Food and coffee

When we were getting to Chengdu, our first Chinese big city, I was wondering, is this going to be like Seoul or Delhi? I think my answer is, more like Seoul. Super clean, great subway, KTV and WiFi everywhere, dense high rises but not claustrophobic.

Also like Seoul in this way: if you get a meal and a coffee, your coffee will cost more than your meal. Our breakfast of baozi and little rice dumplings that I can't remember the name of is like $2 for both of us. Then we go have coffee that costs $5 each. (This is an exceptional example; most meals cost more like $5. Still.)

(I even broke my rule of "always pay as much as possible for coffee" upon going into Eno Coffee and seeing that their only coffee options are $21, $26, and $33. USD. What! And they didn't even look like they're good at coffee. Come to think of it, I broke another rule of "of course always go into a coffee shop called Eno Coffee and then make Brian Eno puns."*)

More like Delhi weather-wise, unfortunately. I guess that's what we get for coming in July.

* "Eno Coffee: Coffee for airports"
"You'll love our strange flavor overtones"
"Eno Coffee: Sound and vision and taste"
(help me out here)

Chengdu spa day

Chengdu is super nice! We are staying at a lovely Airbnb near People's Park. People's Park, as its name suggests, is a park where people do things. They dance, do aerobics, paint calligraphy on the ground with water (this is neat), practice nunchuks (in an organized group, luckily), drink tea, whatever.

There are also guys who will clean your ears. While you're drinking tea, they wander around with a terrifying array of implements, which they will definitely stick into your ears for a small fee. So of course I tried it, and it was... fine. Sometimes it felt kinda good. It made a gross part of myself excited when he held up a used cotton ball like "here's all the icky earwax that was in there." The one word he said to me the whole time, about 15 or 20 times, was something between "washy" and "washing", to upsell me from an "ear cleaning" to a more expensive "ear washing". On his insistence, and Tati's agreement that my ears were super gross, I bought it. Who am I to argue with a guy who's got a metal poker on my eardrum?

We also got a blind massage. Apparently this is a thing: blind people are more skilled at massage because senses or something? I think they were good at it. I still don't really like massages.

Oh and pandas! All the photos are on Facebook. I think, if you try to leave Chengdu without seeing pandas, the police will first escort you to the panda reserve and force you to look at a panda. And for good reason; they're frickin' adorable. I'm solidly in the "red pandas are the best pandas" camp, even though they're totally different species, different families, and only seem to be there because they're named "panda". Still, all super cute. Tati: "how the hell do those survive in the wild?"

Plus we are eating lots of great things, but in Chengdu, that goes without saying. I'm inspired to cook more Sichuan back at home. I hear Chengdu is known as the Chinese city that's good at food and leisure. I dig it. Tati: "is this like the San Francisco of China?" Me: maybe. In that it's relaxed and West and has great food. Not the whole tech scene thing. If Chengdu is SF, then is Hong Kong like LA, and Beijing and Shanghai are each half DC and half NY?

Anyway, our trip's drawing to a close, which makes me sad. Tati has to go back in two days, so we're trying to enjoy the last of them. I'm looking at heading up to Xining, Qinghai via Lhamo/Langmusi, Xiahe/Labrang, and Tongren/Rebkong. As well as I can make plans here, y'know.

On not being a budget traveler

I used to care more about being a budget traveler. Now I think it's pretty clear that I'm not, which leaves me with mixed feelings:

First, I don't care as much about being low-budget for cred. There's a subset of traveler who will gleefully tell you of the best bargain they ever got. (Mine might be staying at The Bunker in Verbier, Switzerland for like 10 francs a night, or maybe the $3 sleeper class overnight train across India) These travelers will also look down on you for spending any more than you absolutely have to. ("That place was good. Expensive, though," about a ¥25 ($4) lunch stop.) I was once excited to find a place in Dharamsala where I could eat some crummy rice and dal for $0.60, as opposed to the usual $2 I'd spend on a nice meal. This is kinda masturbatory, don't you think? Does that extra $1.40 you saved on lunch really matter?

Maybe that $1.40 does matter. Am I erasing the experience of the actually-just-scraping-by travelers by assuming they've all got a stash of money here or there? I assume that if you can afford a $1400 plane ticket, you can afford an extra $1.40, but that's not always true. I'm kind of inspired by folks who don't have a fallback plan or a stash of money, or the folks who work-travel-work-travel, and I'd hate to snob on them.

... unless they're imposing terribly on local people. One nice thing about traveling with some money is I can assume I'm not imposing on folks, whether it's couchsurfing hosts or hitchhikees or the Amritsar Golden Temple cooks. I'm loath to travel retailwise and just graze the surface, but I'm even more loath to cause trouble or discomfort for anyone.

... but that implies that the hitchhikers and couchsurfers are causing trouble for their hosts. As a former CS host myself, I can tell you that is 85% false. It was a little trouble, but way more fun and interesting. Often budget travel leads both traveler and host to a more interesting and fulfilling time than if you took a plane, booked a hotel, and ate at a restaurant.

To make this more fulfilling experience is really hard, though, and the difficulty increases the more different you are. Couchsurfing was fun, but I've only interacted with a few non-US/Canada/Europeans on it; it's hard to say I've been really opening my horizons. It's difficult to have fully equal relationships, especially short term, if your countries are radically different. And maybe I don't have the mental energy to keep talking with CS hosts and hitchhikees; I need to be able to retreat into my shell sometimes.

Hmm. Like I said, a bit conflicted. I hate being a yuppie and hate being a freeloader. (Plus I like some creature comforts.) This is most likely the kind of thing I should just ignore, but also hey I guess I record feelings on my blog, so here you go.

