Whenever, WherEverest

Something I discovered around 3 in the morning at Everest Base Camp, after trying unsuccessfully to sleep for 5 hours, is that I have a second hypochondriac tendency: fear of dying from Acute Mountain Sickness at Everest Base Camp.  I also realized that I missed having someone to travel with.  I go on adventures alone because I can't stand the thought of not doing something just because no one else can go with me, but at 3 in the morning when you're afraid you're about to die because there's not enough oxygen in the air and you can't even go to sleep to dream about more pleasant things, you realize just how much you wish someone else was there with you.  The Energizer was great, and she happily got up when I woke her at five in the morning to get my other bottle of water and can of oxygen, which I'd stupidly left in the car, but she wasn't family or friends.

Our driver, taking the river like a boss.

The drive to Everest was almost as stunning as the destination.  We had to go over three passes to get there (one of which was actually higher than base camp) and the mountains stretching out as far as the eye could see were just breathtaking (and even considering how little breath I had at that point, that's saying a lot).  Before that, though, not far out of Shigatse, we came to a little snag...there was a long line of trucks and buses waiting.  Our incredible driver stopped and assessed the situation - rains two days ago had washed out the bridge we needed to go over - and then decided he was driving through the mother lovin' river.  I learned a valuable lesson that day: never underestimate the value of four-wheel drive!

After a long drive up and down hills, we arrived at our stop for the night, the third base camp (and yes, I almost made a joke about getting to "third base").  This is the one for the tourists.  From third base camp we had to board a bus and go over a few more hills to second base camp, which is where the serious mountaineers get their start, after however long they sit there waiting on the weather.  In view of the second base camp is the original camp.  The Energizer explained that we're not allowed up there; not only is it a cemetery for the people Everest has claimed over the years (the ones whose bodies were recovered, at any rate), but this is also where some tourists flew the Tibetan flag several years back, upsetting the Establishment and consequently screwing the rest of us over (it's their fault that all tourists must now have a guide).

We were really lucky.  I was pretty okay with the fact that the forecast for my entire trip was "rain," but I wanted to see that peak.  I'd been praying, but was still apprehensive until we stopped just after we first came within sight of the mountain, and the clouds very serendipitously trailed their way off the top.  As we were getting ready to go back to our camp, the whole thing clouded over; in fact, it was still cloudy as we drove away the next morning.

And, of course, one must-do experience at base camp is hanging prayer flags.  You're better off bringing them from Lhasa...the Energizer and I both failed on this, and the guy selling them there wanted 30 kuai for them (which is outrageous).  So we split the cost and hung them together.  Lit - these ones were for you.

Muslim Quarter Mishap

I'm sick of writing about China but I want to tie up a few things first, so this will be my last blog for this trip, and a little scatterbrained.  Please bear with me if I go on any birdwalks.  I got into Shanghai two weeks ago last night, and went to JoAnn and Michael's for some catching up and dropping my stuff off.  And then I was out the door again.  My flight to Xi'An was at 7:30 the next morning, over in freaking Pudong, and I've become terrified of missing flights since last summer's debacle (which I didn't write about, it seems...basically my alarm failed and the taxi either didn't come or didn't call up, and so I missed my flight back to Iowa, a mistake that cost me $1,200).  So I saw them off to bed before walking to the New Star Sauna, an authentic Korean bath house down the street from my old school, where I spent about 3 hours going from the hot room to the hot bath to a cool shower.  Rinse and repeat.

Unfortunately, I had a pretty bad headache the next day, and my Korean friends would have told me it was from the toxins released from the hot/cold treatment.  Whatever the case, I got to Xi'An and was not in the best mood.  I tried to get a taxi from the airport to stop by Emperor Jing-Di's tomb, but he tried to tell me it would cost 600 kuai running the meter.  I hadn't done as much research on this point as I should have, but I was pretty sure that was bullshit, so I got out of his taxi and went to buy a ticket for the bus instead (and it turned out I was right - the taxi the hotel called for me when I went back to the airport only cost 150 kuai).  When the bus stopped it was in the heart of old Xi'An, and I really didn't care.  I wanted to get to my hostel - a good one called Qixian - and leave my stuff.  I wanted a meal that did not consist of a red bean bun (I don't eat red bean anything - it was the last thing I ate before I got violently ill my first Christmas in Korea, and even the smell of it kind of makes me want to hurl).  And I wanted a damn aspirin.  Eventually I got to the hostel and got something for my headache, but had failed to find anyplace I wanted to eat.  But as I started wandering the old town, I decided I could live without a proper meal for now.

I had all sorts of things I was going to go do.  I wanted to bike along the city wall and see the drum tower and the bell tower and the Forest of Stelae.  But I just couldn't be bothered.  I guess it's possible to get China fatigue even when you don't live there.  Instead I wandered my way through side streets until I reached the Muslim Quarter.  I've lived and traveled in the Middle East, and was really curious to know what it would look like in China.  There are actually a couple of different Islamic minorities in China - Xinjiang province is much better known for it, but these are a different people, the Hui.

