Limmony Snickets and a Very Unfortunate Series of Events

I'm surprised I've never heard the phrase 'back-shadowing'. Back-shadowing would be a sweet sister word to forshadowing. It would mean when an event happens and you can trace the origins of that event back to 3 or 4 other obvious events that should have foreshadowed that something big was going to happen, but you didn't pay attention. That was a pretty sloppy description, so let me just get right to the story to explain.


The final product was the following situation:

1. Stranded in a Chinese Airport with a canceled flight due to the protests in Bangkok


2. Stranded by myself with no friends in sight


3. No credit cards or ATM cards


4. Less than $10 on my person (not enough for cab fare to Yangshau, 1.5 hours away)


5. No one that spoke English to help me


6. I didn't have any phone numbers to call someone for help

These are the moments in traveling where you really have to buck up, or at the very least wait it out. I guess you could cry yourself to sleep in a corner and someone would come and help you eventually. Before I get to how I got out of it though, here the the moments of back-shadowing that led up to this.

1. Stranded from protests: We have been discussing at length over the last few months the deteriorating political climate in Thailand. After rioting and coups and re-re-elections, this was bound to happen.


2. Stranded by myself: I came over travelling with 3 friends. They all wanted to go back on the 22nd. That wasn't enough climbing for me, I had to stay 4 more days til the 26th. The 26th happens to be the day that the airports in Bangkok shutdown. My friends got home just fine on the 22nd.



3. No credit cards/ATM cards: So a week before I came to China I had my wallet stolen in Thailand. Right out of the glove compartment of my friends car while we were climbing. They got all my cards, driver's liscense, video rental card, subway punch card, etc.



4. No money: So after my credit cards and ATMs were stolen, I figured I would just travel with cash. Except for the exchange rate between Thai Baht and Chinese Yuan buys and sells at about a 28% loss to me. So I decided to just have my friend that I was traveling with use his ATM and then I would repay him when I got back to Thailand. The $10 I had left when i got to the airport would have been perfect had I not been stranded


5. No way to communicate: I clearly remember standing in a book store in Yangshuo that morning and picking up a Mandarin phrase book and thinking, "I'm not going to need this now, maybe next time."


6. No phone numbers- I should know better by now. Always have atleast 1 business card of a hotel or a business or something. I had all the contact info for the place I was staying on my mobile phone. Unfortunately, that got stolen with my wallet.

So I'm sitting outside of the airport trying to figure out what I'm possible going to do. The airport in Guillin is about the size of the Jackson airport and probably just about as far from town. Then a couple of Chinese people walked past me and for I could understand what they were saying, because it turns out that they were speaking (and were) Thai. Turns out that they were on the same canceled flight. Neither of them spoke English, but they could speak fluent Chinese. So we went back inside, talked to the ticket counter, they pulled up the website for China Climb (my friends in Yangshao), got their phone number, called them, China Climb sent out a taxi, and the rest is history. They helped me with all the money stuff until I could get some money wired from Thailand.

I'm stuck in China now until I can fly back, but there are much worse places to be stuck in the world. I had a feeling I was tempting fate with the Limmony Snickets haircut; it was really only a matter of time.

Visiting Old Friends

Food is often one of the defining factors of a great vacation. I remember 5 years ago I got this mini-sized hamburger in Washington Square Park at the Shake Shack in N.Y.C. It was soooo good, that to this day, that stands as my number one reason to get back to to N.Y.- to eat another one of those burgers. (My good friends Chris and Josh come in at a close second.) I had a similar love affair with some noodles and Seschwan beef last year in Yangshuo, China. So when I found out that one of my compadres at the climbing shop was going to be interning in Yangshao (at chinaclimb), I couldn't think of a better opportunity to reunite with an old friend (the noodles). So I'm here for a few weeks climbing, eating noodles, and blogging. Pui had to stay behind because she is saving her vacation time to come back to the states next summer. However Pui's boss, Josh Morris and girlfriend, Kat and Kat's brother, Dtaw are all here with me. One of my goals for this trip is to get some sweet climbing photos with the hair, so stay posted!

Revisiting My Least Favorite Holiday

I feel like every year I write something new about how much I hate the giant Thai Festival, Loy Gratong. This year was an exercise in facing this holiday head on. Putting all my fears about losing fingers, eyes and sanity to this fireworks infested holiday into a gratong and sailing it down the river. I stood at the banks of the river that drove me to madness last year for up to half an hour. Bottle rockets soared over my head, M-80s exploded everywhere. Police were arresting people left and right for setting off fireworks that were considered big enough to actually kill people. We had one of these go off 30 feet in front of us and you could literally feel a giant shockwave push you back. If you give it about 10 minutes, you actually stop panicing and start relaxing. I mean it's all way too much to worry about. Then I finally saw what maybe I was missing after all these years, all the activity, all the movement, the shouting, the life and excitment going on in every direction as far as the eye could see and no one was worrying about what might happen, they were just living in the now. (**this includes all the people that just lost their pinky finger to an M-80).

Oh... And I also went to the lantern lighting festival that I went to the first year. Here is another fantastic video.

Look at the Cute Little Puppies!