Chinese guesthouses: what to expect

We've been staying in a bunch of great places. With utmost thanks to those of you who gave us money as wedding gifts, we apologize that we haven't really splurged on any fancy places. In some towns (Yubeng, Litang) this is because there are no fancy places. In other places, this is not because we're trying to penny pinch, but because really the most important criteria for us is: are the owners/staff nice and English speaking? I feel weird making this a criterion, but being new to the language and the country, we need friendly people who we can ask all the tiny questions that keep coming up, like "how do we get to X?" or "we need to ship some things, where do we do that?" And so we're mostly going off recommendations from other travelers or internet people, and all the recommendations we get are for mid budget places - between $20-40/night. I guess fancy hotels might make sense more if you speak fluent Chinese. (But even then, a friendly face is worth way more than luxury frou frou.)

Anyway, the places we've been staying have been really solid! But there are different defaults than you might expect if you're used to the US or Europe. (Or even India.)

Every guesthouse seems to have the following:
- a bathroom with a shower that is the whole room. (There are non-bathroom rooms and dorm beds too, but we've been pulling out all the stops.) No shower curtain or anything, just you take a shower and the whole room gets wet.
- plastic slippers so that once the floor is all wet, you can go back in the bathroom and keep your feet dry.
- an electric kettle and two mugs. I'd heard about the Chinese thing about only drinking hot/warm things, but they're serious about it. This is quite handy, though, because you can boil a big thing of tap water and drink it later when it cools, and you don't have to buy quite as many bottles of water.
- WiFi. You cannot escape wifi. This is lucky.

That is all! Everything else seems up for grabs. That said, most hotels/guesthouses seem to have:
- towels. The one guesthouse that didn't have towels had instead a "disposable towel" for sale for ¥15. That was real lame.
- toothbrushes and tiny toothpaste. Isn't that the one thing you would bring with you? Eh, maybe not :P
- some other toiletries. Usually a little packet of shampoo and bath foam (not "soap" or "body wash", always "bath foam"), usually a frickin shower cap, sometimes a razor or whatever else they felt like throwing in.
- heat lamps in the bathroom. This is nice.
- electric blankets in the bed (but no heat in the room). These places must be brutal in winter.
- 2 twin beds in the average "double" room. So unromantic for a honeymoon.
- a TV. Some dumb things are universal.
- a way to do laundry. Usually you just give them your clothes and they wash them. How nice!

Sometimes guesthouses have:
- toilet paper. Sometimes you're allowed to throw it in the toilet, sometimes you're not. Sometimes they have a sign telling you "no TP in the toilet", sometimes you just gotta know.

A wake-up call from the Van Man

About a week ago, we met this guy Jimmy on the bus from Shangri-la to Daocheng. He told of us his plans to hitchhike up to Litang and Sertar. Later texting with him, I found out he had made it to Litang at least, got a ride from a Tibetan trucker, and was staying with a Tibetan monk. He texts me "Tibetan people are great." And I go, "Yeah, I hate to generalize, but the Tibetans I've met are pretty cool." After a few van trips, I'd amend that to "... except the van drivers."

The drivers are the main system of transport between cities in the Tibetan areas around here - Shangri-la, Yubeng, Daocheng, Litang, Kangding. A lot of these routes don't have buses, or just have one bus a day, so the van drivers transport most people. They usually each own a 7-person van.

The rides aren't bad (the roads around here are actually really good, except Shangri-la to Daocheng) and some of the difficulties of dealing with the drivers are just because they hustle. They'll never drive without a full car. They'll usually add a little stool in the middle row to turn their 7-person van into an 8-person van. They drive pretty aggressively. And they will badger you mercilessly whenever you walk past a bunch of them near the bus station. "Yading? Tomorrow? Hellodoyouneedacar?"

But can't blame em, really; like I said, they're doing business in a tricky informal situation. Plus, they have a pretty sweet style, that could best be described as "50s bad boy." Lots of leather jackets, sunglasses, and jeans. And amazingly voluminous hair.

So ok, really, these guys are cool; the only complaint I really have (besides the time I managed to bargain up from ¥100 to ¥150, but that's another story) was this morning.

Last night, we arranged a ride to Kangding at 8:30am. I was very clear on this, because we repeated it about seven times, like a mantra ("Ba dien ban, dui ba?" "Dui.") along with the price (most definitely ¥120/person). Told him where we're staying, exchanged phone numbers, he'll pick us up there tomorrow.

Seven thirty AM, we get a knock on our hotel room door. Cancel that - there was no knock, just the door opens and in comes Van Man and his buddy. (Luckily, we were awake and clothed.) Dude starts rushing us, and I'm like, 8:30, like we said. And he goes "8:00!" (as if this explains why he's there at 7:30; whatever) and I gesture to our stuff spread around the room and got to use a favorite Chinese expression: "Busheng." ("Not possible!")

So we repeated "8:30" a couple of times, and recited the price again for good measure. (this time with a calculator visual aid.) Dude's left, I made sure to lock the door, and good thing, because the knob turned again at 8:15. Barges back in and we go through another couple recitations. And sure enough, we were ready and out the door at 8:28. Dude.

Some documenting of China

Because my blog had been more neat insights but y'all facebookers might be wanting to know, where are you going and what are you doing?

Kunming
We landed here. Quick stop. Tati got a migraine from a 36-hour flight extravaganza. I wandered the streets and chewed betel nut with a guy.

Lijiang
One day here. Tourist town, meaning downtown is all old fashioned things that are pretty, and nice shops.

Tiger Leaping Gorge
I already blogged about this.

