Sin título

[thesongoflucius]

Passing Time

Everyone in the hospital has a story. A sick parent, dying of cancer. Returning home for months to take care of an ill child. An aunt, a friend, a lover. Maybe it is the thing we can most relate to at the time. Pain and fear are in every room, and on everyone’s mind. It’s easy to see how they would find those stories so close to the surface, that there may be some comfort in them. The difference…

View On WordPress

[thesongoflucius]

Tea and Pineapples

I need a scooter. Getting out of the city here isn’t nearly as easy as it was in Taipei. A lot of the good trails have no buses or trains to access them. And the ones we could, tend to be boring or busy. It’s not uncommon for them to be both. I wander up the mountains here, often at least partially paved, but at the top there is nothing but farms. There is a beauty to the trees and the shade on…

View On WordPress

[thesongoflucius]

Beginning Again

Settling in here was easier in a lot of ways than I expected. Not just because I’ve built a life so many times now, but because I know I can’t leave. It’s not a prison so much as a haven, a place where everything is still open, but shuts down what is necessary when there is a risk from the virus. There was a possible outbreak about a month ago. A pilot who had been showing symptoms wandering…

View On WordPress

[thesongoflucius]

Christmas in Quarantine

Two weeks in quarantine isn’t hard when you know there’s something amazing waiting on the other side. I’m still surprised it’s finally happening, there were so many times when things were about to grind to a halt that I started to lose hope. But now I’m here, in Taichung, and in quarantine until Christmas. This time last year I was heading home to finish paperwork on the job that I was supposed…

View On WordPress

[thesongoflucius]

Everything has stopped here. Travel, work, life. There really isn’t much to do, and no way to plan for the future. China was in my sights, but the virus stopped everything for a while, and our government makes it worse. Communication isn’t good between the two countries these days, and every time someone high up targets the Chinese on anything it makes them less likely to open Visas for Americans again any time soon. It’s really hard to know what will happen at this point.

I had a plan, and now it is done. And there is nothing to do but wait. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, all this change. There are other places I want to go, and China was always going to be temporary. The world is open to me again, and I want to see what is out there. It’s only when you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything. Or so I keep telling myself.

But being stuck here is the issue. The unknowns. How long will it be? How bad will it get? What will the world become afterwards? I’m seeing this as a sociologist in so many ways, and the potential is staggering. Just seeing how much of what we do is a social construct that can be sacrificed in an emergency is amazing. The changes in personal space, the fear of what others might have, that any surface you touch can infect you, that the assumption that we will be healthy, or that the health care system can take us in is amazing.

That is one thing I noticed. There is no profit in preparing for this kind of event, this spike in services at hospitals. It would be a waste of money to have all those extra beds and space, money that could be kept as profit, or used to open a new hospital and expand the market. A government run system could prepare for this without worry about profit, but with all the inefficiencies that government breeds. So many people now are without health care also, and who knows how high this spike will go. How much will we have to suffer to collectively decide that the system must change? How close does the disease have to get before people get angry?

An event like this is morbidly fascinating. All the stories I have read that begin this way, that the world changes beyond return, and that it really shouldn’t go back to the way it was. The pandemic exposes our flaws, so we can break or we can endure. We can become stronger since we have seen our weakness and can fix it. Or we can deny it, our undeserved faith in how life should be, and that it should never change. Everyone chooses on an individual level, but as a society we will have a flow, like an ocean in a storm. What will we fix? What weaknesses will we find? What idols of what was will we cling to, memories of the time before?

Even more so is the time that we are in, the level of technology that allows a quarantine without completely stopping the world. I am still talking to my friends in Mexico, helping edit papers for my old coworkers in China, and in touch with family spread across the US, and we’re starting up our DND game again. People can work from home, order anything they need, and endure at a level unimaginable at the turn of the millennium. It also shows the weakness of a service-based economy, with most people in the US whose jobs are simply to help other people get things finding themselves without work. It was something to do, but we always thought that computers taking those jobs would be a slow process. What happens now that they are a barrier to disease? What happens when people don’t want to have that contact with people, with cash, with all the things that could make them sick?

People are such unique creatures, seemingly so easy to predict, but almost always coming up with so many unexpected ideas and solutions. And with such spectacular failures. I doubt this will make the world collapse, it has yet to really happen in our time, but I could easily be wrong. What happens to the active warzones in the time of plague? Continue fights that cannot be won or begin spending the money at home where the economy is going into a recession and the people are all getting sick? What happens with all the trade that was relied on?