I've always found Xinjiang cuisine to be the expected outcome of mixing Arabic food with Chinese food, and the mosques in Xi'An were the same, except with architecture.  If you took Chinese buildings and tried to build a mosque out of them, you'd get something that looks like the mosques of Xi'An.  I was fascinated by them, because while they looked Chinese, if you know what to look for in Islamic architecture, you'd see those things as well.

Islam forbids the depiction of any creature with a soul.  This over the centuries has resulted in beautiful geometric patterns as well as floral decorative motifs.

The Qu'ran, of course, is important.  You will see it prominently displayed in mosques, as well as depicted, as it is here.

I found it interesting and funny to consider that Chinese Muslims can read and speak two of what I consider to be the most difficult languages in the world - Arabic and Mandarin.  Arabic phrases are also carved into the decorative motifs.

And then there is the matter of one of the most recognizable aspects of Islamic architecture: the minaret.  A minaret is where the call to prayer is given from (five times a day...starting at times at four-freaking-thirty in the morning, so if you are considering living in the Middle East, I hope you are a heavy sleeper, or living on the right side of the building!), and is usually a tall tower at one or more corners of the mosque.  The minaret at the Great Mosque of Xi'An looks like nothing so much as a 3-floor pagoda.  It's clever, and is just another example of the amalgamation of the two cultures that created it.

Well, while wandering and finding the two mosques (there is a smaller one that I stumbled on - the first few pictures are from it) I passed some really delicious street food.  I don't eat very much street food.  Sometimes it just looks unappetizing, and you don't have to tell me that it comes with risks.  I'd eaten it once with Meen in Shanghai, and occasionally I'd get my favorite Taiwanese breakfast sandwich thing outside the fabric market there, and having had no bad experiences with it, I decided to try these delicious things.

 First there was the shwarma thing.  Instead of flatbread it came in a bun thing.  It was delicious.

Then I tried some noodles.  I only had like, two bites, because they were cold - I thought they would be fried, and was seriously mistaken.  They also came served in a bag, so they were hard to eat and walk.

My favorite was probably the fried, spicy tofu.  It was cooked with cilantro - mmmm!  Have I mentioned how much I love tofu?  Because I do.  They gave you a little skewer to stab them with.

Also my favorite (I can have two, because this was sweet, and thus, a dessert) was the fried banana on a stick.  I love hot bananas, and it got bonus points for calling to mind Arrested Development's banana stand.

And, because I'd heard Five and Domestic Goddess raving about the sugar cane juice I never tried outside the fabric market, I decided I'd wash it all down with that.  I didn't care for it.  It is sweet, but not too sweet, and has an organic taste to it.  Give me a pure chemical coke anytime!  Anyways, I just don't think of China when I think about juice.  Thailand, of course, and the Middle East as well (there are days when I'd kill for the banana-orange juices I used to order from the Yum Yum Tree in Bahrain).  I shouldn't knock China's juice, but...yeah.  Not my favorite.

Well, like I said, street food does have its risks.  This point was driven home particularly clearly when I woke up at five in the morning with all the food I'd eaten in the last 24 hours coming out of one end or another.  It is not the worst case of food poisoning I've ever had (see the above reference to red bean...I thought I was going to die), but it was definitely the most inconvenient.  I pulled it together and made it to the terracotta warriors anyways, but I didn't end up seeing the bell tower, or the drum tower, or the city walls (other than as I was passing through them), because I went back to my room and fell asleep as soon as we got back, and holding it together that long was trying.  And strangely enough, I'm kind of okay with that.  I've seen enough city walls, and towers of one kind or another, and museums and temples and such that I don't feel cheated.

I still would have liked to see Jing-Di's tomb, but sometimes you just have to write things off for a loss.  Damn taxi drivers.

Qin Shi Huang's Revenge

A long time ago, in a country not too far away, I had a friend named...let's call him Lick (that's a Korean joke).  Lick went to Beijing, and he got amoebic dysentery while he was there.  Being unwilling to miss out on all the things he went there to see, he tried not to let this stop him.  But while he was out shopping one day, he really, REALLY had to go, and the result was catastrophic.  Let's just leave it at the fact that you don't want to have explosive diarrhea when a squatty potty is your only option.

This little memory ran through my head as I was attempting to get myself together last Monday.  I didn't want to be the girl who went to Xi'An and DIDN'T see the terracotta warriors.  I also didn't want to be the girl who "redecorated" the bathroom at the site of the terracotta warriors.  And it's a big site - this was the biggest of the three pits, and there is no bathroom in any of the buildings.  So I felt like this was a legitimate concern.  Did I let it stop me?  Obviously not.  However, I didn't get much out of the other things we saw - Banpo neolithic village or Emperor Qin's tomb, and I only ate a little rice at the lunch, which was part of the price of the tour, and that was a shame since we had to drive over some really sketchy roads to get there.  I honestly wasn't that interested in them, so it wasn't that big a loss.