Wait a second? How did a dog crawl into the kitchen cupboard where all of my beloved Cliff Bars are stored, rip them open, and then have a litter of puppies in there? Wait a second! Those aren't puppies! Those are baby rats!! Some fat, slutty, pregnant rat was squatting over my Cliff Bars and pushing out these little pieces of disgustingness. These are the same Cliff Bars that I bring over from the states every year (50 lbs. in a suitcase of their own). The same Cliff Bars that Pui once quoted me as saying that 'I think I might love Cliff Bars more than her'. The only thing that might be worse is if those baby rats were conceived in my Cliff Bar drawer.

Anyways, after puking my guts out at the sight of these things, Pui and I went through and cleaned off every single one. We found 7 of the creatures in total. One of the most satisfying things I have ever witnessed was tossing them into the canal behind my house and watching an enormous fish coming up and eating one of them whole! Let that be a lesson to all would be rat mothers that plan on desecrating my Cliff Bars with their fetid offspring.

Our First Houseguest

After you've finally got everything unpacked- the office is all setup, dishes are in the cupboards, toothbrushes are in a little jar next to the sink, the utility room has all the boxes of extra stuff packed away that you won't see until the next move; you get that first night that you can just hang out and relax. We ended up spending that night reading. The interior of the new place is so relaxing and nice. It's very western in style and if I had one adjective for it, I would say it was 'clean'. So it was such a peculiar moment in my life when I looked up over the rim of my book and made eye contact with a 12" rat that just sauntered into the bedroom. Moments later, it reversed itself as Pui started squealing. So now I'm in the position of having to deal with a rat problem. I hate new houses.

So I go to the super store and go to the rodent ailse. For some god awful Buddhist reason there are no hinge-swinging rat traps. All they have is these 14" pizza plates with this special rat glue. You basically put some bait in the center, the rat goes for it and wallaa, you've caught yourself a rat.

What the box doesn't tell you (but of course you know it's going to happen), you don't just catch yourself a rat, you catch yourself a live rat. So now I have to figure out how to kill this huge thing. Pui (being the sweet little Buddhist that she is) wanted me to try and get the thing out of the trap (outside of course) and see if it could get away. After just about putting a broom handle through his stomach, I was able to dislodge him; only to have him get helplessly stuck to the broom. There was no way this thing would ever walk again. So I'm like, o.k., I'll put the end of the broom under the water in the canal behind our house, come back five minutes later and deal with it. Only the thing that happened was that 5 minutes later that little bastard somehow crawled up the broom handle 2 feet to get it's nose about 1" out of the water. At this point we figured this thing could probably survive anything, so I kindly scraped him off the broom onto my neighbors fence and waved a unfond farewell. That would suck so bad if my neighbors read this.

One More Time

Back in my college days it seemed like I was moving around all the time. An average year would start with me living in one apartment, moving home for the summer and then going back and finding another apartment in the fall. After I became a homeowner, I was kind of hoping these days of moving were behind me. So I find it a little exasperating that I've ended up in occupying 5 different residences in 2008. Pui and I just lost the sublease on the 'greatest place ever' and had to start apartment hunting. It's also funny that every time I move, I end up going through all the crap I own and getting rid of about 1/2 of it. Which means by now, I should only have about 10% of my original belongings. For some reason though it keeps getting worse instead of better.


So the new place is much nicer than the last one, 3 bedrooms, washer/dryer, entertainment room, patio, a stream in the back yard. I haven't shot a video of it yet, but I will soon. Until then, here is a photo album. It's got some really weird extra stuff. Imagine if you had money to do any crazy thing you wanted to do to pimp out your house - this is that place. A good example is my office. It has this 200lb. pocket door that when you slide it closed, 16 black fluorescent lights that are mounted in the floor come on automatically. You can also toggle it so the lights come on when it's open and off when it's closed. Who would ever do such a crazy ass thing? Every room is wired for surround sound through a central amp. These are the kinds of superfluous amenities that I'm trying to escape in America. It's so ironic that I ended up in a place that has them.

Anyways, the place is pretty sweet, the location isn't quite as good. We ended up buying a motorcycle for Pui so she could get back and forth to work. If the economy ever turns around in America, we might try to buy the last house we were in so I can cut my number of residences back down to two.

Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Thailand makes one thing very easy for me- being happy. I get to wake up every day and pretty much do whatever I want. I was just looking through photos from last year around this time and I'm doing pretty much the same things, taking Thai language classes and climbing (or ziplining as this photo would indicate) . As far as the Thai class, this class was the 4th level class so you would think that I would be getting pretty good. I would say I'm definitely getting better, but I've got so far to go. I love the reading and the writing so I keep focussing on that. There is nothing I love more than watching a really bad American movie and trying to see if I can read the subtitles in Thai at the bottom. I'm at about 30-40% right now, but that is much better than my 20% from last year. As far as speaking, that hasn't improved much, but my listening is good enough that Thai people can't gossip about my hair without me knowing about it.

As far as the climbing, I'm trying to go about 5 days a week. I've had some far off goal of climbing 5.12 ever since I was probably 15, and I think this is going to be the year. I'm getting cut up, freaked out, and exhausted every time I go out, but I keep asking for more. Pui has also been out climbing a lot more. She red pointed a 5.10b a few weeks back that has been her nemisis for the last two years.