry), but for dinner we didn’t want to chance it with the unknown restaurants that charge $10 for a bad sandwich or bland pizza or bland tajine.

Our last dinner in Marrakesh? KFC. And you know what? It was more delicious and cheaper than the crappy food stalls that tried to scam us. Oh…and the KFC had guards at the doors! ;P

I almost lost it today. The traffic here is terrifying. Very few streets have lights, let alone a pedestrian signal. Most people just step out into traffic and trust that the thousands of motorbikes will zoom past them safely. Between the stress of all the horns blaring at me and staring down buses I felt myself just wanting to punch everyone around me.

But then we turned a corner and came across a quieter street with an old colonial building which is now the Museum of Fine Art and everything just got much, much better. The night ended with a Vietnamese meal which could best be described as spiritual (needless to say, we were too busy eating to take photos.) I guess sometimes it just takes awhile to get used to a place…

Walking down an alleyway next to the museum

An alleyway

Birdcages, clothes, and deadly power lines...

Uncle Ho Chi Minh guarding the post office

Former hotel, now home of the People's Committee

It’s hot. It’s overwhelming. Everywhere we go we have to dodge motorcycles. Everywhere we go we hear horns blasting. There’s smells in the air, not often pleasant. Garbage in the streets. Holes in the sidewalk that lead to sludge-water. It’s pretty embarassing worrying over the fabled motorcycle purse-snatchers when you know you’re carrying a camera worth more than the average family makes in a year.

But yet it finally feels exciting and like we’re REALLY traveling. Parts of China were exciting and “exotic”, but we’re kind of spoiled owing to the fact we lived in Japan for three years (and thus could read quite a few things) and coupled with the fact some of my best friends are Asian-born Chinese (thus I was already exposed to quite a few foods, customs, etc.) We are finally in a place where we don’t understand anything going on around us. It’s overwhelming, but it’s fun.

Two delicious bowls of pho down, bring on more delicious food.

We arrived in Taiwan fairly uneventfully, but yet managed to make an event of it.

We booked at the Lucky News Classic Hotel (weird name, I know) which for the price of $50 offered free shuttle service from the airport, free breakfast, wifi, etc. When we arrived, we were surprised at how friendly the staff was and moreover, by how clean and nice the room was. It wasn’t 5-star for sure, but it was certainly nicer than some of the dens of evil we’ve stayed in around Asia before for that price. Needless to say, we spent more time than necessary wondering if we’d get charged for the soap, or for the fruit, etc. Nope, it was just a nice place to stay in transit. God, we’re newbs.

Despite our best efforts, today started off on a bit of a rough patch. Due to jet lag, we woke up at 5am and had little to do but try and steal internet and eat sandwiches with provisions (baguette, brie, and ham–we’re assholes) we had purchased the night before. Needless to say, when we decided to go out into the city around 10am we were stir crazy and hungry. This is unfortunate, since our first stop was the Bund–a collection of old colonial buildings on the waterfront and facing some pretty spectacular buildings on the Pudong side of Shanghai which are all super futuristic (and/or tacky.)

I usually love this sort of juxtaposition stuff, but instead we was hot and cranky and eager to find something to eat. After a remarkably long walk which wasn’t helped at all by the fact I decided to buy the WORST guide-book to Shanghai. It’s full of beautiful pictures and history on all the buildings, but it doesn’t tell you whether the building is actually functional (long history on the architect of a theatre, but no information on what actual is performed there) nor do the maps bother to list all the streets. I digress–finally, Hugh found a place and we were like, fine, lets go here.

Turns out it was a restaurant that has been around since the 1800s and it was at this restaurant that, finding myself simply overwhelmed, I almost burst into tears. I suppose it was a mix of the heat and the just being so unable to communicate when people think I can. I never know if someone is shouting, “Hey you! Watch out!” or what to do or say when someone asks me a question. You know, it was culture shock.

But remembered this saying we invented yesterday–Think: Luke!