America produces enough to survive without help, but almost all the medicine is made in China, and so many other things come from outside now. On an individual level I am sure this will push solar panels and survival skills on some people, building storage and finding ways to survive when the world around them fails. Looking back at all those doomsday preppers and seeing that they might have a point could become more common than we like. How many people will try to begin the separation from a society they have lost faith in?

And what of all the anxieties and mental illnesses? Part of the reason I am able to cope with my insecurities as well as I do is because of a time where a combination of illness and bad meds put me at rock bottom. After that there was sadness, but having that emptiness as a reference point makes everything in my life so much easier to endure. What happens to others when the virus touches their lives? When they are at deaths door and survive, or someone close to them does not? Does it consume them or strengthen them?

That is my real question, what will we become when this passes? As individuals, groups, and a society as a whole, where will we be after? Will we choose what to be or will we let the world decide for us? And what comes next, considering this is relatively minor compared to some of the plagues of history? Where do we go, from here?

What We Become Everything has stopped here. Travel, work, life. There really isn’t much to do, and no way to plan for the future.

[thesongoflucius]

I’ve been in San Francisco for a month. I planned to be gone by now, but it hasn’t worked out. Getting the documents is taking far longer than I would like, and it’s far too easy to make mistakes that stretch out the time. It’s not a bad place to be, I’m just ready to get back to work, or at least to be somewhere else.

San Francisco has always been a bit off for me. I like the place, but I would rather be in LA or San Diego, where the Mexican food doesn’t always come out weird. Lettuce in burritos, things fried that should not be, beans and rice in everything, no heat to the salsa, there is always something that is not what I am looking for. The weather is a bit too cold, the air a bit too wet, the ocean far too cold, but maybe that’s just that I’m used to the winter in the desert.

It was stressful being here at first, problems kept coming up with the visa paperwork, delaying my trip out, and even now I can’t plan to leave until I have the visa since in San Francisco the Chinese Consulate sometimes requires you to go in for fingerprinting to get the final visa. I was planning a trip south, but I’ll be lucky to make it to San Diego, much less to Mexico this time. I’ll have to plan better next time.

I never thought the process would really take this long, but China has a few extra steps, and it’s easy to miss. Not that I blame them. With all the problems I’ve seen teaching abroad, I’m sure most of these steps were created because of people cheating the system, bypassing rules to get the jobs that pay better, or hiding from something back home. I just hope it’s not always this difficult. I don’t want to waste so much time next time I change countries.

Having this much time off is frustrating. I am too far out of shape and away from Wing Chun to go practice with the people I know here, but I’m hoping to find something, somewhere to go for a while. I have a small gym I can use, but I always had a problem with being consistent when I was without the group. Buddha, Dharma, and Sanga. In Buddhism you need all three to achieve enlightenment, the teacher, the teachings, and people to study with. I just haven’t found that here yet.

Not that I’m looking. I should, but I always feel weird going in the States. In other countries I show up and it goes well enough, especially since I usually can’t speak the language well so I can be off to the side and quiet until I really want to join in. Here, there is no language barrier to hold me back. There is something oddly comforting about not being able to communicate except through fighting. It’s something I understand, something that comes easy to me now.

But that sets my plans, for now anyway. Find a place to fight, find something to fill my days, and keep working on the visa. And maybe look up some other countries and see how hard it is to get to them. It’s nice to dream of what will be.

Waiting in San Francisco I’ve been in San Francisco for a month. I planned to be gone by now, but it hasn’t worked out.

[thesongoflucius]

Remembering Taipei

It was weird being back in Taipei, the energy maybe, or the memories. Maybe it was just knowing how soon I would be back in the US. I found myself walking fast through the streets, like when I still lived there. I still had all my old music, and in some ways it was like I had never left, and in others it was all too clear.

Lanzhou was not good for my health. It’s not the fault of the place, but I…

View On WordPress

[thesongoflucius]

When I am in a dream, the only way I have ever been able to take control is when I realize I have no continuity in my past. I know where I am, but I never know how I got there. I’m on a cliff leading up to the house I am staying in, but I was just in another country, how did I get here? That is the defining question of my dreams. How did I get here? Things are always irrational, but when I am in the middle of it, everything seems normal. Like that part of my mind just accepts the reality around it and deals with problems as they come, until I think of the past. If I can’t remember how I got here, something feels deeply wrong.

