the long march

the journey began with an official salutory photograph with chairman mao - mandatory upon leaving university for summer holidays.



this was fallowed by a salute to my own vanity, totally appropriate in Hong Kong, where the place literally breaths status and noveau richness,


we went up one big building and got to see another. That one on the left is the international finance centre - one huge symbolic prayer shrine to virility for the impotent, money hungry men and arrogant security guards who work inside what is otherwise known as 'The World's Largest Penis Inferiority Complex',


these people had all congregated here to see me because I'm white. I signed a few autographs before escaping to burn my tongue on some beefy canto noodles,


this is the view from a hanglider I hired and flew off Victoria Peak - the big hill in Hong Kong. It was so hillarious watching all those sucker tourists below me who had to scrounge for a spot to grab a photo at the lookout point, and then wait for an hour for the tram, which hasn't been uprgaded since the opium wars, to take them back down the hill. Suckers!


this dude had just thrown a cheezel up in the air and was trying to catch it with his mouth...I can't remember if he caught it or not,


the head of this dried fish is a macau speciality. The rusty hooks give it a distinctly metalic flavour. Make sure you've had your tetnis shots,


this looks like a harmless budhist shrine but it was acutally a liquid explosive bomb. I disarmed it though. Thanks McGyver,


this is modern china in one picture,


these babes kept giving me the eye while I was waiting for the bus to go back to Macau. But when I went over, they played all hard to get, telling me to speak up cause they couldn't hear what I was saying. And they just stood there like prudes, I think they were fridget - one of them couldn't stop shaking. So I ditched em,


this is me assimilating with chinese culture,


thse kids all have giadhia now...if they didn't have it already,


I took this girl out for dinner cause she said she'd split the bill with me but when I got back from the bathroom she'd eaten all the food.

Lucky she was damn hot, otherwise there woulda been trouble,


muslims congregating, do i need to say more?


I stumbled accross this factory with all these old statues. They were all pretty crappy though. Dirty, old, and lots were broken. And they weren't even for sale!



I pooed on the road here - I thought it was the culturally appropriate thing to do.

blogger unblocked in china!

That's right folks! Who knows how long its gonna last! But one things for sure, this blog's about to get a whole lot more interesting...NOT.

net cafe edit: edit

I like Chinese. Well, I like them as much as I like any 'race', but thats another issue. In case it was/will be taken wrongly - sarcasm ppl, sarcasm. And if you still don't understand, 练习你的英文.

net cafe edit:

Chinese pop music mufucking bites. It's making me an aggressive rascist. I'm pretty sure it was passive until now. But right now I want to break something...and everything around me has made in china on it.

Chinese net cafe

Dude next to me is playing some kind of dance dance revo shit and smoking a cigarette. In fact this whole cafe is one big, young, culturally revolved, fag toting 'work unit' of chinese youths wearing fashionable clothes and getting fat on kfc.

The train from shanghai to xian smelt good for the first ten minutes until I noticed the soft scent of stale urine eminating from my head pillow. Although I could have been mistaken. It could as easily have been wafting up from the rather rotund looking nappy of the young baby two beds bellow.

Im going to see the teracotta warriors tomoz. I know I'm gonna be dissapointed. In fact, I already am. Teracotta-warrior, what was that narcissistic little chinese emperor thinking? Those two things don't go together! Who makes a warrior out of the material your mum uses to pot her geranium, pave her patio!? Make it out of steel, or bronze for fucks sake! Louzzzzzzzzzzzzy.

Mcdonalds has become my tummy's new friend. Ronald's fear of getting sued has made his premium big macs the perfect recovery food for my stomach, which has been struggling with the cocktail of bacteria you recieve free of charge with most restaurant meals in china.

I'm out!

WV

shanghai email

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Stefan's been in China forawhile. Where's the email? Where's the email? Where's the email stef? Whatya been doing? How many Chinese wife's you got? Do they know you're not a communist yet? Have you worked out how to make billions of dollars out of billions of chinese so we can all buy a pacific island and live happilly ever after, naked and frolicking in nature, like we were supposed to do?

The truth. The truth! I'm a foreigner in a familiar land. The three syllables, "wai-guo-ren", float around me like a unique body odour. Waiguoren means foreigner, and as I walk down the street, climb the mountain, wonder why I have to show my passport at the internet cafe, this word surrounds me. It jumps out of the irrepresible little mouths of young children like a cat out of a hat, "Look. Mum. Waiguoren!". It is muttered by old couples, by families. Jesus - the dogs who used to bark at me, only me, at my apartment block every day, seem now to have been secretly barking my fellow residents to attention: "waiguoren, waiguoren, waiguoren!". Sometimes I will hear it and jump to attention, turn my head, hoping to shock the
person who uttered the words, thinking that this will maybe make them more wary, that I do understand, that I am not a totally oblivious vessel from a different world.

But then, The East is advancing toward The West. Or the west is seeping into the east like algae growing in a stagnant old pond - depending on how you look at it. Old classic American hits waft out of record stores. Department stores have top brand fashion outlets, coffee chains, toilets that don't require you to squat. In Shanghai, Pepsi and Coke battle for streetscape supremacy. Pepsi signs line the streetlights of a boulevard here; a six-storey coke bottle on a building corner there. In this sense, it's all a bit like home really.

So yes, I'm a foreigner in a familiar land. And I feel, well, I feel pretty good. Don't think I could do it forever, but right now (stomach issues, and me being a cultural anomaly, aside) China is an enjoyable place for stefan to be.

BUT I WANNA GO HOME!!!! HELP!!!!!!!!!!

...just kidding ;)

So utterly fucking bored right now

Sitting in a net cafe in Macau, grounded like a paraplegic basketball player who's just fallen out of his chair. There's a typhoon on the way to China and all transport has been cancelled. Two and a half hour fucking bus journey cancelled. Hundreds of thousands of people without transport. The slow, iron wheel that is the Chinese mainland transport system has ground to a soggy halt.

Earlier this morning,the smell of our geriatric air conditioner woke me like a swift fist to the middle of the face. Well, not really. I was woken by the monotonous buzzzzz of my feshly purchased, plastic smelling, Palm TX PDA. But the first reason sounded more romantic.

The truth is. Macua is as much a Portugese enclave as Sydney is home to the Koori Aborigines. The difference being that in Macua's case, the Portugese were the colonial power, not the other way around. Thus, the old buildings with their old-wood stench of regality, religion, cuisine and white picket fences remain for travelers to marvel at.

Macau's main present day attraction is its casino's which cater to Hong Kong residents on weekends. They surround the old part of town and new monstrosities are popping up everywhere. China's well greased iron wheel of money never stops. At least not here.

Which reminds me. Fuck pretentious security guards. I don't care if it's in your job description, or if some fat-fuck jerkey muncher reported it to you from behind a security camera monitor. Go check the toilets for bombs instead of asking me to move my backpack closer to the wall so the fucking 'public space' aesthitics aren't compromised while I wait for my girlfriend to go to the toilet. Shiiiiit.

What else? Oh yeah. Iraq, sixty people died the other day. There was an article heading a week ago that read something like, "14 people die in day of relative calm in Iraq". I though last night, "shit, what if 14 people being killed in a day in my country was normal, or was a good day". Anyway, must suck being Iraqi.

peace

WV