HK Living

We’re leaving for the mainland later this morning – A and I are off to Guangzhou and then, uninclined to spend a great deal of time in that supposedly mess of a Chinese city, immediately off on an overnight train to Guilin where we will cruise down the Li River.  It’s been a helluva time in Hong Kong and has reaffirmed for me, yet again, the interconnectedness of us all and the latent potential in each new conversation with a stranger.

THe amazing carrot cake at LIFE

Ann and I arrived here two days ago from Taipei, checked into the hotel and set off to explore.  We had lunch at Life, the vegetarian restaurant recommended to me by friends and yogis alike.  Revived by a few veggie sandwiches, we caught a bus to the Star Ferry and set off for Kowloon, the crazy part of Hong Kong.  Roaming Nathan Road, the tourist-trap thoroughfare of electronics, jewelry, and other stuff, A and I felt grateful for deciding to stay on HK Island.  Mild in comparison to Bangkok night market hastling, the plethora of Indian men trying to pull us into our shops and small Asian women whispering “Gucci!  Prada!  You want?”, were nonetheless still remarkably irritating. Perhaps it was the lack of caffeine that day that contributed to our annyance, so we decided a Starbucks run was in order.

A few hours later found us in the Long Kwai Fung area of HK island, meeting my friend D and his HK friend, M, for a Sangria and some middle eastern food.  It’s always interesting to see your friends outside of their usual context and seeing D outside of Taipei was great fun.  He took us for the best Lebanese food of my life.  That is quite the claim, I realize, but it’s true.  The creamy hummus, the soft pita, the chunks of fish, the fresh grilled cheese…..I was taking it all in, so that when, in a few days, I would be confronted with bits-of-animal stews, I could remember just how yummy the non-Chinese food was.

The quest for eating western in Hong Kong continued into the next day, as I rather illogically deemed that filling my system up with yummy, healthy western options would somehow spare me the anticipated stomach ailments.  We ate at Life again, ate at a bread and soup place, and downed Mexican nachos at Taco Loco.  Convinced of my digestive invincibility yesterday, I ate with relish.  Unfortunately, my stomach apparently did not love something in that mix.  Bu hao.

The potential upside was the fate factor of meeting (at Taco Loco) an expat woman who lives in Beijing.  Perhaps overly friendly, she invited A and I to stay at her 5,000 square foot apartment in Beijing while we’re there.  A and I are still weighing the potential upsides of staying with her (saving money, having her driver cart us around town, nice dinners, etc.) vs. the downsides (three days of conversations with this Texan woman and the obligations that come with staying with someone).  The jury’s still out.

The beach at Stanley

Digestive issues aside, yesterday was a feat of exploration.  From the bus ride to Stanley, a great beach and market area that involves a twisty-turny terrifying double-decker bus ride, to the view of HK at night from the top of the mountain at Sky Tower, we breathed in the city.

THe double-decker buses

In just a bit now, we’ll be off to breakfast and then on to the Guangzhou express train.  Or rather, A will be having breakfast and I will be mentally imbibing the delectable spread.

Upgrade

If the start of this trip is any indication of how it will be, then I’m in luck.  So far the karma has been great.  (I do realize in announcing my good fortune I potentially thoroughly jinx myself.)  After zipping through the clear highways outside of Taipei on the way to Taoyuan Airport and making it in record time (35 minutes), I arrived at the Cathay Pacific line, only to breeze through that, hand the flight agent my Marco Polo club card, and hear these glorious words:

“I’m sorry, but Economy class is full, so we’re going to have to upgrade you to Business class.”

So very not sorry to hear that, I tried to contain my excitement.  Acting casual, as if I am upgraded to Business class every day, I strove for a noncholant expression.

“Oh,” I said.  “That sounds fine.”

Whhipppppeeeee!!!!

Granted, the flight to Hong Kong is a mere hour and a half, but what a time it will be!  If the rumors about Business class are true, then I am shortly to be showered with beverages, smiles, and pillows as I step onto the plane.  Ah, the joy.