Zamales was a paradise in a lot of ways. I never really explored like I planned to. The town of San Filipe was a cool mix of old Spanish buildings, quick built concrete storefronts, and fancy beach side houses, but I barely ever saw them. The beach seemed to stretch on forever, but I never went that far. Liwa, the beach side village I stayed in had tons of street art and bamboo houses, but I never took the time to get pictures. The trap of bliss is that nothing really seems important. Life is good, so there is no need to strive or struggle.

I spent most of my time in a hammock, sleeping in the open air or just watching tv i missed out on in Mongolia. I swam in the ocean most days, fighting the current or surfing when I could get a board. I am way out of shape, but I never found the drive to get back into working on my popup again. Or my kungfu. I could blame the ever lessening pain in my feet, but the truth is I just had no motivation. I built a few things, cooked a few meals, cleaned once or twice, but most of my time was spent on simple pleasures.

We spent a lot of time talking, joking, and eating. The food was amazing, except for a single meal during my stay. Almost perfect. Adobo, lumpia, and an endless series of meals I never really learned the names of. There was a French chef from Belgium and an Italian chef for part of the time too, and I cooked Mexican food once or twice. There were always problems with the appliances, but in the end the food was always good and no one got sick from anything. There weren’t many snacks, but somehow that didn’t matter. When I had the chance to hit the town, I bought some stuff from 7-eleven and ate it faster than I thought I would.

Most of the work was just about maintenance, patching fences and sweeping up before the guests came on the weekends. People from the local cities like Manila would come to spend a day or two at the beach before going back home, like we used to go to the mountains in California to camp and see the stars. I never really got around to seeing the stars here. I would watch the sunset most nights, on the beach or through the trees. I swam in the ocean a couple time as the sun went down. It was like swimming in an ocean of paint, reflecting all the colors in the ripples between waves.

The days passed faster than it seemed possible. After a few weeks, I found myself wondering if I was awake or asleep, so I traced back my steps and found I was at a loss. I was where I should be, on a beach in the Philippines, but I couldn’t remember exactly how I got to my hammock. I couldn’t remember climbing the stairs, or where I had been a hour before. There was a feeling, something about cleaning, or building, but I couldn’t be sure. The days began to blur together in a way I couldn’t have expected, and the memory I rely on to show me the difference between worlds failed me.

Everything was right, nothing was too weird, and I was fairly sure I was awake, but I didn’t know for sure until I began to create a past. I waited a minute and started to put things back together, sorting through my memories as I created new ones. It was exactly like when I would drive to work everyday and find myself there, but completely on autopilot, unaware of anything that had happened during the drive. And that was the worst part of bliss for me, that loss of my memories. That life was so good and easy it wasn’t really worth being aware of.

I could see a path laid out there, filled with sunny days and mosquito bites, finding someone to spend my life with, building a house, and slowly dying in a hammock on a sandy beach. There would be problems, but never any that would truly disrupt the place. A life on the beach would be a decent life, but I am not ready to stop yet. I’m in Taipei now, with a couple weeks before I get home for Christmas. I still have places to go, but it’s good to know there is a beach waiting for me.

The Trap of Bliss When I am in a dream, the only way I have ever been able to take control is when I realize I have no continuity in my past.

[thesongoflucius]

Landing in the Philippines was hard. I have never heard anything good about Manila, and I wanted to be out as soon as possible. Part of it is just leaving Seoul, Mongolia, and China. Everything feels safe there, and I was never robbed beyond the typical overcharging you get with taxis sometimes. I didn’t really know what to expect in the Philippines, and that was hard. Not knowing. I should have known it was just my anxiety acting up.

Manila looks a lot like Mexico as you pass through. Some neighborhoods are beautiful, filled with cookie-cutter houses or malls and expensive stores, others just look like they were built as they went, scattered concrete cubes filled with stores and homes. There are a surprising number of Dunkin’ Donuts here, but most shops look more like family owned hole in the wall stores and street food restaurants. The more expensive areas are filled with western stores, super-malls, and coffee shops. The power lines fill the sky over the streets, draped across the corners of buildings and electricity poles.

The bus ride out of the airport was cheap and comfortable, but the roads in Mongolia lowered my standards significantly. We stopped off and on over six hours, some people getting on and off, others selling fruit, eggs, and snacks. In Mexico there would have been entertainment sometimes too, clowns and musicians helping pass the time. They annoyed me back then, but I miss them now.