Shangri-la
A couple days here resting and getting ready for the next trip. Another tourist old town, but I mean the old town is prettier than the new town. Big monastery. Nice guesthouse where they helped us plan our Yubeng trip. A barrage of tasty food; we discovered the Tibetan barley cake, or qingke bing, which is delicious.

Yubeng
Took a van to a viewpoint mini-town called Feilai si. Crashed a wedding, accidentally. ("Tati, let's check out this cookout thing!" "Dan, that looks like a private party." Too late, we sat down, welp.)
Hiked to Yubeng. 1100m elevation gain, which I learned is a lot. Spent a day recovering and hanging out in this Tibetan guy's "Team A Bar" drinking honey lemon tea. Sadly, no Mr T references. Still, Team A Bar would do well in San Francisco.
Hiked to a waterfall. Frickin gorgeous. Plus I guess we got all our sins forgiven.
Hiked out, mostly downhill. That was much easier for me. It was harder for Tati because her shoes were too small. I guided her walking backwards for part of the way. We stopped walking backwards when the trail became along the edge of a cliff.

Back to Shangri-la
Hanging out! Tati got a stomach bug, probably from something in Yubeng. I tried to acquire Imodium or Azithromycin or Pepto-Bismol from a pharmacy, and instead got Bismuth Subcarbonate, Smectite, and some plant pills that looked like skittles. It all worked marvelously, really.

Daocheng
Took a bumpy bus to here. Auf. It was the first ride I'd compare to rural India; the rest of the roads here have been pretty awesome. Daocheng is strange: looks like it was all built last year, and it probably was. About three streets, all of them full of hotels. It looks like it's a new tourism destination; they built an airport here in 2013 and now it's Disneyland. People dancing in the square in the center of town. Is this a thing that happens?

The ride to Yading
... is supposed to be an easy paved 2 hours, but due to a landslide we had to go the back way. Always be nervous when Tibetan drivers suggest going the back way. This dirt road was intense! Tati has some good videos of vans trying to pass each other on a one lane dirt road over a creek on the side of a cliff. Wow.

Yading
And then we finally made it here! Outdoor Disneyland. Beautiful mountains, but not like Yubeng: here everything is on wooden plank paths and paved roads and guardrails. On the other hand, there's not trash and mud all over the place. I have mixed feelings, really - not "mixed feelings" as in dislike, but really just kind of complicated, some like, some dislike. But then they are overwhelmed by much bigger feelings of "whoa those mountains." Doing the last of the 3 big hikes we had planned today! (In addition to Yubeng and Tiger Leaping Gorge) Well, we had wanted to do the kora, or trek around the mountain, but seeing as it is 3x as long as the hike into Yubeng, we probably couldn't make it in a day. So we're hiking to Milk Lake and 5-Color Lake and heading back down.

You may have noticed that Tati has been unlucky enough to acquire a series of minor ailments. She's quite positive about it though. I am lucky to have married someone resilient, strong, and generally awesome. And we both feel good today! So, here's to that.

Incidentally, on my phone, the Blogger app just fails to upload pictures. I can upload pictures by going to the Blogger site in mobile Chrome and doing a lot of frustrating zooming and poking and waiting, but instead perhaps just check Tati's Facebook for photos of all this.

Dan Goes To The Bathroom

(DGTTB is the name of a game that my friend Aaron made once. Unfortunately, it was renamed "Gotta Go!" before final production.)

(content note: contains graphic descriptions of gross bathrooms. this is not a sarcastic content note. I know at least one person, who is my mom, who will probably be happier not having read this.)

Today was a rough day for bathrooms.

A 10-hour bus journey from Shangri-la, Yunnan, China to Daocheng, Sichuan, China (which is only 2 hours away from Shangri-la, Sichuan, China, and that makes me want to punch someone) veered off the roads that are thick orange and the roads that are thin orange and the roads that are thick white onto the thin white (and sometimes even gray) roads. This meant that, along the way, we were treated to some of the most rural and grossest toilets I've had the pleasure to encounter.

Back up a bit: so far in China, public toilets have been fine-to-kinda-bad. They're often on the side of the road or somewhere around town, with a little "men" and "women" sign (you learn those right quick; the Men has a little window-pane with a thing below it.) They are usually pretty basic stalls - often just a few spots where you can squat and it leads into a trough. Often they smell bad. Sometimes they smell ok. Then, when you come out, you pay someone 1 yuan. (even if they were nowhere to be seen before, the Toilet Guardian will remarkably materialize.) 1 yuan is 15 US cents; it's fine. I guess this pays for upkeep of the toilet. Sometimes, especially in rural places, you don't pay someone 1 yuan.

Today we had a couple where we didn't pay anyone 1 yuan. There's not always a correlation between paying 1 yuan and a clean toilet, or not paying 1 yuan and a dirty toilet, but today there was. Exhibit 1: thick cloud of flies, trough full of poo, and even a small batch of bees in one corner. It is scary (even as a guy) peeing near bees. Exhibit 2: a small house with 4 rooms. Two were locked. One had a leaky toilet. One had nothing. Both the unlocked rooms, however, just had shit all over the floor. It looked like a murder scene, if people were full of shit instead of blood. Or like an attack from the Poop Monster from "Gotta Go!"

Anyway, we deal, we move on, we go outside and do our business behind the poop-murder-hut. Fine. Gets me wondering a few things:

1. why doesn't 1 yuan pay for cleaner toilets in general? The standard public toilet is worse than a kinda-bad gas station in the US. Should they start charging 2 yuan?