So, hoping that I’m not jinxing myself, it’s been a great morning so far.  Ann has been here the past week, reawakening my awareness of Taiwanese culture.  Having visitors, no matter where you live, allows you to put on new lenses, seeing your home-of-the-moment with the eyes of an outsider.  So very used to Taiwan at this point, Ann pointed out all the things I noticed when I first got here, plus some others. A few:

-Motorscooters galore

-Easy and efficient transportation

-How helpful people are and how giving of personal space

-The “Fur Elise” theme of the trash trucks

-The yummy Chinese food

-The wonderful and awful strangeness of the expat world

Now we are off to China.  We start out with China “lite” (Taiwan), go to Hong Kong on the first leg of the travel (not really China) and then move onto the mainland.  Over the next three weeks, we’ll be visiting Guangzhou, Guilin, Yangshou, Dali, Lijiang, Chengdu, Yangtze River,  Huang Shan, Shanghai and Beijing.  Whew.

We have a general itinerary set, two internal flights booked, and a three-day cruise of the Yangtze River set.  Other than that, we have no hotels booked, no train tickets bought, no bus tickets found.  This is probably the least amount of planning I’ve ever done for a trip.  It feels freeing.  It also feels terrifying.

Ann and I will be together which will help with the anxiety.  But there will undoubtedly be a number of mini-disasters, and I should expect them.  But if somehow the upgrade is any indication, it will eventually all work out – perhaps in unanticipated, wonderful ways.

A Veggie Paradise

It’s as if the air changes when you enter.  There is a lightness in serenity and a weightlessness of good feng shui.  The little vegetarian haven tucked into the narrow, crowded alleys of the Da An neighborhood is a respite from the bustle outside.  The design is meant to simultaneously soothe and invite creativity, a sharp contrast to the spikes of cement rising from the pavement, acting as shelter and office space in so much of the city.  Much of Taiwan is quite ugly on the outside, but more and more spaces are playing with their inner spaces and the design that is cropping up is quite amazing.

This restaurant in particular (the name escapes me) is a medley of lines and curves, of different textures.  The deep curves of the rough hewn bowls mirror the curves of the backs of our seats, and contrast with the vertical slatted dividers which both segment and integrate the place.  The restaurant also serves as a showcase and store for the beautiful hand made pottery.  Pricey and exquisite, I can see spending hours pouring over each individual piece, mostly tea kettles.  The colors of the clay, the severity of the curves, the amount of texture, call out how lovingly each one was created.

When you can tear yourself away from the shop area, you are seated in a cozy corner (for there are a number of cozy corners in this place) with great acoustics.  Even with a number of other diners in close proximity, it was only my party’s conversation heard.  The menu is all vegetarian with tasty options like seseme sauce noodles with fresh sprouts and greens, open ravioli with creamy tomato topping and parmesan cheese, and a delicious curry with all local, seasonal, extremely fresh ingredients.

This place is a haven of beauty in a sea of lackluster exteriors and, often, interiors.  When we know that our experience with food, our experience with each other, can be so full of beauty, dimension and light, why do we so often accept much less?

Expectations

To what extent do our expectations dictate our experience?  Can we ever truly free ourselves to accept what comes our way, or are we forever caught up in our own expectations?

Trudging to the MRT last night, I felt weighed down in body and spirit.  I ate too much again, still unable to grapple with the timing of food given that I now practice yoga from 7-10 PM every other night (intensive training program).  I find myself having lunch around 11 as usual, and then eating dinner around 4.  This makes me feel both bloated and remotely like my grandmother, whom I have memories of eating 4 o’clock dinners with.  According to her, when you woke up at 4 in the morning and had breakfast by 5, you were ready for dinner and bed by 6 PM. 