Then, I came to Liwa in Zambales. Its a beach town, filled with hammocks and surfers, souls in celebration of being lost from the worlds they came from, searching for something more than can be found in the world outside. Some I wouldn’t be surprised to see burn out, and others may find the tranquility of spirit they are looking for in meditation and chemicals. There is a lot of faith here, born out of experience rather than religion. I question it sometimes, but then, I question everything. I was never one to accept that the universe has any plans for us, or that life has any meaning beyond what we give it.

But life here encourages that kind of thought, that there is a plan and it is good. I spend most of my days relaxing in a hammock or swimming in the ocean, relaxing into the waves on a good day or fighting them after a storm. Everything is alive. The walls crawl with lizards and ants, mosquitoes and flies are everywhere, and frogs of all sizes are scattered around the forest and house. The purpose of life here seems to be just to stop and take a breath, find your direction, even if it takes years. Especially if it takes years.

It’s and easy place to stay, to stop and never leave until life forces you to. I could spend a year here, sitting on a beach and relaxing, teaching somewhere local or online, just existing until something forces me to move on, but I don’t really want too. I have complaints. There are no walls in some places here, just a hammock under roof, open to the world. The ocean is warm and never really seems to cool me off when I start to overheat. And after living in the desert for so long, I am already tired of everything being wet all the time.

Discomfort. It’s mild, but it keeps me moving forward. There is nothing bad here That couldn’t be solved by having my own space to live in rather than sleeping in a hammock in a shared room. Life is good here, and easy, but I want to keep moving forward. I want to be in my next home, a place to call my own again. But there are still months to go before I can really settle again. I have a plan, and a contract, but I can’t really work on it until I reach Taiwan next month, but that should be easy. I know the city, and I know where to go to get everything I need. For now, I can just exist.

    Tranquility of Spirit Landing in the Philippines was hard. I have never heard anything good about Manila, and I wanted to be out as soon as possible.

[thesongoflucius]

South Korea

I don’t really know what to say about Seoul. It wasn’t bad, but I was never amazed by the place, or the food. There was art, some cool to look at, but never really impressive. There were temples and palaces, but not so different than anything I saw in China. There were clean streets and easy access to any part of the city, but I’ve seen all of that before. If there was anything that I will hold…

View On WordPress

[thesongoflucius]

It’s hard to think back on Mongolia, simply because so much happened there. The vegetation went from green to yellow, then brown before I left. It started out warm, good weather for shorts, but by the end it snowed and stayed below freezing during the day. I went from a city to a farm, then a town and a nomadic tribe. I worked, taught, wandered, cooked, and slept on top of a mountain, but one of my favorite things had to be the Mongolian wedding.

The friends I was staying with had a wedding while I was there, so part of my invitation was just that I was staying where the wedding would take place. It was fascinating. There were traditional foods, large slabs of meat cooked in a local restaurant before being set up for presentation on the day of the wedding. A person would stand up, give a short speech, then sing one of the many songs that everyone in the family seemed to know. There were a couple people whose only job was to take a single, large shot glass and pass it around the room, person to person, and refilling it after each drink. Like in China, I was not allowed to refuse, and the times I tried to only sip I was given the cup again and told to drain it.

The vodka here tastes like rubbing alcohol to me. Reminds me of a medicine cabinet, or working in the hospital. It will get you drunk, but it really doesn’t seem to be something we should be drinking. The food was amazing the first day, but the thing about the wedding is that it seems to last about a week. After the first day with the big ceremony in an elegant yurt built just for the occasion, people kept coming to the house, day after day, to sit and eat and drink. They talked, they laughed, and they gave presents.

The last couple days of the wedding we traveled north to Lake Khovshgul to visit more of the family. I don’t really know the exact reason since we were visiting the people who were already at the wedding, but it is custom. It snowed that day and night, covering the world in a white sheet of glittering diamonds with waves of golden grasses across it. Tourist season had ended so most of the places felt empty and isolated. We ate and sat around the warm fire while presents were passed around, then it was on to the next home, and the next family.

I think it was my favorite because it was the only thing I experienced there that felt truly Mongolian. The language is written mostly in what looks like Russian characters. The buildings often have the feel of Russia, the Soviet Union, or China. So many of the restaurants are Korean, American, British, or Indian. So many of the Mongolian places have changed to suit tourists or have been influenced by their neighbors that it is hard for me to see what is truly Mongolian.

The wedding felt like a wedding, but it was not Chinese, or Russian, American, or Mexican. The way people celebrated, they spoke, even the way they passed snuff bottles to each other to smell, even if you didn’t want to try it. Everyone wore beautiful, traditional Mongolian robes and laughed and sang with their families. Part of me wants to see the similarities between it and the other places I have been, but that would be dishonest. I haven’t seen anything like it, so simple, traditional, and beautiful.