2. who employs the Toilet Guardians? Is it a private business? I can't imagine that'd be profitable, but I've seen stranger. Is it a government job? In that case, wouldn't it just make more sense to fund it with tax dollars? I can't imagine the 1-yuan-taker is collecting enough 1-yuans to pay their own salary even.

3. geez how can you deal with a poop-murder-hut on your property, I mean, man, I think I'd just burn the whole thing down if it got that bad

4. how are our toilets better in the US?
4a. I guess McDonald's has an incentive to make clean toilets; fine. It's weird that your clean toilet is subsidized by burgers, but you know, whatever.
4b. Highway rest stops etc are paid for by... partially tolls and partially federal taxes? (n.b. to all you drivers out there: your gas taxes and tolls do not fully fund our roads; keep that in mind next time you want to make some dumb argument about how cars have more right to the road than bikers)
4c. City public toilets (SF has a few but not enough) are funded by... city taxes?
I mean in each case there is someone paid to clean the toilet - but there is in China too.

Anyway, not to dump on China here; our US toilet system isn't great either. We could use more public toilets, but I'm not sure how to connect incentives to make that work.

China: Let's talk uppers and downers

Uppers:

1. Tea, of course. Always green tea, served by default with almost every meal. Usually really weak - kinda like flavored hot water.

2. Buckwheat tea. I think this isn't actually an upper, but sometimes you get it instead of green tea. Mildly sweet, bright yellow.

3. Butter tea. This tastes not so much like tea as... I don't know, like tea with butter in it. It's quite nice, nicer than you might think. But hard to drink a lot of. I suffered my first big food failure today when I went to a restaurant, very hungry, pointed at a random thing on the menu like you do, and got a big pot of butter tea. Welp.

4. Coffee. They grow coffee in Yunnan! Most of it is pulverized into Nescafe-style instant milk-and-sugared slop. I have found one good roaster, though, Xiangcheng Coffee, in Shangri-la. (maybe they are based in Xiangcheng, a city a few hours north of here? I don't know; I just know this guy at Xiangcheng coffee Shangri-la is my good coffee hookup here.) It's not world-class best of the best, but I would definitely be satisfied if I got it in a SF coffee shop.
And they sell it in these little disposable DIY-drip-coffee bags. They're awesome while traveling.

5. Frickin' Red Bull. Stuff's everywhere.

6. I mean, and then I just bought a thing that turned out to be flavored brown sugar cubes. Like 1" cubes. I don't know what you do with it, but that'd get ya hyped, I suppose.

Downers:

1. Beer. There is the standard bland watery beer (popular here is a brand called Dali) and then there is one craft brewery around here called Shangrila Beer, run by a German brewmaster who moved here. (there's another one called Bad Monkey I think but I didn't try them.) Shangrila Beer is solid; could definitely set up shop in the US and they'd do great. But here at 10,000 feet, in a place without much beer history! Neat.
All the beer lists something like ">=2.5% ABV" or ">=3.3% ABV"... which makes me think they're all real weak? Or else that's just boilerplate and they can be whatever percent they want as long as they're above 2.5 or 3.3? Can't comment on how drunk they get you. Sleep all night, party never!

2. Wine. I just had a blueberry wine. It tasted like blueberry juice. That is all I can say about wine here.

3. Liquor: the main thing is Baijiou, "white liquor", which I've heard is largely as vile as it sounds. You can buy it in a little sealed dixie-cup-sized glass for like 50 cents, and it's about 2 shots' worth. (Or in bigger bottles, whatever.) I bought a bottle for $1 but haven't had an occasion to open it yet. (seriously - it's got a beer-style bottle cap, but contains about 8oz of 84-proof liquor. I guess they assume you're drinking with friends, or just completely shameless?) Sometimes they infuse it with Maca, a root that grows around here. I tried that and it's pretty good. (n.b. I think weird liquors are good.)

4. Weed: on one of the hikes, one of the trailside snack stands was selling just straight up bags of marijuana. I mean, smelled like it anyway. Didn't try any, but I guess it grows here too :P The lady selling it was advertising "get energy for the steep part of the hike!" Err... I don't think that drug does what you think it does.

Tibetan Prayer Math

Ok, so Tibetan Buddhism. I've got a bunch of math questions. You always hear stuff like "praying in an auspicious time is worth ten times as much as praying in an inauspicious time" or "putting up these prayer flags will make prayer happen continually" or you see the prayer wheels, where one spin sends one prayer up to heaven/the world/etc.

My recent favorite is this prayer water wheel:

Spinning the wheel sends prayers to heaven... so why not make the stream do the work for us? (a smaller analog is this solar-powered desk accessory prayer wheel that just always spins.)

If Tibetan Buddhism were a game, I'd say it had balance issues. Why spend any time doing anything that's like one prayer's worth, if you could instead be building a mega-fast spinning prayer wheel? Or mass producing prayer flags? You get some crazy things where one drop of water from this river is worth 100,000 prayers or something - dang, just gulp that water and spend the rest of your time goofing off!

Not that Tibetan Buddhism is alone here. Confession in the Catholic church likewise seemed weird - it wipes away all your mortal sins, and if you die without mortal sins, you're (eventually) going to heaven. At least they closed the confess-then-suicide loophole by making suicide a mortal sin too. You just gotta accidentally die soon after a confession.
(This sacred waterfall we just hiked to had a similar sin-washing-away effect.)

And the weird thing is, people insist that it's not just a metaphor. I mean, I can't speak for Tibetan Buddhists, but the Catholics at least say, yep, that's definitely correct, if you get hit by a truck right after confession, straight to heaven. And the Buddhists have lots of very specific terms - the definition of a "Kalpa" comes to mind, but you'll find a lot of magic numbers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(aeon)

So... all the talk about this prayer being worth 100x that prayer, that's all metaphorical, right? Like, it's a way to say "praying here is good" or "put up some prayer flags because it makes us feel good" or "go to confession", not actually about mathematical equalities, right? Or are most Buddhists and Catholics really irrational actors?