Decidely not yet in geriatric condition, this eating schedule has not jived particularly well with my normal life.  So, swollen from too much food, I headed off to yoga also feeling heavy in mind.  I was dreading this practice.  Last session had involved my utter failure as a yogi in forearm stand.  I was a demonstration for the class – of course in the one pose I have absolutely no remote grasp of.  And while I rather consciously know that there is “no failure in yoga,” try telling that to yourself when you are collapsing on your face in front of your fellow classmates.

So I was dreading a class full of postures I could not do, energy needed that I did not have, and an open mind that I was not in possession of. 

I don’t know if S read my thoughts last night, but the practice was gentle, breath-focused, and restorative.  No crazy poses, just the ease of breathing deeply into a few postures.  His class put me at ease and all my negative energy started to float away.

But what would have happened if the practice had not been gentle?  Would I have been fighting it the whole time?  How can we learn to release that negative energy, even without a positive outcome?  What if we let go completely of the idea of any sort of outcome?

Getting ready…..

The time is near.  The school year is drawing to a close and the summer is imminent, hot, humid.  Inevitable.  Tantalizing.  Ann will be here in just over a week and we will wander about Taiwan for a week or so before taking off on our China adventure.  I can’t wait for her to get here – I’ve missed her so much!  Besides that, her arrival marks the near end of school.  And her upcoming visit has me reflecting on the past year.

It has been a year of great change and much progress, in so far as one really progresses.  I arrived 10 months ago and in that time I feel that I’ve accomplished a myriad of feats, some quite small, yet pleasing to me.  A few:

-Learning a new school, including many new kinds of students and faculty members

-Living in an expat community of other teachers is like living in a bubble where everyone talks about everyone and knows everyone else’s business.  I’ve learned to not fight this inevitability, but I still don’t love it.  I long for hermit-like life sometimes.

-Gained my Yoga Alliance certification through an intense 3 month course on the weekend, and grew my yoga practice in lovely, unexpected ways

-Learning Chinese, and being able to converse with taxi drivers about pineapple desserts (today’s entertainment).

-Getting weekly massages and monthly hair washes at the salon

-Relinquishing consumerism for most of the year.  I haven’t bought any clothing, furniture, decorations or much of anything in Taiwan

-I have, however, spent my money on food.  The food is sometimes good, and many times wonderful.  I’m starting to figure out the places that blow me away.

-Friends I have made, and particularly the beauty of knowing Sherry, through Carolyn

-Getting to travel during my breaks around magnificent, thoughtful, curious, bizarre Asia (and New Zealand)

I relish my good fortune and am so thankful for the astoundingly great luck I have to be able to do this all.  I want to pay my gratitude forward after this amazing year.

How Education is like Grazing

How is the military-industrial complex of growing corn like modern American eduction?  It was a quiet Sunday morning as I was reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and this question rather suddenly sprung into my mind. 

According to Pollan in Omnivore’s Dilemma, “Unlike grain, grass can’t be broken down into its constituent molecules and reassembled as value-added processed foods; meat, milk, and fiber is about all you can make out of grass, and the only way to do that is with a living organism, not a machine. Grass farming with skill involves so many variables, and so much local knowledge, that it is difficult to systematize. As faithful to the logic of biology as a carefully grazed pasture is, it meshes poorly with the logic of industry, which has no use for anything it cannot bend to its wheels and bottom line. And, at least for the time being, it is the logic of industry that rules” (Pollan 202).

I can’t help but think of my own profession when I read this, particularly the corruption of the American education system via over-regulation, and attempts to find a one-size-fits-all method. Kids are people and people do not operate according to instruction manuals. We do not all learn in the same way and we do not all thrive from the same “corn” prescription. It is up to the teacher and communities to develop systems that work for their environment. Like Joel Salatin, the local grower held up as a model in Pollan’s book, we teach best by understanding the wisdom that is local.

For education this means that we really need to understand our individual students’ needs, the way Salatin gets down on his hands and knees to comprehend the complexity of the grasses that nourish his cows. We need to work in teams and discuss what works, rather than blindly follow curriculum units mapped out by No Child Left Behind. Instead of government-regulated testing as our focus, we go back to basics – to the land of education, to what is actually being learned.