Mongolia was beautiful, and still wild in a way I have never seen. Part of that I saw in the children there. They don’t seem to look to the adults for direction, like they have simply had to deal with all their games and arguments themselves. They speak with confidence, even though they have rarely spoken English before. They learn it in school, but they never really speak it, like in nearly every public school I have seen before.

On the other side, they are much more physical, and in many ways closer to violence than I am used to. Games like rock, scissor, paper end with someone getting flicked in the forehead, and tag always seems to be at the edge of someone being slapped too hard, or in the head. Shame seems unnatural to them, like after accidently poking someone in the eye, apologizing just never occurs to them. At best, it is spoken as the child runs off to play again.

Wild. It is the best description for Mongolia I can think of. A place where problems are solved between the people involved because the higher authority simply isn’t always there. A place where you can camp wherever you like because there are so few fences. A place of courage, confidence, self-reliance. I am sorry that I had to leave, but as the days were still below freezing it is best that I begin to head south for the winter.

  A Wedding in Murun It’s hard to think back on Mongolia, simply because so much happened there. The vegetation went from green to yellow, then brown before I left.

[thesongoflucius]

Halfway across Mongolia I found myself in Murun, which feels like an old New England town in a lot of ways. There are few paved roads, as well as no running water or sewer, but there are colorful wood houses and streetlights down every dirt road. In another life I could have been posted in a place like this, if I had been invited to Peace Corps Mongolia instead of China. I like it, but two years would have been a very long time to be here.

There are plenty of people, and the mountains are close, but that’s about it. Even the road from Ulaanbaatar to here was mostly dirt, and at least once the bus driver just left the tread marks carved into the steppe and just drove through the scrub and bushes. There has been a running joke for a while about Posh Corps China, where every comfort can be found, but I never really noticed before coming here.

The bathroom has been closed because the pipes have begun to freeze, so we drained it like we would the summer homes in New York when I worked there. Nothing really seems to dry, but it also doesn’t quite freeze. It’s definitely fall here, and everything I saw went from green to yellow to brown in about a week and a half. It feels like California, but far colder and we use wood fired stoves to keep everything warm.

I was only in Murun for a couple days before heading to the far north, eight hours through muddy back roads to a village in Khovsgul. It was beautiful, and for me had that New England feel to it, especially on the last day when an icy mist covered the village. The amazing thing about Mongolia is that it feels safe enough that seeing a shadow walk through the mist with an axe wasn’t really scary.

The next day I took a car and a horse to the reindeer tribe in Khovsgul Aimag through what was closer to being marsh than anything else. It snowed, then melted, and the horse was stepping to its knees into the mud at times. I’m too big for the reindeer, and on that land I’m too big for the horse too. The flat lands were okay, but on the downhill it stumbled and I was thrown off. The good thing is that it was a soft landing, easier than most I have taken in Kungfu.

It was a beautiful valley, far away from everything. The food was simple but good, bread and meat or rice and meat, but that seems to be the standard for Mongolia. Their milk tea is weak and a little salty, but perfect for the weather we had. Cold days, colder nights, and a bit of snow and rain. I wish I could say I discovered something there, but it was just a place where people live. No more magic than anywhere else I have been, but stark and beautiful as the winter began. At night after dark the husband and wife I was staying with read to each other and the animals wandered around outside.

The animals were more fascinating to me. Reindeer grunt. The small ones sound like pugs, snorting around the ground looking for food and licking my hands for the salt on my skin. The big ones sound like someone fighting to start a gas powered chainsaw. They move more like dogs too, snuffling the ground, moving like a dog hunting. I had always imagined them more like cows, but that part of me comes from a different world. So many of the animals in the US are domesticated or living off our scraps, so seeing animals this close to being wild is fascinating. It was the same with the goats and sheep for me, sprinting across the steppe whenever a car came close. The sheep still look like orbs with skinny legs, but they run like dogs. It’s almost comical, but I also realize that everything I have seen has been so deeply influenced by the developed world that I don’t really know what the world could be without us.

Mongolia is wild, and somehow deeply uncomplicated. Things are functional, practical, and without a lot of fuss. That is what I noticed about the Reindeer tribe, that they were so similar to the people living in the cities. People setting up a yurt in their yard, and that is just where someone lives now. Cooking everything over the same stove that keeps the house warm at night. Simple wood highlighted by vivid colors. People without fear, even when it comes to speaking a new language. The children here can get shy, but most of the time they just speak as much or as little as they can.

