Back to August or so...

So, for various reasons, Boyfriend and I decided to quit our jobs before our contracts ran out.

It was decided that we would quit at the end of August, and Vee was going to quit her job, too, and we could all travel together in one beautiful, triumphant, curious group.  China is so big that there is no way to see it all, but we were gonna try.

The posts that follow will be a documentation of that time.

Dudes.  Verity came to China. It was awesome.

(Interjection: I just, right this minute, made an argument about the dinosaurs that went as follows: "Lotta T-Rexes prolly stepped on glass, got an infection, it went to their heart..." And thus, Yoshi wears boots and lives!)

auflauf

My favorite German word is the word for hot dish,

or as boyfriend would say, casserole.

Or when we make it with taco seasoning: cassero-lay! But that's Spanish.

Haircut

I got a haircut, and I can't decide what decade I think it's from.  I got bangs again, but I think I look more like Mary Anne from the Baby Sitters' Club than, say, me in college.  Maybe it's because of the giant 80's glasses.

What kind of haircuts will people have in the coming decade?  And how can I describe that in German?

Where were we?

Oh, yeah.  May.  Later in May, the boys heard about this bar where if you drink 12 pints in 2 hours, the beer is free. As I am a girl, I thought, "Well, a person can't drink 12 pints in two hours, that's crazy." As they are boys, they thought, "That sounds crazy, but I bet I could do it."

We dressed up, and man, we looked good.  But Will looked the best, because his suit was made of gold. 

We took a before picture, then a picture from the same spot every ten minutes. 



Before we started, we asked the waitress when most people quit.  Four or five.
Nick (Boyfriend), Rich (Cardigan), and Dan (Blonde) quit at 4.5, but Will (duh) and Nate (Piano Tie) kept going!  Rudy (Polo) and I (Girl) didn't play. 

Now, the rules say that you cannot puke.  DQ, baby.  But Will, gold suit or no, is sneaky. 

Well, maybe not, but anyhow they didn't catch him when he yakked after 6 or 7. Nathan is a stickler for the rules. Well, maybe not, but he didn't puke. 

Following the puke, Will resumed drinking and finished the 12 pints, thus avoiding the bill.
Nathan, on the other hand...

Well, the poor guy drank 11.5 and just couldn't do it.  But that's still pretty impressive.

Then we headed for a busy street and taxis.  Nathan was inspired and played dead.

First we passed a hardware store where we bought a toilet seat (to replace the one Nate broke while we were in Thailand) and gold spray paint. 
Then we went to McDonald's. 

dream job

I had a dream, and the car talk guys were narrating (actually, they just described the other character, laughed about it, and cut out), and I was in Mrs. Robinson's house (I can't remember the actress's name--Anne Bancroft, right?) And she had short grey hair and she was crabby and smoking and wearing a gold necklace over a turtleneck in the way that old rich ladies can do.

I was going to do some work for her, but she offered me a drink and asked if I wanted to play a game, maybe Network or Canasta. (I don't know of a real game called network and I don't know how to play canasta.)  I was afraid of her dog, and I kept knocking things over as I looked at everything in her house. She was annoyed.

Anyway, the point is that I found something in her house that made me want to do an art project involving jigsaw puzzles. I feel like I HAVE to make it, because it came to me in a dream and Anne Bancroft was there!

Oh, hi, (Thailand, May)

New Years Resolution: stop starting every blog post with an apology and just post more often.

So, back in May, I went to Thailand. It was awesome. Details are a bit fuzzy for me now, but here's an overview.

We flew in from Cambodia, waited for a bus at the airport for a while, talked to a crazy guy who claimed the hostel we were headed for didn't exist (it was a Sukumvit on Nut, I remember that, but I probably spelled it wrong), watched his shoes while he prayed, got bit by a million mosquitoes, gave up on the bus, caught a taxi, decided to stay in the touristy area instead (because it's by all the tourist attractions) wandered from hostel to hostel until we found one with a vacancy,* and went to bed.