Like Salatin who has accululated decades of knowledge from extensive, quality time spent with the land, teachers who are most successful fully immerse themselves in their craft, in understanding their students and working with individual needs.

Salatin’s knowledge cannot be packaged and sold, and that is why agri-business cannot recreate that model, much as it tries. The Slow Movement realizes the impossibility of big agriculture truly being successful, either economically or morally. By becoming more local and allowing the land to take its time, food becomes more authentic and far more nutritious.

The quick fix of corn and bi agriculture is increasingly showing its inability to provide us what we really need to thrive. Education is much the same. The more we try look to change en masse, never giving anything a chance to stick, allowing the same test to access a plethora of learning styles, the less we are serving our students. Our nation is increasingly malnourished.

Pollan mentioned Salatin’s quoting of an old agricultural textbook: “Farming is not adapted to large-scale operations because of the following reasons: Farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die” (214). I can’t help but think abut education’s concern with actual students, not cogs in a sort-of-education machine.

Lost in Translation

I write this, sitting on the floor in front of Gate 68 at the Hong Kong airport (the ideal location for powering up my laptop), while 6 Chinese guys from Beijing stand behind me. I jest not, they are all staring at my computer screen, less than two feet away from me, engrossed in what is, to them, my completely nonsensical typing. The stench of cigarettes and body odor wafts over me, as I type disbelievingly.

It all began about 15 minutes ago when I was struggling to get my new adaptor to work – it just didn’t want to fit in the socket. One of these Beijingers, about 40 years old, give or take a few rotting teeth, sprang out of his seat, dashing to my rescue. He got the plug to work and, thrilled at his accomplishment, I made the fatal mistake of saying “thank you” in Chinese. That “xie xie” was the demise of my privacy.

The other Beijingers ran over at the sound of my softened Taiwan mandarin. They started to speak to me in Chinese and as I have little I can actually say and even less I can understand, I turned to my computer. What ensued felt truly surreal. For the next fifteen minutes I would pull a word up on Google images and say the Chinese word for it. For example, I would bring up an image of a pineapple and say “feng li.” Then the posse of middle-aged Beijingers do one of the following three things:

1. Agree with my pronunciation and recite the word back to me.

2. Laugh at me, and then recite the same word back to me.

3. Say something that doesn’t sound remotely like the word I just learned in my Chinese lessons.

By the way, after I’ve typed all this, two of them are still standing behind me and I keep hearing some snippets of their conversation that I can make out – “English,” “American,” etc. They’re obviously talking about me quite openly now. The boldest of the bunch just ran over, grabbed my left wrist and turned it to look at the time, asking me in Chinese what the time was. My watch clearly indicates “Ba dian” (8 o’clock) and I said as much. He and his friends were disbelieving. The lack of numbers on my watch obviously confounded them.

The stench of stale Chinese men is enough for me. I need to get out of here and get some space before I get on the long flight to Auckland. Mental note: do not let these men’s lack of respect for personal space, personal hygiene, or privacy influence my thoughts about Chinese people. Or it might be a long three weeks this summer traveling in China…..

Borneo Highlights

I haven’t had the chance to add some Borneo pictures that are not about hiking, so I wanted to take the time to do that….

Where it all began…..my hostel room in Kota Kinabalu, a two-minute walk from the beach.  No air con, which was interesting initially as I was blasted with waves of sticky heat upon exiting the airport.  The charm of the place was lost upon me at first as I became obsessed with my perceived loss of sleep due to the humidity.  I wanted to run to the nearest cheap hotel with air conditioning – what was I thinking being here!  Turned out to be better than I expected, though I still wouldn’t say good.  By the fifth night, though – once S, M and J arrived – we checked into an air con room at the hostel.  Whew!

Some lovely scenery of the beach.

M, me and J with the women who cooked us lovely food…..