Yubeng: some useful tips

Look, this whole trip was totally great, but I've been allergic for the past 4 days so my brain is half there and it's hard to write coherent things about how great it was, so here's a little stuff my engineer brain dashed off:

You take a bus from Shangrila to Feilai si, then the next morning share a van to Xidang. There are a bunch of guys driving there, no problem there. Takes 1.5-2 hours.

From Xidang it's 9.4km to upper Yubeng. You can check the numbers on some of the power poles on the way up; the top is at about 105 and Yubeng is at about 150. It's tough - I'm a reasonably fit 30 year old guy and it was still a whole lot of uphill. Took about 6-7 hours including breaks. The top is at about 12k feet and upper Yubeng about 10.5k. If you've acclimated in Shangrila (10k), you shouldn't have altitude trouble.
The first stop, Dazhending, doesn't have food, just instant noodles. The next two stops (Bayinong and Nanzheng Col at the top) have rice and eggs, so hold out for them if you can.

Upper and Lower Yubeng are both about 1-street towns. I can't tell what's the difference from a traveler's point of view. Seems there are fine places in each. We stayed in Lobsang's Trekking Lodge in upper Yubeng and the Sacred Waterfall guest house in lower Yubeng. None of the places are fancy, but at least they're not too pricey (150RMB ~ $25 double room) and have good views and friendly owners. (Especially the Sacred Waterfall.)

You can meet goats.

Someone said it was "like life in the 1800s." Well, not quite, unless the 1800s also had a thriving tourism industry. But it's a taste. I bet the 1800s had even more mud.

Anyway, speaking of good views, the sacred waterfall hike is totally great. As it's the easiest of 3 day hikes in the region, we expected it to be kinda easy and not super exciting. Wrongo, both ways.

Dude's wearing a suit! Did he hike up in it?

Getting out, we took the Ninong trail. Way easier than the Xidang. Right before the Ninong village, you can take a shortcut down to a parking lot where some drivers are waiting. We went with one of them all the way back to Shangri-la.

Travel as the ultimate retail experience

I've been thinking a lot about what I've been calling "retail" experiences - like the kind you get at Starbucks or Target or Marriott. A retail experience has the following characteristics:

- it's pretty context-free: almost anyone can walk in and do the thing. I say "almost" because nothing's ever fully context free; you need to know what kind of business it is, be able to communicate, etc, but you don't need to be in the club or know the owner or anything.
- no relationship is formed. You can leave right after you do the thing and never speak to them again, and it's fine.
- whoever has the money is the boss. That's usually the customer. Dependability is assumed, and if you're not getting what you paid for, it's up to the proprietor to make it right. (usually this is kind of an honor code, but in extreme cases it's legal)
- perfectly informed, perfectly rational choice (a la Homo Economicus) is assumed. If you were going to Marriott but Hampton started offering a better product for cheaper, you'd know that and go to Hampton instead.

It's all a spectrum, right. Context isn't on or off, choice isn't perfectly rational or completely irrational. By saying "Starbucks is a very retail experience" I mean it's very far on the retail end.

What's a very un-retail experience? That coffeeshop where you're a regular, Couchsurfing, the local Elks Lodge, your regular weekly poker game, a martial arts studio, and arguably a realtor.

The tourism industry (both techie and not) seems focused on getting travel to be as retail as possible. Hotels, trains and buses, airline search engines, guidebooks, resorts, etc. And this is not necessarily a bad thing! If you've got two weeks and you want to go to 7 cities throughout Czech, Germany, Switzerland, and France, you're not going to build relationships with people everywhere; you're not going to thoroughly research all the local customs; hell, you're not even going to learn all the languages. I'm mostly a retail traveler, so don't read this as a slam on retail travel.

But it's interesting to think: how could we make some kinds of travel less retail? I mean, Couchsurfing is one way; Airbnb looked to be another way (though it varies from place to place); various slower tourism things like learning Spanish intensively in Mexico or learning to make pasta in Italy are others; travel within your own subculture is a fourth (like connecting with an opera fans club in Vienna or bike touring through Vietnam).

Someone's already probably theorized all of this. If so, tell me who.

Three things you cannot escape by hiking 7 hours to a remote Chinese-Tibetan village

1. Internet. Hah! By the way, there are no roads here.
2. Red Bull. I think we are even beyond Coca-Cola, but there's plenty of Red Bull around. Ew.
3. Altitude. Indeed, we ran right into it! I think we're at 12-13k feet now, and we're not terribly sick, just everything is working a little bit worse. Even like sinuses! Why does having less oxygen make your nose all stuffy?!

Edit: we're not at 12k, we're at 10,500 ft in upper Yubeng. And I don't think altitude does make your sinuses worse. I think we just both have a cold :P

Food mysteries in China so far, and our attempts to decode them

1. Every table has a bubbling red spicy oily sauce in the center. People dip food into the center. Before we could order stuff, the waiter kept pointing to "choose your own sauce" on the menu and pointing us over to the next room, where, sure enough, there were a bunch of sauce ingredients. Then you add a tiny 3oz can of oil and you have a sauce. I guess you dip into the bubbling red stuff, then your own sauce, then eat it? But either way it is all damn hot, so much so that: 1. we had to order whatever we could find to drink, which turned out to be orange juice, and 2. I kinda had one of these capsaicin-induced out of body experiences. Afterward we were given a not-quite-sweet tapioca jello-ey thing.
Conclusion: Chongqing-style hot pot?