In a lot of ways, I wish I had spent the two years here, living in a place that really feels wild, but I know that part of that is just because it is so different from what I have known. There are so many things here that feel familiar, but somehow I think that familiarity is hiding what is truly Mongolian. Like so many of the buildings here that look Russian, Chinese, or western, with yurts scattered throughout the towns and cities. It would be easy to think that true Mongolian architecture was non-existent, but truly it is just hidden.

But I think the one thing I wonder about the most is how to really understand a culture as it is, but with such a short time to really understand it. To see the superstition, the language, the history, and the behavior and try to put together a cohesive idea of what a place is seems impossible. Like so many things, I don’t think I can really explain the place so much as I can explain who I become when I am a part of this place. I want to see the world, but in so many ways the world is just a mirror.

I got more pictures this time, but wordpress is still giving me trouble. All the pictures from this trip are at https://thesongoflucius.travellerspoint.com/7/

Reindeer and Expectations Halfway across Mongolia I found myself in Murun, which feels like an old New England town in a lot of ways.

[thesongoflucius]

A Farm in Mongolia

A Farm in Mongolia

Who you spend your time with greatly changes your experiences. I find that to be so true for myself. I have always been a bit of an empath, a mirror, mimic maybe, but I tend to greatly vary my personality based on who is around me at any give time. It’s not always something I control, it’s just something I do. It’s part of what makes it easy for me to learn languages and kung fu. If I can see it…

View On WordPress

[thesongoflucius]

Leaving anyplace I have called home is hard, but not for the reasons I expected. My time was up, and there are people I miss every day, but it’s more that I wish they were here then I was there. I had forgotten how beautiful everything is when I find myself deep in a new country, but Mongolia was breathtaking from the start.

Ulaanbaatar is a small city by the standards I grown used to over the past couple years. Most of the buildings are low and the sky stretches overhead. Most of the buildings seem to be in the style of the Soviet Union or China, but there are a few amazing exceptions. The capital building is columns and glass with the khans of old sitting on bronze thrones or riding bronze horses. On the other end is the yurts, which they always call gers. I like the word yurt better. It’s just fun to say. Yurt. Even if it is wrong.

The other thing I noticed is the people. So many of the women here are beautiful, and each in their own way. I think that is a lot of it for me, that they are comfortable with their rich dark skin, or pale skin, or all the shades in between. Many of them have curves, and they don’t seem to worry or feel bad about their weight. Just the variety between different women is beautiful to me. Maybe I was just too long in a place where there seems to be only one standard of beauty, and so much true beauty is hidden beneath the need to be pale and skinny.

The men seem to have something about them that makes me think of the warriors their people once were, a confidence to their stride and their backs straight. Or maybe I am just seeing what I want to see, the ancient horsemen that lived free beneath the eternal blue sky.

Mongolia was my first choice for Peace Corps, or at least I remember it that way now. I have read a few stories about the place, heard rumors, but I don’t really know what Mongolia is in the 21st century. It’s supposed to be the most sparsely populated country in the world, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that is true. The cities still have the feel of ancient towns I come across in other countries, with open air markets scattered throughout and many of surface streets still unpaved. I have had more than one person tell me about how they traveled the country and just set up their tent wherever they stopped, no campground needed.

I am tempted to do that, to just go and see what I can find out there. Hitchhike, or rent something and drive. As long as I have my phone I can find my way back from anywhere I wind up. But I already have plans, for now. I am on a farm for the next week and a half, currently finishing ripping out an unused bathroom and replacing it with a small office and a bed. Sometimes I help shovel out the horse stalls, gathering manure to be dried and burned throughout winter.

Most days I help with the cows, either in the morning or at night. They have to be herded so they can be milked, but there are 44 cows and no fences so it can take time to find them. The woman I am staying with has about a hundred horses also, but they just run free this time of year. Soon we will have to bring down the cows for the winter and gather the grass they will be eating once the plants go into hibernation. The scenery is amazing, the sunsets extraordinary, and the stars fill the sky.

There are a lot of other volunteers here, too. Most younger than I am, traveling alone or with a partner, from Europe, Singapore, New Zealand, and surprisingly Los Angeles. I got along best with that guy before he headed out. We hazed each other, talked about everything from philosophy to Monty Python, quoting and laughing, not even needing to finish our sentences to know the references. It was like having a brother around again.