See, I have always greatly admired anyone who went to Japan with me who didn’t know anything about the language or the culture. Me, I studied it for years and came to Japan near fluent in Japanese. It was easy for me. I could have never done what some of my friends did. This is where the phrase Think Luke! came from. We tried to think of one of our friends, someone who came to Japan non-fluent but kind of had fun with that and had a good attitude, smiled, tried to be positive about it, etc. So we thought of Luke (if you’re reading this buddy, you better be flattered ;P) When you feel let down, think Luke!

China is the first country I’ve gone to in Asia where lots of people don’t speak English–cause, well, why should they? They do in Cambodia because the economy in Angkor Wat is based around tourism. I’m just grateful for my Japanese ability which means I can more or less understand signs and read maps and sometimes even make a decent guess at pronunciation.

So anyways, after a delicious lunch and a pep talk, we set off feeling better — found a Starbucks, got our caffeine fix, people watched, pep talked a bit more (which made Hugh feel better this time. We then managed to spend the next 12 hours wandering around Shanghai on foot, amazed at just how sprawled out the city was and how clean it was. There’s always this impression that China was dirty, told to me by my Chinese friends nonetheless. Maybe it is, but Shanghai is near spotless.

At night we had arranged to meet a friend for dinner, but due to my shitty guidebook we found ourselves lost in the French Concession. So we decided to ask a waitress at a cafe, who proceeded to take my book and ask another customer where the location of an unmarked road was. In the end, the waitress asked me if I could read Chinese–I responded that I could a little, and she presented me with a JAPANESE advertisement tourism book that just happened to have incredibly detailed maps of all of Shanghai including all the street names in CHINESE characters and not useless English ones.

THANK YOU!

Anyways, dinner was fun (Yunnanese food) and in the end we got to a taxi and managed to make our way home communicating with the driver only with what limited Chinese we have learned, which, well, made me feel really good. I know I could probably get by just speaking English, but I’ve always felt when in a country every effort should be made to speak as much of the language as one can until the locals laugh at you and speak in English to you. Most of our broken-gibberish Chinese phrases has been greeted with Chinese spoken at natural speed, which tells me either they think we can understand them because our Chinese is just so awesome or they don’t speak English at all–so Chinese it is!

Anyways, after walking around for 12 hours straight we’ve decided that tomorrow is going to be a day of rest….probably.

P.S. I can’t seem to access LJ within China, if anyone knows of a proxy server, please let me know.

I know it’s not the same because the Japanese language doesn’t exactly have naughty words the same way we have naughty words (though don’t be fooled, there’s plenty of shit you never say in polite company), but I will never ever get over hearing 3rd graders in elementary school screaming the following:

“Oppai!!” (Tits!)
“Chikubi!!” (Nipples!)
“Boku okama da!!” (I’m a tranny!)
“‘Chinko’ eigo de nan to iu no?” (How do you say penis in English)

Maybe more so than the fact the kids say it is the fact the teachers smile and laugh. I can’t help it, I’m a prudish American. I have a mouth like a drunken sailor, but I still cringe when I hear kids saying stuff like that.

Then again, I also cringe when people ask me things like, “Oshiri ga itai no?” (Does your butt hurt?) Let’s not talk about my butt, your butt, or anyone else’s butt. Japanese people are always really shocked when I tell them we don’t discuss breasts and butts in polite company, they always reply with “but…but…American TV is nothing but showing that stuff, why can’t you talk about it?”

Touche.

Every Tuesday I teach eikaiwa (English Conversation Class) to a group of women in their 30s-50s. They’re lovely women and over the course of a year or so, they’ve become people I’ve gotten to know and they’ve gotten to know me as well. I find them an excellent source of views on Japan, not typical views, but interesting ones. They’re not students, they’re not obsessed with dating foreigners, and they’re not driven by some desire to live overseas–they’re all mothers, some housewives, some with jobs, and most of them live in rural Japan more or less by choice because their husbands have family here. In short: they’re typical Japanese women. At the same time, they’re clearly a bit more international than the typical Japanese person because instead of hunting down foreigners to “befriend”, or complaining about how they wish they could speak English, they’ve actually taken the iniative to try and do what little they can to improve their spoken ability.