2. A Tibetan delicious cornbread thing, so good that we ordered it twice to take home and had it for breakfast the next day too. Kind of orange.
Conclusion: Qing ke bing - "highland barley cake."

3. A tea that looks like those things that sit on top of a cricket wicket. Tastes like graham crackers. This one we figured out: buckwheat tea.

4. This other thing, next to the steamed buns filled with red beans that were amazing, which looked like a steamed bun but with a different shape. About the size of a softball. Turns out it's just bread, which is pretty disappointing when you have to eat a softball's worth of it.

5. Very thin slices of green pepper and meat, so thin you might call them threads. So I got this app called Pleco where you can draw in Chinese characters and it will tell you that, yep, that's qing jiao rou si, definitely "green pepper meat threads."

6. Lots of mapo tofu. This wasn't much of a mystery. What's sort of mysterious is how often we both look at a picture menu, see what looks best, and welp it's mapo tofu again.

7. Another hot pot, this one more like a chicken broth? Came with slices of potato, lotus root, and cabbage, and was totally great and surprisingly filling. Oh, and then they brought out a whole fish, which was great but guys we could have made it with just the hot pot, but y'know, not complaining

8. Okay, this frickin' candy. It's black, it looks like chocolate, it's got the consistency of a compressed dried fruit, it tastes like licorice and mint and betel nut and orange and about twelve other weird flavors, and I kind of love it but then can't stand it. Oh, and it's got a rind. As if it were a fruit? Maybe it's a fruit? Help me out here.

VPN achieved!

OK, this felt really good: we finally got Tati on a VPN. Warning: what follows is a long and nerdy story, with a small payoff.

As mentioned previously, she didn't have one fully set up before we left, which left her in a catch 22: she needed VPN access to set up a VPN (like NordVPN or her company VPN). (reminder: a VPN is the thing that lets you get around the Great Firewall and see sites like Google and Facebook.)

My VPN was working, so I figured I would just set up a portable wifi hotspot and Tati could connect to that. Nope, for some unknown reason. Well, ok, I can connect to her phone and share my network via Bluetooth. Nope, for some unknown reason. Well, maybe she can just download PrivateInternetAccess (my VPN provider) and set up her own account. Nope, for some mostly-unknown reason (maybe the Great Firewall blocks privateinternetaccess.com?) Well, she can just sign in with my login/password? Nope, FSUR.

At this point we figured we were pretty SOL, but a friend offered to share some OpenVPN config files. Worth a try - all the setup is in those files, so we don't have to create an account with anyone etc. that might be Great Firewall-blocked. So... I can download the .ovpn files and send them to Tati via... what? Bluetooth? Again, NFSUR. Ok, I'll WeChat them to her. Nope, can't send files on WeChat, just pictures and stuff. Uh, I'll WhatsApp them to her. Nope again - WhatsApp even lets you send "documents" but that seems to be pdf only. Why pdfs and not .txt (or .ovpn or whatever)? Beats me.

Skype (Skype!) to the rescue. Send file with Skype. Download it on her iPhone. Uh, where the hell did it go? Let me just get into the file system -- ha, hahahahaha, sorry, nevermind. Frickin iPhones. Ok, here's what finally worked: "Save to Notes" then open the Notes app which has the text file as an attachment, then click the attachment, "open with OpenVPN."

Except it didn't work: line length too long. Oh gourd - when I got it from Dropbox, I couldn't save-as from mobile Chrome, so I just copy-pasted it into a new text file. I mean, of course that bungled something - in this case, I think it just mangled the line endings. Wait, you can't save-as in mobile? If you visit a foo.txt file, you can't save foo.txt to your computer? Well, nope. I realized, I just need wget. So, phones being what they are, I went to the Google Play store and searched for "wget", and got "webget", which is some app written by some dude that hopefully doesn't steal my bank account info. This is so much better than just giving people access to the underlying linux, right? UGH.

Ok. Copy paste URL into webget, download text file, skype it to Tati, save it into Notes on her phone, open Notes app, open attachment in OpenVPN, connect to VPN. It worked! It goddamn worked! She can communicate with the world normally again!

... long story for a short payoff. Sorry, warned ya.

China notes, part 2

Everything is bigger in China. Texas, GTFO.

A big part of the difficulty here (and anywhere you don't speak the language) is getting over embarrassment. You're going to have a million awkward interactions where someone's talking at you and you don't know what they're saying, or you need to ask just one simple thing and you don't have the word, and then you just have to both kinda sheepishly smile and walk away.

Finding good Chinglish is just too easy. If I had room in my bag, I'd have bought at least three t-shirts by now. On day 1 I took a picture of a "Fire Extubgyusber" -- which now is not even in the top 10 silliest signs I've seen.

Lijiang is an old town turned into deluxe shopping, a Carmel by the sea of China. It's extraordinarily cute. There are 10 shops repeated over and over again. You can buy, over and over again, a jade bracelet, a Pu-erh tea disk, a silver bracelet, a flower cake, general convenience store stuff, clothes, travel services, or a hand drum. Not sure why all the hand drums. Still, somehow it's pretty and not tacky. I think the stone streets and pretty old houses have something to do with it.