And then there was  the canopy walking.  A nice intro to climbing some stairs….getting us prepped – we thought! – for Kinabalu.  Turns out to have been useless for that – nothing could have prepared us for that mountain.  Fortunately, the view from the top of the canopy was beautiful, albeit wobbly!

What looks more vacation like than yoga by a waterfall?

Yet another beautiful sunset.  And our beautiful beachhouse on our last night.

A thoughtful country

Sometimes, sometimes I love Taiwan.  It is a fierce love, a protective, motherly love.  It feels like my place and I am loyal to it.  As I hike the stairs of Yangminshan after school, I take it all in: the fresh air, the haze of pollution settling on the valley of Taipei below, the sight of the tree monkey scrambling up a branch at my footsteps, the enormous red and black centipede I almost step on, the Taiwanese people I pass wiping their brows with handkerchiefs and carrying umbrellas to be used in both the rain and the sunshine.
Taipei is in the details.  Anything can happen here in this conservative, frugal, thoughtful, bizarre, paradoxical place.

Yesterday, plagued with an unrelenting headache, I bowed out of yoga and headed to my local health food store, hoping that some vegetables might help.  I haven’t shopped in weeks, and I barely had the energy to buy food, let alone cook it.  Lettuce it was.  Tear some up and throw balsamic on: instant dinner.  Dropping my purchases onto the rough, sticky counter, I looked around for some tahini sauce.  Not finding any, I attempted to ask the owner if they carried tahini by using a pathetic mixture of my Chinese and English.  It was reminiscent of high school French where we used to string together sentences like, J’aime le soleil et the beach.  It just about killed our teacher; Franglais we called it.
My Chinglish was not any better and she had no idea what I was asking.  Fortunately another customer overheard us and in very good English told me that they didn’t have that; in fact, she had no idea what tahini really was.  After about 5 minutes of me trying to explain it and the customer – Vivian, I had learned her name was – telling the owner what I said, we were no further to solving the mystery.
Giving up on the tahini, we chatted about a variety of other things.  Half an hour later, I had learned Vivian’s husbands name  (“You can call him Mr. Kao”), where the owner liked to travel in China, what is good for a unhappy stomach (mine), why everyone should drink pumpkin oat milk (it is good), and when Vivian was going to be cooking me some special corn thing that she said would help my unhappy tummy.
My headache was almost gone, I had practiced some of my Chinese, and I got to meet two really interesting people.
I know this kind of stuff can happen anywhere.  And it does.  But only in Taiwan have I found people not only genuinely kind, but also willing to go out of their way all the time.  It really is an amazing country.

my friend, Sophie, one of the kindest, most generous and thoughtful Taiwanese people I know

Hiking Mt. Kinabalu, Borneo – the tallest peak in SE Asia

The Things You Will Carry (or should remember to carry):

• Sunscreen
• Snacks for the 5 hour hike straight up
• Quick dry towel
• Knee Braces
• Great hiking shoes and thick socks to prevent blisters
• Cough drops
• Allergy meds for strange, unpredictable reactions to local vegetation
• Lots of water (drink untreated mountain water at your own risk)
• Warm Gear
• Toilet paper
• A headlamp (trust me – you will need this)

What you might feel on the hike up the first day:

A sense of peace, of order, of positivity, or do-ability.  You will see steps, rocks, slabs of clay, a path – all rising upwards at every turn, flat reprieves all but nonexistent.  But this will somehow not matter because you are existing both outside of yourself (as an observer of what you are accomplishing) and deep inside yourself (as a feeler of the smell of the air at each place on the path, the way the ground supports and sometimes shifts beneath your feet, the unsteady rhythm of your heart and the simultaneous steadiness – miraculously – of your mind.)  You may not have thought about this much beforehand – you may have followed others here on their quest.  But now it has become your quest and as the air thins while you rise higher, you drink in the oxygen in a sort of quiet ecstacy.