But we all move on sooner or later. Visas end, work calls, or simply more adventure in other countries. Soon enough, I will be gone too, to Murun, somewhere halfway across the country. I will be teaching again, for a couple weeks anyway, and there is the Golden Eagle Festival in the beginning of October I am trying to get to. Two months here really isn’t enough, but the days are already getting cold and I can feel the winds blowing me onward. The hardest thing sometimes is trying to enjoy where I am before I look ahead to where I might be.

Beauty in Change Leaving anyplace I have called home is hard, but not for the reasons I expected. My time was up, and there are people I miss every day, but it’s more that I wish they were here then I was there.

[thesongoflucius]

It was a long trip out of Lijiang丽江 to the coastal cities of China. I spent 36 hours on two trains to Hangzhou杭州, then took another train and a plane to Beijing北京. It was a good trip, but in a lot of ways it was exactly what I expected.

That is the thing about big cities in China, they are what I expect them to be. Hangzhou’s major pull is the massive Westlake, but it’s like so many other places I have seen before. Smaller cities trying to capture the beauty of the coast by copying their style. The buildings were bigger and well maintained, but there were no surprises. Everything looked clean, like most tourist zones in China, with an army of people to keep it beautiful.

And that is the thing. Hangzhou is beautiful, but it’s such common beauty that I get bored. Another lake with flowers and bridges. Another group of people, well dressed and on their way to a club. Another temple that could be in any major city in China. There is no mystery, no surprise, and nothing to grab my attention or inspire me. Nothing to really make me feel.

There is a reason I loved going to the small towns in the middle of nowhere, with my friends who never really understood why I am so fascinated by places like that. Places where the paint is peeling, the walls are crumbling, and everything is worn by use and love. Hole in the wall dumpling shops that have been run by the same family for decades, using the same old pots and made by people talking and laughing. Cobblestone streets worn bare by a century of street markets, or just watching the endless stars above with a friend, shining through the darkness away from the big cities. That is what I remember. That is what I love.

Beijing wasn’t much different. I met up with some friends, and we traveled to a few sites together, but I don’t really care about seeing the ancient palaces and squares that have been copied in so many other places. I wandered by a few old sites before finding the parks and gardens I preferred. The sky was clear and the sun was hot, but there were plenty of places to rest in the shade. I understand why Chinese people would want to see everything, their country, their history, but I lack the attachment to it to find it interesting.

What I enjoyed was talking to my friends, wandering through side streets and small parks, and the view from the Great Wall. It’s an amazing thing to see, and actually a short but hard climb. There were far less people than the pictures always suggest, but we went after school started and everyone had to be back to work. It was worth going to Beijing, but that is not the kind of place I love.

I still miss Guilin with its strange rock spires, sleeping under the stars in Dunhuang, the silence in Lijiang, and the homes of my friends in Longnan, Wanzhou, Wushan, and so many other places. I still want to see the Tibetan areas and make it out to Xinjiang one day, but I have such a thirst for something different that I am glad to be out of China for a while. I will be back, but for now I am thankful for the change of scenery.

Expected Beauty It was a long trip out of Lijiang丽江 to the coastal cities of China. I spent 36 hours on two trains to Hangzhou杭州, then took another train and a plane to Beijing北京.

[thesongoflucius]

It can be hard to explain to people why I miss building things and breaking things down so much. Teaching is fun, and I love it, but the work never really ends. Maybe if you spend five years with the same students you can get them close to their goal, but you never really finish learning a language. There are still parts of English that I don’t know, law, science, medicine, but for the most part it is enough. I am not done learning, but it is enough.

When I build something, it is done. The wood is piled and ready to keep people warm for the winter. The garden wall is built and ready to be filled with plants. The chicken coop has been taken apart, broken down to something useable again. I am sore, dirty, smelly, and covered with what looks like spider bites, but I am done. Teaching doesn’t work like that. The semester is done, but the students still have so much to learn.

I was glad for a week of dirty work, where I can let my mind think deep thoughts as my body moves things around. Where every meal is earned, and rest is wonderful. Where I sleep easily because I am truly tired. It’s been a long time since I felt that way, and to do it in a place that is a paradise is so much better.

I was in Da Mai Di 大麦地 outside of Li Jiang丽江 in the south of China. I was high in the mountains, surrounded by trees and rivers, with sharp cliffs for climbing and tobacco fields woven throughout them. A quiet place where the stars were like an ocean above. Even more so than the desert outside Dunhuang. I spend a week working and reading, swimming in the river before the rains began, and a day remembering how much I loved river tracing. But always in the back of my mind was a question.