Yesterday one of my new ladies started talking about how she was having a hard time adjusting to Unnan. I found this particularly interesting because although she was born and raised in Osaka, but she had been living around Shimane for 9 years or so. She just moved from Matsue, which is best described as someplace like…I don’t know, Dubuque, Iowa? It’s the capital of an extremely rural prefecture, a non-city that likes to think it’s someplace big and important. Anyways, she was saying that people are really cliquish here, that she has a hard time trying to fit into the group, that people aren’t very open or warm to her or her ideas for internationalising the kids in her community. She said she was really shocked by it, culture shocked.

I found this to be fairly interesting. Many of my fellow foreign friends here in Japan get frustrated by the fact that people don’t include them in things, or that they can’t get buddy-buddy with their neighbors. Well, if a Japanese woman who moved 25km from Matsue to Unnan feels like she can’t integrate, what hope is there for you? I learned a long, long time ago that the average Japanese society will never accept you into their group. This doesn’t bother me. Of course I want to have friends, and I do have those. But I’m not expecting to be accepted as Japanese when I’m not. This is one of the great things about America, if you subscribe to our ‘ideals,’ you are American. This is something Japanese people don’t understand and why people always say, “you’re not really American,” to me. Being American to them is an ethnicity, like being Japanese, you cannot become Japanese.

Of course we all want to be accepted, but part of understanding the culture of Japan is understanding that the likelihood of becoming “Japanese” while not being Japanese is virtually impossible.

I have had bronchitis for over two and a half weeks. During this time I’ve missed two weeks straight of work. Do you know absurd that is to a Japanese person? I mean, it’s absurd to an American, but to a Japanese person it’s totally insanity. And part of the problem was honest to goodness the medicines they gave me. I’ve been on all manner of stuff, all of them with side effects that are worse than the bronchitis. There was day long nausea, vomiting, palpitations, and days when I cannot remember a single thing that happened. One of the things given to me was a sleeping pill, which my mother worriedly informed me, was generally not used in the U.S. any longer due to the fact that it regularly gives people nightmares, has caused suicidal tendencies, and I believe in one cause made someone go on a homicidal rampage. Nice. I’m also on medicine that according to websites is highly addictive and suddenly stopping the dosage can cause withdrawl symptoms. Right. Okay.

I’ve decided not to recontract. I’m unhappy with a multitude of things here, and it’s all sort of causing this general depression I’ve had since maybe late October. I’m sure the medicines I’ve been on haven’t helped, but a few days ago I was on the verge of a mental break down and spent the whole day crying my eyes out and nearly decided to just pack up and go home right then and there. Of course the next day after the drugs were out of my system I felt 1000x better and realised the affair the day before had been largely drug induced, but it really doesn’t change the fact I’m quite unhappy here. Kenneth thinks it’s because being a CIR had been such a long time dream, then to have it realised and see it was NOTHING like I expected (even knowing what I did know) can be devastating. I guess that’s true. I’d wanted to be a CIR since I was 14. I guess when you hold on to a dream for 10 years and find it to be nothing like you hoped, then you sort of…yeah. Well anyways, rather than whining about how I hate stuff, I’m just going to move on. If I can’t find work in Tokyo, then I’m considering going back to school to get some classes or maybe another degree in business. My mom is really pushing me to New York, don’t quite know why, but she is.

Oh well, when everything is said and done I have the support from the people who love me so I really don’t have much to worry about. My mom suggested I see a psychiatrist here or something since I have sort of a history of depression that doesn’t seem to be getting better…unfortunately, Japanese people don’t believe in mental health or doctor-patient privilege. Once again, wtf?

Very stressed lately. Events, cold weather, interfriend-drama (!), difficult kids at the schools I visit.
bitching