What you will feel when you arrive at Laban Rata, your overnight resting place:

A sense of accomplishment and secret pleasure at arriving before most of your friends.  You know this is no competition, but old habits die hard.  You will drink the complimentary tea greedily, warming yourself in the chill of the air at 3,500 meters.  You will feast on friend noodles and plantains after your warmish shower and feel – in so far as it is possible – reinvigorated by these comforts, especially since you know – but cannot at this point fully comprehend – what awaits you in 9 hours.

What you might experience when you go to bed:

-Your allergies are driving you nuts – you can hardly rest for your nose keeps running.  It is already becoming chapped in the dryness.
-Your throat is sore, desperate for the cough drops you should have packed.
-Your breath is deep – the tidal volume is much greater, as each breath – due to the altitude – provides less oxygen.
-Hour upon hour of sleeplessness while you hear the sounds of your friends dozing a few feet away.
-You will listen to your I-pod, targeting the most yoga-like music in hopes of sleep.  Still, it will evade you.
-You will arise at 2 A.M. with the other 60+ climbers attempting the summit, and you will break down in hysterical laughter and sobs – simultaneously.  You are a bundle of nerves, exhaustion, and anticipation.  Your emotions are pretty schizophrenic.
-You quite literally stumble down stairs to the cafeteria where you scarf down two pieces of bread and some tea.  At this point hunger is the furthest thing from your mind and you are only eating to sustain your hike.  It is an effort to choke the food down.

What you will see at night:

A sky so full of stars that you swear you’ve never seen anything like it.  I didn’t even know so many existed.  The sky was like a Lite Brite after you take all the pegs of an intricate design out, left only with the light beaming through hundreds of holes.

How you will feel on the Summit climb:

You did 6 km. and 1,600 meters or so of vertical height yesterday.  Today, you are leaving at 3 A.M. and have 3 hours to reach the summit by sunrise – around 6 A.M. That is 2.7 km. and 6,000 meters high away.

You start out in pitch dark – you did not bring a headlamp and are kicking yourself now.  You are relying on the scatters of light from other people’s headlamps and the kindness of your friends offering some light.  You nearly trip every few seconds.

You climb up, up, up what feels like interminable amounts of steps.  Your guide urges you – “slowly, slowly” – the mantra of this trip, but you want to race up and get it over with.  Even if you could speed up the process and race forward with your legs, your heart and lungs would abandon the effort.  For you cannot physically do too much at this height.  The air is thin, it is too dark, and you know pacing is paramount.  As Maria, and Robert Frost, said – you have “miles and miles to go before you sleep.”

But you cannot think about that fact.  You must be present in every moment – not only to prevent injury, but to mentally sustain yourself.

You might not be able to do this alone.  Not reaching the top is not an option, so you might need to find people to work with.  J and  became the people.  We worked together to reach the summit.  We would keep psyching ourselves up for each step.  We would have to pause, winded, every ten meters or so.  We encouraged each other with positivity and kept taking breaks to regroup, blow our noses, drink water and watch the amazing star-studded sky.

You will find yourself in another place.  You won’t be able to fully explain with words what this means.  The closest you will be able to explain it is that you will become another person for this part of the journey.  It’s as if your normal, regular self is not strong enough.  You need a super self to step in – a self of iron.  You might hardly recognize this steely self.  There is no gripping, no desperation, no waiting for it to be over.  This super self finds energy to move forward, and generates kindness and compassion to spur your friends on in their journeys.

Almost as it if never happened, at the top – after 3 hours – you are suddenly yourself again, and you are watching the sun rise from the peak of Mt. Kinabalu.  The light is coming up and the view from the top is indescribable.  You sit in the frigid air, nose dripping, thankful the wind has let up somewhat.  You thank the mountain goddess – the Chinese widow – for the tenth time, for allowing you to safely make it to the top.  You have prayed to her to the whole trip and you will continue to do so on the way down.

But first, just take it all in.  The future will happen soon enough.