I Still Can't Believe It

I just lost my post about the trip to Vienna. Am typing this so I don't continue with my preparations to commit Harry Caray on this mutha fucking computer. I'm buying a Mac and that is final. FUCK WINDOWS XP. I hate you with the burning hot hate of a million rivers of lava. LAVA!!!!! Carry on. Will have to update later on the trip. Once my brain can muster up something other than this string of invective currently overtaking all other thought.

At least, I'm hoping to get lost today during my walking tour of what is a stunning city. Across the street from my hotel is park where a famous Mozart statue and a famous Goethe (pronounced gerta, thanks JoySoy) statue live. The weather is ideal with mostly sunny skies and cool, but not cold. Magnolia trees, forsythia and any number of other early spring blooms pop out against the architecture. I can definitely see why Vienna is considered a romantic city. On the other hand, this keyboard has caused that last paragraph to take me about 10 minutes and now I must run to catch up with my sightseeing companions. Why must they put the z where the y is supposed to be? And none of the punctuation marks are in the right place. I guess they had to get creative in order to have these: Ä Ö ß § µ € °.

...you get a new phone? I am bursting with pride over my new little friend. It sings to me and she retrieves my email...I love it so. The only downside is that I'm bound to become one of those people pretending to pay attention in a conversation but am actually checking my emails on my phone. But, I'm breaking it in with the firm assertion that I WON'T become one of those people addicted to their email. I'm not that important and I don't ever want to be that important. ...you have a party and the cops are called because people are having too much fun for stodgy suburbia? The third (or was it fourth) annual Jamexican party had probably it's largest turnout ever (thanks in large part to Anna and her party coordination skills) and I think everyone had a jolly good time. By the time the cops showed up to let us know there had been "several" noise complaints from neighbors (which maybe? I have a hard time believing since two of our five neighbors wer...

Chicken feet salad. Yum!

Which means I'll just have to tell the rest of the story via pictures. The lake outside the Summer Palace. Just a short drive from Beijing city, it was raining proper by the time we arrived. The lake was pretty much invisible. But I really like how this picture turned out. It's not shot in B/W either. These are candied sweet potato fries. They were piping hot when they were served. You grabbed a few with the chopsticks and pulled them straight up off the pile. The little strings are like molten hard candy and once you have a lot of longevity (as evidenced by how high you could pull the fries up and still have candied webs), you dipped the fries in that little bowl of water next to Plate of Fiery Love in order to cool them off to just under the temperature of the sun and eat them. De-fucking-lish. A path outside the Temple of Heaven. I really love this picture. I wonder what those two were talking about. I wondered that a lot on this trip. Not being able to communicate makes me ...

On Friday, we went to the blah blah blah Jade "factory", then the Ming tombs, then the enamel "factory" then the Great Wall, and then finished off with blah blah blah Peking Duck. I think I peaked too soon with that ginormous post yesterday. It's true that the first day was a fucking whirlwind and I was cream crackered at 9:30 when we finally got back to the hotel. And day two was another day of Dead Emporer Sites galore. Can you believe I've only been back for three days and I'm already this jaded? Standby while I slap myself and then climb out of my Hole O' Pity. Right then. Where was I? Yes, day two in Beijing. The "factories" were government-owned shops where a girl (always a girl, lower to mid-20's) would rattle off a brief history of the intricacies of whichever factory we were at. At various points during the guided tour, we went to the jade factory, the enamel factory (where they make cloisonne trinkets and vases and jewe...

I'm going to start out by saying that I think everyone should try to travel internationally at least once in their lives. One of the things I really noticed on this trip was how much being in a foreign place makes you question your assumptions. Everyone knows assumptions are bad mmmkay, but that doesn't stop us from making them. But when you're someplace so far from home and so far from the culture you were raised in, the obvious doesn't seem so obvious. And questioning things keeps us alert and young and...I don't know...alive in a way? We (my boss, her husband and another co-worker) had a guide/translator and a driver. We paid $340 plus about $100 in tips for six days worth of driving and sight-seeing, as well as our lunch and dinner meals. Beijing is working on adding a lot of English signage at tourist sites and in common areas for the impending Olympics in 2008, but it's pretty much impossible to get around if you don't speak Mandarin. So, this was a go...

To those who haven't yet said "to hell with that blog and that bitch that never updates" you will be rewarded with photos (with titles and explanations! it's the time-consuming part) and posts about my recent trip to Beijing. Veddy, veddy soon. I even took notes while there so I would remember all the stuff I saw in order to share it here. I have officially become my grandmother. As for the mobile blogging experiment, well, I think you can tell how that went. The test worked and then my subsequent attempts at posting from the phone failed. I probably spent $16 in text messaging fees for posts that never showed up. I think I may have figured out the problem though and thank god too - I can't wait to see how the picture of the chicken feet salad turned out. Seriously. A salad with chicken feet as the main ingredient. I also tried to post from an Internet kiosk at the Hong Kong airport. The site was blocked though and the nice little pop-up said CDB was bloc...