Frickin' Great Firewall. I was right when I said that of our 3 VPNs, at least one would work. Hang on, we're getting geeky. I have my CMU VPN, my Private Internet access.com VPN, and Tati has a NordVPN. CMU doesn't work - of course not! It only VPNs traffic to a few select IP ranges (I think that is what's going on). PIA works (but is slow, so it goes). Nord doesn't work - not sure if that's because of Nord, or because Tati didn't finish setting it up before we left, or because Facebook has its IT tentacles somewhere into Tati's phone, and they (wisely) lock some things down if you say you're going to China. Not sure what all they've locked down, but the following things don't work:
- Facebook VPN (obv)
- Nord VPN (like I said)
- Bluetooth connecting to my phone so she can share my VPN for a minute
- Connecting to my portable WiFi Hotspot.
- Seriously, why the hell does that not work.
- Anyway, we're sort of at a loss; that was kinda all the backups I had planned for her phone. Welp.

China update, one day in

China update, one day in:
Internet wise, I can still access this site sometimes. Project Fi is miraculously working a bit; sometimes I get edge (remember that? The thing before 3g) but I stumbled into an internet games cafe ("I would like some coffee." "uhh, we don't have coffee." "your sign literally says 'coffee loft.'") and am getting LTE now, hence the update. WiFi should work sometimes but I'm 0 for 2 so far. (sometimes the signal is bad so I can't get WiFi + VPN to be fast enough to load anything.)
Language skills should work, but sometimes they don't. I'm pretty sure I was repeating, "I would like this" while pointing to someone's food, and that still did not quite work. Still, relatively successful with hotel and taxi so far :P
We are killing time in Kunming before heading to Lijiang, tiger leaping gorge, and Shangri-la, in that order. Just so's you know.

It feels useful to remember how helpless you are when you don't speak a language in a place! And yet, being a white English speaker is still easy mode.

Anyway, if you want to communicate quickly, hit me up on Wechat (dantasse)!

Wedding tips I can think of right now

OK, this weekend was totally the best, but it started out about a year ago with a giant "wtf do we do" so in case you find yourself in a similar situation, here are a few thoughts I can brain dump.

It may seem like a lot of little choices that make up your budget. But it's not; it's really a few big choices:

1. Where is it? The bigger/more expensive the city, the more expensive the wedding. I recommend Pittsburgh.

2. Is it small (<40 ppl), medium (110 ppl), or huge (200+)? I don't see a ton of weddings in between those sizes, though I don't know why not. I think small or medium is the easiest to find a venue for.

3. Is it on a summer Saturday? No, stop, don't do that. Everyone wants a summer Saturday. Especially if you don't want to book a year in advance, pick a different day. (But don't worry if you really want a summer Saturday; we did it and it was OK.)

4. What's the venue + catering + booze cost? The Mattress Factory was expensive, but not actually, once we factored in that we could bring our own caterer and bartenders. As a counter example, Phipps Conservatory seems kinda reasonable at $3000, but you then have to use their caterer, who is at least $90/person. Calculate this all together.

5. Are you gonna DIY hardcore? We are both super job busy and across the country, so our answer was clearly "no" - our MO across the board was to hire good people and let them do their thing. But if you want to save a lot of money, I think the answer is to do a lot yourself or hire volunteer friends. Note: this is way more difficult; it probably helps if at least one of you is unemployed or part time or something. The amount of work feels like the order of magnitude of putting on a college theater play or two.

Small or medium sized choices you can make once you've figured out the big ones above:
1. How much photography? We went for "a lot" and had 2 photographers and 2 videographers. This was, all in all, a big expense. People say it's worth it though.

2. There are not many! Once you make the big choices, the small choices will kind of be locked in, and you're talking hundreds of dollars more or less that you can spend, not thousands.

Things we did that I was proud of:
1. Indian food catering. Tamarind was awesome, everyone loved it, and it was $25/person for the food, or $45 including full service catering and tablecloths and silverware etc. For a medium sized wedding, catering can definitely be your single biggest expense.
Doesn't have to be Indian if you don't like Indian - you can do Mexican or Thai or whatever you like that is served in big portions. (so also like Japanese would be bad I bet.) Just get outside the expensive-and-blah "American food."

2. After party. Find a bar you like that isn't super crowded or has a back room, and rent it out. If your budget is blown, they'll often give you a minimum instead of a fee, and then your guests can pay for their drinks at this part and it's basically free to you. This was such a great decision - instead of going to bed at 11, we got to stay up till 2 - like multiplied the length of our wedding by 1.5.

3. Hire great people. Everyone was top notch 100% awesome. I don't know how you do this really besides meet with them, screen them, get lucky, and also be willing to pay for it. Our photographer and we just clicked; we knew as soon as we met them that they were on the ball, super skilled, matched our energy, within our budget, and we just booked them right there. The DJ, I went to his weekly gig, and though it was a college bar and therefore a little different atmosphere than we wanted, I felt like he was good at reading the crowd. Our bartender Matt is a friend who I know has bartended professionally and we've talked about drinks, so I knew he'd be great at coming up with fun cocktails and good ideas for beers/wines, and at serving them up. Plus Amanda and the Mattress Factory crew - I mean, the space is awesome, I got a good vibe from meeting with them, and they have a million great reviews on Yelp etc. We had a pro do most of our flowers, but my mom made centerpieces because she'd done that a bit before and knew how to make them simple, cheap, but elegant. Our friend Killian, a professional artist/tattooist, was super happy to make us a drawing for our programs. And our officiant John is a friend and a professional chaplain, so I knew he'd be great too. See a theme here? Friends/family + pros. If they're one or the other, that's fine (and err towards "pro" as much as you can afford), but if you can find someone who's a friend (or feels like one) and also a pro or otherwise experienced, that is a great thing and you'll be fine.

4. Trust your great people! Once you go in with someone, don't micromanage them. They've done this way more than you and have probably thought of everything you've thought of. Feel free to ask them stuff, but try not to worry. (this is more for your sanity; your people will do great, don't worry about it.)

