Zhou Dynasty

Woohoo! I just got my final grade back and I passed the class! That means I've officially graduated. I'm still surprised that I've never failed a single course in college. On another note... For New Years, I went to a new kareoke place with some friends in Xiamen and my cousin to drink and sing the night away. It's amazing how light Chinese beer is. The girls were drinking these Bacardi wine coolers and they were even stronger than the beer that we had. 24 cans of this White Shark Chinese beer was nothing compared to a dozen bottles of Corona. Xiamen is great, I love this place. There's nothing better than weather like this in the 60s everyday and great seafood at the tips of your fingers.

I got a new cell phone finally to replace the old but very reliable hunk of Nokia I had before. The new phone I got is of a Chinese brand, Amoi. This Amoi M636 is nuts, it's like a mini computer. I'm not going to bother writing the features down because the list is too long. One of the coolest features is an English to Chinese dictionary. Soon you will be drooling over my M636 instead of my old Nokia 6something... Past few days I've been religiously watching this new soap opera called 再见阿郎 (Goodbye Alan). I don't know why I'm so into this Singapore soap but usually I hate these kind of shows. The acting is terrible and the stories are extremely depressing. I think I finally became hooked for the same reason all of us are hooked or was once hooked to Asian soaps at one time, the hotties. Yes the hotties on there along with the main actor (who looks me, I think) make this show irresistable. By watching these few days I've also figured out the main reason why these characters in the shows have such crappy luck. It all comes down to lack of communication. In this show, our main character Alan's current situation is the following; Alan's retarded friend was shot to death by accident, his mother was shot by accident, two girls are fighting over him (like that's bad), his fiancee was almost raped by his own brother, he lost his job, his dad lost his job, and did I mention two hotties are fighting over him? All this crap is happening to him because people are not communicating openly with each other and working together to figure out who is the root cause of all their misfortunes. Instead this show is spiraling fast to become one of those soaps where you see an average of 5 people crying at separate times per episode. How annoying and pathetic. Despite the fact that this show sort of disgusts me in the way they torture Alan, I am still hooked. Anyways, enough rambling, I'm going back to Shanghai after tomorrow for a coule more weeks then I'm coming back to Xiamen again. Xiamen has been great, there are many things happening everyday which surprises but I forget about them later so I don't write it in the blog.

I always wanted my own condom brand.    

I had some weird dreams last night...4 actually 1. Dreampt that I was up at the Boundry Waters with my parents and some other family friends. I didn't catch a single fish worth keeping. That's actually happened one year. 2. Dreampt that Apple (AAPL) stock plumetted to only $6 a share. 3. Dreampt that I was back in the college dorms but it was a maze and I couldn't find my way back to my rooms. Hallways were so narrow I had to crawl through them and the whole place was littered with trash from freshmen. They were also playing bad music. 4. Dreampt that there were all these bugs crawling into our house through the ceiling and we had to fight them off with waterbottles. Many bugs were flying around and getting on our heads, it was a rather disgusting feeling. When I woke up, my head felt tingly like the bugs were still on me. I checked AAPL and it soared over 7% on iPOD revenue growth of 300% and Apple's release of Intel chip based Macs four months early. Nice.

I just got back from visiting Amanda's family in Guangdong province. They live in a small city called Lianjiang and it was not easy getting there. At 9am we started this journey by taking a cab to the Shanghai MagLev station, the maglev took us to the airport, the plane took us to Haikou where we got on a boat, the boat took us to another city called Haian which we were picked up by another car, drove for over 2 hours and finally got to her house at 8pm. Almost 12 hours on the road for traveling the distance of Minneapolis to Seatle. During my entire stay in Lianjiang (4 days, 3 nights), I drank Chinese liquor during breakfast, lunch and dinner. I've never drank so much weird tasting strong liquor (25%~55%) in my life. I drank stuff ranging from cloudy rice liquor in what looks like a plastic gasoline container to the prestigious Hennesy XO and China's famous Wu Liang Yi. If you haven't tried Chinese liquor before, I suggest you don't. It will take a lot of shots for you to "acquire the taste." Here are some pictures and interesting things I saw along the way. The MagLev's top speed is half the speed of an airplane I heard. When I looked out the window I felt like I was superman flying really fast over all the cars below. The weather in the Hainan province was hot, it was in the 70s everyday. Interesting thing to note is that the airport in Haikou makes you feel like you've landed in Hawaii but as soon as you leave the airport, you quickly realize that it is probably the only paradise you'll find in the city. The boat ride was weird. You didn't feel like you were on a boat because the seating resembled the ones on the airplanes. There were two TVs in the front showing some movie and there was a guy doing weird sock demonstrations and then trying to sell the socks. The boat ride on the way back was much much worse. It was dark, dirty and crowded with college students, I felt like I was being smuggled into the US or something. Guangdong people are crazy about their chickens, they love this one dish where the chicken isn't thoroughly cooked so you still see some blood from the marrow. Mmmm... H5N1 anyone? I saw a long line of these trucks carrying tons of sugar cane queued for the sugar processing plant. The line was probably a mile long. The people who operate these loud and slow moving tractor vehicles on the highway are nuts. I don't see any seatbelts but I bet this thing has one of those state-of-the-art safety features where the passengers suddenly get wrapped up in bubble wrap if a collision were to occur. Our car needed a quick tune-up so we stopped at a road-side shop. The mechanics here must be really good because they sure start out learning at a young age. I think this picture shows that the airport advertisements of beach-side resorts is all just a big fat ... couple blocks away! I met the 3 little pigs on another rest stop. Wow I didn't know they have a KFC here too! Wait a minute... MFC??? It's like fried chicken but not from Kentucky! Forget MFC, we went to the Nice Restaurant. Their food was pretty nice and so was the service. Overall, the restaurant was pretty nice. Now that's fresh chicken! If you want to avoid the H5N1 all you gotta do is keep your own live chickens and make sure they're not dead when you cook them. These bamboo water bongs are so popular in the Guangdong province, they're everywhere. They can be found in restaurants, offices, dirty street food stands, and homes. I had some trouble getting it to work right, I'm just not the expert when it comes to these bamboo water bongs.

