mug

fire food

We had been warned. A man had seen fit to actually come out of his restaurant and tell us that the food there was hot. Except that we were speaking Chinese so the word he used was 辣. He said it over and over – even after it was clear that we understood Chinese.

After convincing him we were ready for the spice, our other problem was that we had no clue what they were serving. So we played charades on the sidewalk until we had guessed the two main options. “Rabbit” was easy. After he said the word for rabbit, which we knew, I used my index and middle fingers to make rabbit ears and he nodded happily. Guessing “frog” was more of a challenge, mainly because we didn't know the word. Also because in trying to pantomime what he meant, the man kept moving his arms in a way that was more reminiscent of flapping chicken wings than hopping frog legs.

In the end we ordered the rabbit and as Shi-Wen would later say, “If this food isn‘t hot, then nothing is.” It made us sweat. A lot. In fact, before last night I didn't know it was possible to actually feel your ankles perspire.

The big metal bowl they plunked into the sunken center of our table was filled with molten hot oil, ginger, cilantro, garlic gloves and big green chilis – all swirling around pieces of hacked-up rabbit and red pepper and cucumbers. We would dredge around with our chopsticks looking for rabbit – then drag it out and slop it through the sauce bowls before using our teeth to separate the meat from the small and only vaguely recognizable bones.

Our sauces were mercifully mild, but that wasn't our doing. In fact when the staff had asked how hot they should make our sauces, we said, in Chinese, “a little” hot. The girl who was helping us, and who’d landed that role because she was most adept at understanding our Chinese, then turned to the girl who was preparing our sauces (the one who every time we spoke to her looked at us with a blank smile) and distinctly told her to make our sauces with no heat at all. And hallelujah for her because she was absolutely right.

As was the man who had come out on the sidewalk to warn us. He was 100% right about how our lips were on fire and how they nursed wispy licks of chili flame each time we ate a bite. But what he had neglected to mention was how awesome the food was. And how well it goes with peanut milk. And how it’s the reason crowds wait outside in the August heat, crouched on small plastic chairs, breaking sunflower seeds open with their teeth as they kill the time it takes to get a table.

It’s also true that small Chinese children pointed at me and my sweating ankles. And maybe that made me sweat a little more. But I would do it again.

And when I do I’m getting the frog.

dinner rush

茶 is tea

There’s a place where tea is served under an unexpected roof, its drinkers tucked into the underbelly of an overpass. From here you can’t see the sky. There is only the cement ceiling, swaths of it coated in fresh white and the rest just peeling away. Swimming past are city girls in summer dresses taking a shortcut through the shade, and cyclists bobbing gently by the tables and tea drinkers.

Each fleeting breeze comes from a fan plugged into a long and winding cord, and the stone bridges lead to nowhere, like the stunted versions resting on aquarium floors, covered by more water than they cross. The line of hedges separating the tea drinkers from the traffic hides everything but the buses, their passengers watching us through glass windows, making this feel even more like a separate world.

The Chinese spoken down here is unintelligible not only because it is a new language for me but because it is spoken among friends, so it degrades, like voices captured in soup cans, lost in the quick speak and casual mumbles used by people who know each other well.

The man across the way shakes open a large painted fan. He moves liquidly, each pass of the fan raises his white hair and then lets it fall with the gentle current. A left-behind newspaper is snared by someone who hasn’t yet finished his tea. A dog is asleep. And a table near a fan is claimed by someone looking for a breeze.

Men’s pants are hiked above the knee, well above the knee, and the grey breeze keeps coming. The dust from the traffic, the embers from the cigarettes, it all drifts through. Drifting the way the server does, from table to table, opening his large plastic thermos in a cloud of steam and refilling each of our glasses. Making the bright green leaves rise in a flurry and then settle to the bottom again.

spaceship, with granny

faces on the bus

relaxing, with dog

two sides, same country

China is a shifting heap of anything and everything, with a billion people navigating the contrasts and contradictions. In Chengdu’s side streets a Maserati will as likely run you down as a hard-charging old man and his bicycle will — the Maserati propelled by European engineering, the bicycle gathering momentum from the industrial-sized photocopier bungee-corded to its frame.

The corner vendor dredges your tofu from a plastic bucket on the pavement next to the peaches and drops it, unceremoniously, into a thin plastic bag. Or a doorman ushers you into an air-conditioned luxury mall to buy Louis Vuitton and Prada. The corner vendor is lively and fun and nothing she says makes sense the first time because her Chinese is so overcome by local dialect. The luxury mall is sparkling and cool, and desperately empty on a Saturday afternoon.

Someone out there is buying expensive China. Someone is the reason that luxury cars sit in the parking lots and new construction projects boast high-end living in the sky. The bakery at Kempinsky Hotel even sells $5 batches of macaroons; each piece delicate and then chewy, with paper-thin tops and buttery insides. But it was empty there too.