The next day we saw the world's largest reclining Buddha:

That temple also had a lot of other normal-sized gold Buddhas. Here are some monks’ fancy mosaic tombs:

We wandered outside around the presidential palace for the rest of the afternoon, I think. We also got pressured by an information booth guy who wanted to sell us to a guy with a little open taxi for a tour of the city, except since it was “a national holiday” (a common scam to derail your plans and convince you to go along with them) everything we wanted to do was allegedly closed. He said we couldn’t even buy beer anywhere, so we told him to forget it.

That night, we had dinner with Will, who is Thai and had gone to high school with Boyfriend, and his wife Stick (?). They took us to a night market, where we avoided the “Ping Pong Show” (Boyfriend was initially interested, because he thought they said “ping pong qiu” which is how you say ping pong in Chinese. I explained that this was a show, presumably involving ping pong balls and vaginas. So we didn’t go.) We bought souveniers: Candles for my coworker who helped me out with my banking, a fancy popup card for Wenfu, and muy thai boxing shorts for Nathan (who NEVER wore them, despite many plans to go to a club wearing nothing else). Then they gave us a night tour of the city, including the street where the anti-government protests are usually held.

The next day we had smoothies at a place with this reassuring sign:

And took this boat,

driven by this couple

to the “floating markets,” which I don’t have a picture of because in the city it’s apparently one guy selling bananas and beer from a boat. They also take you on a canal tour, so you can see all the little houses on (or in) the water.

 And temples:

 Most of the houses had little shrines outside.

 And then you go to real solid markets. These things are fruit tacoy things, not cheese. Still yummy.

 Then Boyfriend got a straight-razor shave from a 97-year-old who was watching muy thai boxing on TV while holding a blade to Boyfriend’s throat.

 Then we went to Cabbages and Condoms for lunch, where the money goes to pay for food for orphans and condoms for grown-ups.

They have informational posters all over the place and mannequins wearing only condoms.

Then Will and Stick picked us up and we stayed at their house outside the city. She showed us their wedding photos, which are done Chinese-style, in a huge, beautifully edited book, with lots of locations and costume changes, rather than a bunch of individual pictures. At 5am, Will drove us to Pattaya, which is supposed to be pretty seedy but we were there a little too early in the morning to witness many shenanigans. We just took a van, then another van, then another van, then a ferry, then a leaky truck (it mostly leaked right above my head and right above my suitcase…) to a shack on Koh Chang, Elephant Island.  On the ferry, you could see the storm clouds and there were butterflies flying around and we knew it was going to be great.

 Here’s the shack:

We slept under mosquito netting and there was a lizard in there and cats outside that ate my sandals and an ant infestation in the bathroom and Nick had to kill one GIANT cockroach everyday that we were there.While we were there, we did the normal island things:** nap, swim in the sea (the water was really warm—you couldn’t stay in the really shallow parts because it was too hot), get sunburned, look at the water, eat large amounts of incredible food, and ride an elephant through a rubber plantation.

I look scared in all the pictures because I’m riding an elephant, for crying out loud. That shit’s scary.

Side note: Koh Chang is so named because it’s supposed to look like an elephant. Elephants aren’t native to elephant island. They brought these here for the tourists. They’re retired from whatever they used to do (circus, paper delivery, whatevs) and supposedly have a nicer life on the island than in some stuffy elephant retirement home on the mainland.

Ok, bye!

*I originally typed "cavancy," which seems like it should have the same meaning, no?

**-drinking, for the most part, because booze at the hostel bar was overpriced and we couldn’t be bothered to go anywhere else

P.S. Sorry I can't figure out formatting like a normal person.

Holiday in...