Why am I here? I could have just gone home. Or found a job in Chengdu right away. Something stable, something simple, something where I could build a life. Part of me wants that, but there is still so much of the world I haven’t seen yet. Part of me wants to never come back. To go to Japan and work in Kyoto or Osaka. To find a new place I have never been. I am in the middle of a fight, between stability and adventure.

There are more than enough reasons to come back, and I don’t think I am ready to completely leave yet. Lanzhou was not the best place for my health, but I think that Chengdu can be. Kungfu friends to keep me working out. A place far enough from the western world that I can’t eat all the tacos I want to. And there are people I still want to see. People I miss already.

In the long run, I don’t really know what I will do. The plan to stay in Chengdu is fine for the next couple years, but then, who knows. The world is still open to me, and I want to see all of it before I am too tired to go on. Before I find a place to stop and rest, and find I don’t really want to get up again. In a lot of ways, I wish I had started when I was younger, so I would have all that energy and time.

But that is not how my life worked out. I wasn’t ready then, and I am lucky that I am now. There is conflict, but that is part of finding balance. Balance for me is often the center of conflict, not a place of serenity. It is being pulled in two directions, and trying to find the line between. The trick, I think, is to find the joy in that conflict, the peace in the eye of the storm. For now, I chose adventure.

Between Stability and Adventure It can be hard to explain to people why I miss building things and breaking things down so much.

[thesongoflucius]

I was in Chengdu, finishing the paperwork and trying to see as many people as I could before I left, trying to decide if it was my final time or not. The idea of finding work in Chengdu after the New Year is sticking with me. I could go somewhere new, struggle through the adventure of a new place and a new language, but for now, I have bills to catch up with. There are other places in China I could go, but my friends at the Peace Corps know most of the people I would want work with, so it might be better to go through them. Guanxi is a useful thing sometimes.

For now, I am heading south for a while, first to Kunming, then back into the mountains outside Dali. I teach a couple hours a day, and my foot is finally healing after my body rejected my effort to take up running again. I see old friends, and the food is healthier than I have had in a long time, but part of me just wants rolled tacos and a quesadilla. I am not yet looking forward to the adventure ahead.

Part of it is still being in China, like my time here hasn’t really ended for now. I’m not in anyplace new, and there isn’t much here I haven’t seen yet. Eryuan is still beautiful, surrounded by pear trees filled with spiderwebs, but it feels like I’m waiting, not traveling. Part of it is that I still have too much stuff. I need some fall clothing for Mongolia and my camping gear will be useful in the Philippines, but I should have shed more of the clothing I am still carrying around. Part of it is that I kind of envy the people who just went home.

There is something tiring about living in another country for so long, especially when home is so far away. In Mexico, I wasted a lot of time and money on trips home because it was so close. That was part of the reason I began there, that I could walk away if I needed to. Now, home is a city where my family doesn’t live. Part of the cost of travel is that the worlds you leave behind keep changing without you.

The same will happen in Lanzhou I am sure. I was a part of so many lives, and hopefully I did more good than harm, but I will never really know the result of all of my work. I will go back and visit one day, but I can’t possibly see all that will come of my time there. It makes me think of the dream of final judgement after death, the idea that we will finally know exactly what changes we enacted on the world. For good or bad, at least there would be an answer.

Most of the time I am okay not knowing. I choose to believe the people who have thanked me, or told me what a change I wrought, and I choose to forget that there is so much of the story that I will never know, but there is always a whisper of doubt waiting for my attention. The things I say and do are based in the facts that I am an outsider and an American. The people here who follow my advice are not. There is always a question of the damage that will be done if they follow me because where I am tolerated, they may not be. More important, they have so much more to lose here than I do.

Pear trees and spiderwebs. It’s easy for me because I have no fear of the spiders, but that is because they have never really hurt me. That is a privilege I wish everyone had, the ability to reach through danger because they can never really hurt you, but that is not the world we live in. All the people who are afraid for my safety as I travel have been harmed in ways I haven’t. So I travel on, with caution, but no real fear. Anxiety, yes. True fear, no.

The next place I go will be Lijiang, up the mountains toward Shangri-la. I have time, I may continue up or stay in Lijiang and leave something to the imagination, but in truth, nothing will be new until I reach Mongolia. A new language, new food, and a whole new world awaits.

Pear Trees and Spiderwebs I was in Chengdu, finishing the paperwork and trying to see as many people as I could before I left, trying to decide if it was my final time or not.