I've been feeling really Chinese lately. Not only am I speaking Mandarin and Taiwanese without having to think but my thoughts are also in Chinese. The internet is my only connection to the West. My lifestyle in the past few days has also been transformed into one of a Chinese housewife, watching soaps and preparing supper everyday. I'm still into that soap "Goodbye Alan (再见阿郎)" and watch it religiously. Today I discovered that I've been missing episodes everyday. Normally I would watch the regular 2 episodes after eating my instant noodles and the next day when I watched the show again I would feel like I missed something. Finally I just left the TV on after the 2nd episode and I found out that they added another one to the lineup, oh joy! Anyway, things are so messed up in the show that it's not even worth explaining anymore. All you need to know is that since the show has started, 3 people have died and one of them came back to life. By Sunday I'll be going back to Xiamen to get ready for the Chinese New Year. Needless to say, I'm quite excited because it has been over 10 years since I last spent the Chinese New Year in China. I'm very interested in finding out what has changed. I remember the last time I was in Xiamen for the new years... my friend and I were outside waiting for the fireworks show and all of a sudden we heard this big boom and we saw this huge cloud of smoke. We waited and waited and eventually went inside after seeing nothing but the smoke. The next day we saw on the news that the show didn't happen because there was an accident and everything exploded. Every time I leave Xiamen I think of things that I wanted to eat but forgot about it because there were so many other delicious dishes I was devouring. I should start making a list of these dishes so I can cover all my bases this time. Oh yeah, I forgot to let you guys in on a little secret. There's a search engine that is better than Google and also better than Baidu. No it's not Yahoo! Check out BAIGOOGLEDU!

My cousin Simon is a monster. He's like a heroin addict except his drug of choice is food. If you looked at him you wouldn't be able to tell Simon is a big fan of eating riddiclous amounts of food. Simon and his family arrived from HK yesterday and as soon as he set down his luggage, we went out to eat, just me and him. We took a cab around Xiamen just for the purpose of eating different street food at the best places. Within an hour, we ate enough for a person to call his breakfast, lunch and dinner. We had "saute mi" (spicy noodle soup), "zhong zi" (rice wrapped in banana leaf), "tou tsun dang" (seaworm jelly), jelly fish, baby octopus, duck noodle soup, roast duck, pig intestines, and duck intestines. I'm surprised I could actually keep up with this food fiend. Later on we went for a Thai massage, it was wicked. I've never had a Thai massage before but I couldn't believe what these little Chinese ladies are capable of. They might be small but they can handle you like a rag doll, balancing you on your lower back with their knees and forcing you to do yoga positions that you could never imagine. Oh yeah, the girl who massaged me said I looked like David Wu, this Chinese-American actor from HK. There's been a record going now with people in China saying I look like David Wu. Whenever I meet someone for the first time and if they watch TV, 8 out of ten times they'll say I look like David Wu. Almost every massage girl has said I look like this guy. Anyways, after the Thai massage, Simon and I went to eat more dirty street food. After that I feel into a food coma, I don't even remember what we ate, but it was a lot.

It's been almost 12 years since I spent my last CNY in China. Things have definately changed since I was last here for this all important holiday. The display of fireworks is prohibited in most major cities, even the government doesn't light it up, what a shame. Spending the CNY here I did learn more about the Chinese traditions, I thought my knowledge on this subject was quite extensive before but I had forgotten about all the little weird rules. One of the rules is that before new years, you can clean your house, but the day AFTER new years (today), you can't clean your house no matter what, sweeping the floor is especially prohibited. The reasoning is that if you do this, you'll be sweeping away all the good luck for 2006. If you borrowed money from someone in 2005, you must return it to them before new years or that person will have the bad luck of being owed money in all of 2006. There are always a bunch of crazy little Chinese customs that revolve around a certain holiday. Today Amanda and I went to Nan Pu Tuo, a buddhist temple, to pray to the buddhas for the new year. I couldn't believe how many people were there. The traffic jam was so bad that our cab driver tried different routes before we eventually ended up abandoning the cab on a highway and just walking the rest of the way there. It was like the Minnesota State Fair but at a temple. When we finally squeezed our way into the temple, we burned incense as part of the buddist ritual, just like everyone else. Can you imagine hundreds of people all crowded together, some trying to get their incense lit around one of four burning locations and some people with 50 incense sticks burning in their hands and hot ashes dropping all of the place? What's worse is that if your incense sticks catch on fire, you must not blow it out, won't make buddha happy. Amanda's 30 incense sticks in one hand was on fire and people wearing sweaters and other clothes made up of flammable materials were all crowded together, I was fearing for my life and those of the others. If someone caught fire and spread to other people, the stampede that would result from it would be deadly. We did the little praying thing as fast as we could and got out of there. In the end we each ended up with some burns on our hands from ashes, ashes in our hair, and pink fingers from the incense.