It’s the supermarket that’s always full, and usually with a crowd around the lychees. When I asked a young woman which lychees were good she responded by picking up a single fruit and rotating it for me to see, then putting it in my bag. Again and again she’d pick up a lychee, show it to me, and then put it my bag. Before she left I had a bag filled with perfect examples of the fruit. The lot rang up at fifty cents and each was wonderful: thick, wet and dewy.

This is China. You can eat fifty-cent lychees along sidewalks that are spat upon by shirtless men and treated far worse by small children with no bottoms to their pants. Or you can eat $5 macaroons in empty air-conditioned malls that sparkle and shine. As an outsider you sometimes crave the macaroons, but the lychees have a richness you can’t just whip up overnight.

pink sandals, pig parts

street with trees, puddles

meat market

waiting, parking lot

friends, escalator

HOV, market

summer fruit

Chengdu is hot, and here the heat carries with it the construction and chemistry of an ever-expanding city. Each avenue has cranes lifting buildings to scrape the sky. There are the workers fitting the beams and concrete spines, and there is the detritus that is falling. Falling on us, falling on the trees, falling on our view. Each breath has a tinny taste and the sky has traded blue for silver grey. But there are also sweet tastes along the streets. The fruit vendors know that breaking into ripe fruit will help you forget the summer heat. I asked a vendor about the box of round purple fruit with little green leaves and stems. Mangosteens. She took one, plucked off the top, twisted the body until it cracked. She turned the exposed insides to me and I took a piece, ate it. Its pulp was sweet and humid and difficult to pin down. And good. Good like summer-warmed fruit can be good. And good because it reminds you that not every great thing is defined by being the tallest, the fastest, the brightest. Sometimes it just has to be the sweetest.

six things we learned at beijing international airport

Spending time on the tarmac

Dinner on the tarmac is not a good sign
You’re in trouble if the food and beverage carts rumble down the aisle before your plane takes off. Those little trays of soggy food are saying, “Don’t be angry with us but your plane isn’t leaving anytime soon; also, can we agree that your consumption of this yummy meal is like promising not to go stir crazy while we wait?”

You cannot have fries with that
An airport just isn’t the same after three runways worth of airplanes have been turned back because of “heavy storms.” Once the planes had disgorged their angry passengers, those passengers unplugged every check-in kiosk and used the outlets to recharge their cellphones and laptops. They banded together late into the night to shout indecipherable demands at airline staff. And they overran McDonalds and bought every last morsel of food that place had to offer. Once the crowds blew through the only thing left for a latecomer was a Coke… and there were no fries with that.

Beijing hotels don’t like dogs
But people love them. Strangers will take the elevator to come and meet your dog because they saw him from upstairs. Children will make him origami temples out of slivers of white paper. And fellow pet-owners will show you photos of their own pets which are safe at home. But while overnighting in Beijing with a dog is great for learning dog-related Chinese vocab, it’s not so great for getting a hotel room. Why? Because most Beijing hotels don’t take dogs. So even though a day of traveling across the globe has left you with a singular desire for a shower, you will instead spend the night in the airport practicing how to say, “Since you like my dog so much, do you think I could use your cell phone?”

You can sleep on anything
Ok, maybe you can’t but the Chinese travelers we saw could sleep anywhere. When the chairs and sofas were all taken, the floor was the obvious place to go next. But after that? Try the conveyer belts that trundle your checked bags away from the counter and towards the airplane. And those big plastic tubs they use for backpacks and odd-sized luggage? Put your kids in them or flip a few over to make a raised sleeping platform. But the real winners in the sleep Olympics were the older guys who’d managed to commandeer a small fleet of golf carts as their own personal dormitory. While the carts recharged in a corner, each guy got comfy on his own row of plush seats. Fortunately for them, this was out of view of the folks curled up in oversized Tupperware.

You shouldn’t cut in line
(But if you do, we’ll help you first)
When the airport is undergoing a period of intense turmoil there are two ways to receive assistance from staff. The most popular is to identify a group of people that is already waiting and shimmy your way up in front of the group. The alternative – deciding who is furthest back in the group and standing behind them – didn't seem very popular.

When we got to the check-in counter for “Fly To Chengdu Attempt #2” it was 4:30 a.m. and things were already a mess. The only option we had was to sidle up to a thick group of already-waiting travelers and see what happened. What happened was that we ended up in front of an English speaker who promptly told Shi-Wen (aka Stefano) that cutting in line wasn’t cool.

Shi-Wen knows cutting in line isn’t cool but he also knows that a prerequisite to cutting in line is that there is actually a line. Was there a line that morning? That’s debatable. Was it a good idea to talk to this guy about how frustrating the whole situation is to a newcomer? Definitely.

Not only did this guy appreciate our frustration, but he also helped make sure that when he got to the front of the line we were right there with him. When it was all said and done, with his assistance we had either cut in front of a great many people or waited in line local style. Success.