Hey: long time, no see, right guys? Well, we have more factors to blame that on this time than just my laziness procrastination. Blogspot has been blocked since May, preventing me from being a good little blogger and posting information about my life. The VPN I downloaded worked, then it didn't, then I had to delete and reinstall it, then for a while it seemed that I spend all my time on the internet just trying to access the internet...

Anyway, I went to Thailand and Cambodia in May and the statute of limitations is now up, so I'm free to tell you what went down there. (See boy and girl, that's called "overselling.")

(Editor’s note: This blog is wholly unoriginal, being inspired by an email Nick sent to his people an copied, in part, from my facebook captions)

We flew into Thailand, but had decided to head for Cambodia immediately the following morning. From my research, it seemed that you had to spend a day on the bus (12 hours, start to finish, Bangkok to Siem Reap) and hope that you arrived in Cambodia before the visa office/border crossing closed down. Try as I might, I couldn't find any information on overnight buses, which would have made more sense. We also looked into direct flights, but everything we could find on the internet was waaay more expensive than the tickets we'd already bought to Bangkok.

When we arrived in Bangkok, we decided, for the heck of it, to check out flights to Cambodia. We found some that were much cheaper than the ones on the internet, so we went for it. They were still more expensive than the bus, obvs, but we were going to save two days, basically. We were now faced with a dilemma. Well, not really, I guess. There was no way we were going to drop a bunch of cash to get into town from the airport, get a hotel, sleep for a few hours, and pay again to get to the airport. So, we found a nice corner and set up camp. I should tell you about my favorite thing in the Bangkok airport: Travelators. They're escalators an inclined moving walkway. They have them in all the supermarkets in China, but for some reason (lack of sleep? Awesome name?) I was really enamored of the ones in the airport. This is especially noteworthy since I am kinda scared of escalators. This could be related to my fear of heights or to a contestant I foggily remember on Double Dare who said that she got her shoe or pants or hair or something stuck in the escalator.

Uh, anyway, we got as much sleep as we could, then at 8, we were off to Cambodia!

We did not look that comfortable, but we were happy. Sleep deprivation reminded me that it is really fucking cool to look down and see clouds and rivers and fields and stuff.

When we got off the plane, our glasses fogged up. The airport was really beautiful and hilarious. They had seven or eight guys in a row, each with their own job: One guy glues something into your passport, one guy charges you a whopping $5 for passport photos (which are, of course, just taken with a webcam and not even printed), one guys stamps here, another guy initials there. Then there are four guys at the end who make sure that you are the person in your passport and the person in the photo guy #2 took of you and then you're in!

We changed money into...uh, what's the currency there? (google search...) Riel! This was a mistake. We should have changed our RMB to USD. We kept doing the conversions to RMB, as that's our home currency, and it was clear that things cost less in dollars than in riel.

I made Nick promise at some point that he wouldn't be disappointed in me for not riding on a motorcycle taxi. A girl has to have a rule or two. Mine are: No Motorcycles and No Gin Before 4PM.

We took a taxi into town, ostensibly to an address in the guidebook. However, he actually just took us into town and dropped us off. We never did find the place we were trying to stay. It didn't matter, as he dropped us off near enough to a cheap enough place. We checked in, crashed for a couple hours, then went to see us some temples.

We flagged down a tuk-tuk, drive by a guy named and he took us to the temples. We looked around for a while, climbed a hill to watch the sunset, but ended up not waiting, as it was too cloudy to see much anyway.

We woke up early the next morning, because sunrise over the main temple is one of the most beautiful things ever.

There are a million temples around it and they are all different and made of intricately carved stone. Many of them had crumbled and are in the process of being reassembled.

We took a million pictures, which you can see here.

My favorite temple is Ta Prohm, which was taken over by trees. Trees are growing over the to

p of the walls, tearing some of them down, holding others up. When those trees die, the temple will probably fall, but for now, it is breathtaking. My pictures don't do it justice.

After three days of intensive temple touring, we went to Thailand to relax. I'll tell you about that, someday.