On the trip over, our guide - who went by the English name "Coffee" - asked if we knew that the terracotta warriors were in pieces.  He then went on to relate that nobody knows who broke them, but that there is speculation that it was done after he died by a rebel general, Xiang Yu.  I asked if he wouldn't have had to dig the warriors up to do that.  Poor Coffee didn't have an answer to that, and awkwardly moved on with his lecture.  Yes, yes, shame on me.

Peppermint was pretty impressed by the warriors and asked me to take her picture with them.  She was looking a lot better that day than I was, and I figured one of us deserved to have a commemorative photo.  Nobody asked me what I was doing this time.

You probably have heard all about the warriors.  You know no two are alike, although the bodies were very similar in a lot of them.  What can I possibly say to add to your knowledge?  Not a whole lot.  And unfortunately I was too sick to come up with any witty comments or snide remarks.  Once we made it to the site, I went off on my own from my tour group - I wanted to follow the advice of Lonely Planet and work my way from Pit 3 backwards to Pit 1.  I didn't quite manage it; what I thought was Pit 3 was actually the on-site museum, which had some neat stuff, including the two bronze chariots they unearthed here.  Oops.  Pit 3 was supposed to have been the "command center" and so I was kicking myself a little for not getting to see it, but hell, at least I made it there.  Also very cool to see was the restoration experts at work.  They reminded me of all my puzzle-loving friends and how much they might enjoy working here.  Belynda would, at any rate, if her comments when we were looking at ruins in Egypt are anything to go by.  Anyways, it was another China moment crossed off my list, and I was ready as hell to get to Shanghai.

Losing Control

The good news is, I've got the remote con back for my projector. The bad news is, it took me all evening to check the last place I would look...

Today was a bit of a wash. My partner in crime was in Dubai trawling for jobs, so I really didn't have anything exciting to do today. I went to church for the first time this week in the Mormonmobile. Yes, that's right: the Mormonmobile. One of the plethora of Mormon RAKESS teachers decided it would be a GREAT idea for us to engage one of the school vans to take us to church and back every Friday. I'll admit it has its good sides - like the fact that we leave (approximately) a half hour after the meetings end, rather than, oh, two hours, and it only costs 15 dirhams each. But on the other hand, I'm enclosed with even more people but less legroom. Oh, and I spent the entire ride back entertaining the Heusners' three year-old. Sometimes the fact that every child loves me can be a burden. However, since I had to teach Sunday School this week and didn't have the money to rent a car or take a taxi, I took - for the first time in my life - the church bus.

I should have started reading my next lesson when I got home. Socrates once told me that the elder Vigliotti girl is too smart to be Mormon, and while I disagree because I've known some fricking smart Mormon kids, she is definitely going to keep me on my toes. But no - I got home and went to the computer, where I'd downloaded the first episode of the last season of Lost, got it on the memory stick, and plugged it into the projector, only to realize I had no idea where my remote con was. I started to turn the living room upside down, but I was lethargic in spite of the fact that I slept through sacrament meeting. Also, I was fasting, and as the locals will tell you, sleep is a great way to make the experience more pleasant! So I slept about two hours this afternoon, and woke up to look around for the remote again, and, failing to find it, went in search of food and a few things from Carrefour.

One of the things was alternatives to "fizzy drinks." I keep failing to give them up, but I'm going to try again. Don't ask why. I like coke. Maybe I'll just become a social drinker - I'll go on my Thursday night binges once a week. I kind of like that idea. In the meantime, I've got Tang. Orange tang for the nostalgia of it and fresh baked crybabies in my great-mom's house as a child, although I was pleasantly surprised to find that it comes in mango and pineapple and I think one other flavor, as well.

The other thing was ice cream, which seems to have survived in spite of the fact that I forgot to put it away for...uhmmmm...two hours after I got home. I finally gave up on finding the remote and managed to manually load Lost. Five minutes before the end, Socrates called me back and so I had to restart it since I haven't figured out how to pause or fast-forward the damn thing manually, and let it play through again until it got to the right spot. Then I started looking for the remote again, incidentally finding the ice cream was sitting on the counter. I was upending furniture, which apparently involves me tripping backwards over my upside-down end table (again, I found myself cursing the fact that no one was there to be amused by it and/or be in awe of the fact that I managed to do so gracefully and with a minimum of self-damage - MAD NINJA SKILLS!!!) when my eye landed on the bag of cheetos I munched on throughout my sick day, and I thought, "Surely not." Surely so. There on top of the cheetos was my remote con, a little cheesy but none the worse for wear. Yeah. That's what my day has been like.

Yesterday I had my first sick day in five years. I probably could have toughed it out, but I didn't. Sometimes you just need to stay home and take care of yourself. So I did, and it was good.