Strangers will let you use their cellphones
First we borrowed a cellphone to make a call from the tarmac after we’d been waiting there for over two hours. After we’d gotten off of that plane (still in Beijing) we used someone else’s phone to say we would not be making it to Chengdu that night. Then, after our night in the airport, we borrowed yet another phone to announce that we were on a new flight and finally! on our way to Chengdu. But after we hung up, there was an announcement saying the plane had a problem and we all had to get off. At that point we decided maybe it’d be better if we just stopped calling.

Flight attendants on airplanes = canaries in coalmines
After removing ourselves from Flight #2 we sat on a bus waiting for news. Zero announcements were made but the bus eventually dropped us right back where we’d started – in front of the same plane as before. Only now, the fire truck and the fire hoses from earlier were gone. Did I neglect to mention the fire truck and the fire hoses from earlier? My bad. What about the smell of jet fuel and the big puddle on the tarmac? Well those were gone too. However, if these changes weren’t enough to make you want to hop right back on the airplane and cross your fingers for Chengdu, you could always be like me and ask a flight attendant if it was safe to be getting back on the same plane. Her answer came with a big smile and oodles of enthusiasm, “We’re here, so don’t worry!” That’s great… Just promise you’re not planning to feed us right away.

shoe repairs while you wait

moving

Moving across the world is a fantastic and ugly adventure.

Fantastic for the opportunity to see, taste and live a whole new everything. Ugly because getting to that point is a long and exhausting haul. Along the way there are needles filled with vaccines and there is sweat because moving in July is ill timed, particularly for the folks who are tasked with dragging your sofa from one continent to the next.

Since your new home uses a new (to you) language there are months of Chinese flashcards, and in an effort to protect against culinary homesickness there are almost as many months of gorging on food favorites you worry won’t be the same where you’re going.

There is also an appointment for the root canal you’ve been avoiding, because as little interest as you have in getting an American root canal, your interest in relying on newly minted language skills to negotiate so much as a Chinese teeth cleaning is even less.

But in the mess of to-do’s and don’t-forgets the only true mandatory is momentum.

More than anything, it’s momentum that moves a life across an ocean. It shoves you past the pile of address changes. It keeps you at a trot through the visa applications. And it makes sure you get on the plane before it pulls away from the gate.

Then during your flight all of the hopeful preparations and small, singular steps come together into something so tangible that your plane lands you right in the middle of it. Later you can thank momentum for carrying you past the jet lag and smack into China.

and for our next destination...

There’s no telling where life will take you. And later this month ours is taking us to a country a-great-many-hours-on-a-great-many-airplanes away.

In a big, fluffy, general sense we've known this was coming for a while. What we didn’t know was that our wall calendar always knew a bit more than we did. By the looks of it, the wall calendar already knew where we would be going (and when) last year when we bought it in Milan.

We discovered this when we flipped our calendar from June to July, and its previously random stream of color combinations landed on the above. Realizing our calendar has such an expert grasp on our futures could have come in really handy. Particularly when we were trying to figure out logistical details the old-fashioned way.

Perhaps we should take comfort in the fact that two human brains and a wall calendar have managed to independently come to an agreement on where we should move our lives and when. We just begrudge the fact that the wall calendar figured it out first.

luxury is watermelon in the summer

Korean summer is perfect for heavy chunks of sweet watermelon, noodles in ice broth, and honeydew-flavored ice cream bars. It's hot and muggy and when it's not raining, the sun beats down with single-minded ferocity.

Slowly, though, the heat is leaving us. Today the sky was clear and blue and the breeze was crisp and fresh. No sign of humidity or pressing warmth. It feels like school's about to start and soon I'll be having nightmares about not remembering my locker combination.

As fall comes in with its first baby steps I'm realizing how quickly the summer rushed past. June, July, and August blew by in waves with a few pauses for front page news... the death of another former president, or the opening of a demure little plaza called the "Dream of Seoul."



Former President Kim Dae Jung died of pneumonia on August 18 and just as Koreans had done when former President Roh died only a few months earlier, mourners paid their respects to their former president at alters set up around the country. One of these sites was at Seoul's City Hall where people waited in quiet lines under white tents for the opportunity to lay a flower under a large photograph of the deceased. Each individual then moved to a place in front of the alter where some remained standing and others bowed several times in succession.



The funeral ceremony in front of the National Assembly was attended by presidential delegations who remembered the Nobel Prize winner as Seoul's summer sun blazed above. At City Hall there were yellow balloons emblazoned with the face of this democracy activist and at the funeral even the highest ranking attendees wore paper visors made especially for the event.



Earlier in the month Seoul had celebrated the opening of a giant plaza where only months earlier there had been a simple median studded with trees. The transformation was lightning fast and incredibly successful. As soon as this new plaza with its fountains and statues and grand spaces for walking was opened, Koreans flocked to it and enjoyed their brand new public space.



Their enthusiasm was well-founded. Gwanghwamun Square is a great space and showcases the statue of Admiral Yi Sun-shin in a way that simple traffic rushing past never had. And the water that jumps from the ground, in lines and spurts, has become the country's most popular water park. No one seems to mind that it's sandwiched between ten lanes of traffic.

But now September's here and the summer is gone... which means it's time for another vacation.