5. Have it at a place you like. I think we lucked out with the Mattress Factory, but I mean, if you like nature, have it at the Aviary or zoo. If you like history, have it at the history museum. If you like baseball, there was this baseball ish venue we saw. Do you. Plus, then it's more fun for other people.

6. Oh oh oh, honeymoon registry. I mean, if you want a bunch of household stuff, go ahead, register at Bed Bath and Beyond etc. But if you are like us, getting married at 30+ so you have some dishes already, and have a small apartment anyway, do this do this do this. You will not ever use those fancy kitchen gadgets. But you can instead use people's gift-giving instincts to pay for a killer once-in-a-lifetime wedding.

If you are planning a wedding, feel free to ask me stuff! I can share more exact money numbers too, I just feel a little self conscious posting them online. I will say that when we googled for wedding price estimates, they were actually pretty accurate (for our medium, summer-Saturday, Pittsburgh, independent-caterer-and-bar wedding). We might have beat them by a little.

Man, what a friggin amazing weekend.

There is nothing like having 100 of your family and friends come in from out of town and throwing the biggest best party you can think of. It's a whirlwind for sure, the kind of thing you wish you could make last forever. Uh. Man. I want to thank so many people, and I will do so more privately also, but for the record, the following people have been extra special amazing:

John Figdor for a wonderful ceremony - and all the work that goes into it, and guiding us through putting it together

Heather Kresge and co-photographer Robert were so on the ball, thoughtful, artistic, and calm the whole time; seriously, hire her if you need photos ever

(Alexa and Wes the videographers were great too!)

Alex Homer for totally great DJing - the kind of skilled DJ whose timing is always perfect, and who can work in a whole list of stuff we like but also know that, yeah, everyone actually *does* want to hear Don't Stop Believing

Amanda and the rest of the Mattress Factory crew for running the show at the super coolest venue I can imagine

Krishna and the folks at Tamarind for delicious Indian catering - way better (and cheaper too) than standard ol' American catering (and Jen and volunteers at 412foodrescue.org for saving leftovers even, maybe!)

Matt and Charlie Wein for helping us come up with a bar menu we loved, buying a ton of drinks, and serving them up to a hundred thirsty partygoers

Cheryl, Natasha, Ivana, and Miya for being a great Bridal Party and being game for doing readings kinda on the spot

Daniel and Killian for being the Best Man and Best Woman, seriously, waiting on us hand and foot, knowing exactly what we needed all the time, and helping everything go smoothly

All of you for being my loving family and friends! Ok going to go Like everything on Facebook now, be back in a couple hours.

This is what I wanted to say about Trump

Not surprisingly, Scott Aaronson says it better than me.

"Against those considerations, I recently realized that there’s an argument for speaking out, which goes as follows.  Suppose Trump actually wins (as of this writing, Predictwise still gives him a frighteningly-high 27% probability).  Suppose my family somehow survives whatever comes next, and one day my daughter Lily comes to me across the rubble of the post-thermonuclear hellscape and says, “daddy, in the Good Days, the days before the War of the Small-Hands Insult, the days when there was plentiful food and water and Internet, didn’t you have what used to be called a ‘blog’?  Then why didn’t you speak out on this blog, why didn’t you do whatever tiny amount you could to prevent this?”  So, alright, this post is my answer to her."

My answer to my future daughter is this: in the goal of not adding more noise, I won't write my own long thing; instead, I refer my (four) blog readers to Aaronson's post. It's so good - all of it, about why Trump is totally unqualified, why he's possibly Hitler but more likely "only" Putin or Pinochet and that's still not ok, why social media vindictiveness and life-destroying is counterproductive, why we need to understand why people are voting Trump instead of assuming they're just racist imbeciles, and about how we should probably do something to stop him but it's really unclear what will work. (I'm surprised the Black Mirror episode "The Waldo Moment" hasn't been referenced more often.)

Why economic revolutionaryism now?

Man, basically this. (I used to read Tim Bray for some Android things or something, but he's one of the few I've kept around for being just pretty interesting at blogging kinda in the way that I want to be?)

I guess why I was psyched about Bernie despite it no longer being cool was this: an economy that looks hopeless and broken forever, for a lot of (most?) people.

Like, my future looks bright in the short term. I'm one of the people that mainstream Democrat party cares about, I've got a 401k, I've got steady housing and employment and food and I'm unlikely to get all revolutionary, I'm demographically likely to support rather safe progressive values (e.g. LGBT equality)... but look, we need the unsafe progressive values, the ones that Buddha (our salvation is all bound up in each other) and Jesus ("whatever you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me") and Gandhi/Dostoevsky/Churchill/Whoever ("you can judge a society based on how it treats the least of its people"). A functioning society that only works for me and my 401k doesn't work. But this is obvious; go back and read that Tim Bray post and the ones he quotes like the Unnecessariat post.

Especially the one about how moral appeals don't work for some issues. Which is why am I focusing more on the chunk of the world that's our economy than some of the other pressing issues. It seems likely that enough people are going to get angry enough that they're going to overturn the NC bathroom law; it seems less likely that we're going to get so straightforwardly angry about the economy. I mean, the series of small cuts that's giving us the ongoing long-burning economic crisis (and heroin and suicide crises) is leading some of those people whose lives have been hosed to... Trumpism? That seems like some people are taking advantage of the complication of all these issues.

Maybe global warming or malaria are still bigger issues. Ok. There's also the argument that, if you take the (maybe?) most powerful country in the world and let it eat itself with bad economics, you're not going to solve global warming or malaria. But I'd believe that we should focus on global warming or malaria too.