Who Has The Coolest Boss Ever?
Right here, people, right here. To wit, the texts from Hillary meme, which the Secretary not only found amusing, but participated in:
Thailand!
These are a little later than previously promised, but hey, better late than never. These are a few pictures from my Chinese New Year trip to Thailand, which was absolutely fantastic. We stuck to Bangkok on this visit, but I’m absolutely going to get back there at some point to see a little more of the country. If you haven’t been to Thailand, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Incredible food, incredible sights, incredible people. Truly, it is the Promised Land.
And now, a few (just a few) pictures. As always, more can be found on Flickr.
One of the many statues at Wat Phra Kaew, located in central Bangkok
Laundry drying outside a stilt house located on one of Bangkok’s many canals
Criminal Negligence…
… Is probably what I’m guilty of with regard to this blog. But hey, what’s a month and a half between friends, right? Right?
Yeah. Anyway, so part of the reason I haven’t posted much lately is that while things have been sort of busy, they’ve mostly been busy with much of the same sameness as usual. I’m still living the dream in the wonderful world of visas (that’s not entirely sarcastic, incidentally- a lot of the time, I genuinely like doing visa interviews), still adjudicating my fingers to the bone, and the applicants keep on coming. I have gotten faster, which makes me happy, but not as fast as I’d like to be, which gives me something to shoot for.
But! I have had the opportunity to do some very cool traveling lately. First, I went to Harbin over Martin Luther King Day with a bunch of my fellow consular inmates colleagues, and we went to the famous ice festival. It was absolutely awesome- freezing, but awesome. Harbin has a very Russian bent to it (which, given its geographic location, isn’t especially surprising) which actually left me really wanting to find an opportunity to visit Russia at some point, which I wasn’t expecting. Also, as our tour bus headed into Harbin proper from the airport the night we landed, our tour guide was talking about how influential the Russian Jewish population of Harbin was around the turn of the twentieth century. While he was talking, he mentioned that most (read: all) of the Jews of Harbin, which was previously the largest Jewish community in Asia, left for either other places in Asia (specifically Shanghai and Hong Kong) or Israel mid-century, saying that currently, there’s only one Jew left in Harbin. So yours truly doubled Harbin’s Jewish population, at least for the weekend. Hey, what can I say? I try to do my part.
A snow sculpture representing this year’s theme, which was China & Russia.
Australia!
At long last, I come bearing photos. As mentioned previously, I spent my High Holy Days/National Day weekend in Melbourne, staying with a good friend who lives there and obligingly put me up for a couple of weeks. This was my third trip to Melbourne, so I spent a fair amount of time just hanging out, but we also took a long weekend to drive up the Great Ocean Road and visit the Otways, a really beautiful area a couple of hours outside of Melbourne. The whole trip was fantastic, and if I get to serve a tour there someday, I could die a happy woman. The whole set of photos can be found here on my Flickr feed, though I should probably explain that the lack of koala/kangaroo photos is the result of having been there a couple of times already and not having the chance to get out to the Melbourne Zoo or the Healesville Sanctuary this time around. Ah, well. Next time!
In the meantime, a few highlights:
Looking up through the trees in the Otways rainforest
What’s left of the Twelve Apostles
At Long Last….
Well, these are pretty long overdue at this point, but I’ve finally gotten my photos up from Shanghai, where I spent two and a half glorious weeks on a temporary assignment, and Hangzhou, where I took a trip over a long weekend that happened while I was in the area. For any fellow China hands (or future China hands) that might be reading this, I unreservedly recommend making the trip to Hangzhou at some point. I was there on a national holiday weekend, and while the place was hopping and public transportation was crowded, the area right around West Lake wasn’t crowded at all, and it was a great place to wander around, relax and take some pictures. There’s a lot to see (I didn’t get to see it all in one trip), and the people I met there couldn’t have been nicer. So definitely check it out. All of the photos can be found on my Flickr account, but here’s a couple from Shanghai and a couple from Hangzhou:
The ultra-modern Shanghai skyline
One of the pagodas at Jingci Temple, a Buddhist temple in Hangzhou
A Belated גמר חתימה טובה
So, for any Jewishly-inclined readers of my blog, hope your High Holy Days were good and meaningful. Everyone make it through okay? Apologies in advance to everyone else, since this post is going to be heavier on the Jewish geekery than the travelogue-type stuff, but I’m going to do another post for that, complete with photos and suchlike.
I spent Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in Melbourne, at Kehilat Nitzan, a Conservative/Masorti synagogue located in the Balaclava area. The congregation was founded about twelve years ago, and they’ve got a great community there. The services were great, and the folks there extended me a lot of hospitality. Heck, I was actually given an aliyah on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, which for someone who’s not what you’d call a big macher (or, uh, a macher at all, really), wasn’t something I saw coming. Anyway, it’s a really nice community full of cool people (and a lot of younger folks in their 20s and 30s, which was also a really pleasant surprise), so if anyone reading this happens to be in the Melbourne area and needs a place to go for services, definitely check them out. My only regret is that I didn’t get a chance to go over to Shira, an egalitarian-leaning, Modern Orthodox minyan that they’ve started. I heard a lot of great things about it while I was down there, but there just wasn’t time to go. Ah, well. Next time. Or maybe the bidding gods will be smiling down on me someday, and I’ll actually get posted there. What? A girl can dream!
If Fountains of Wayne and the Maccabeats had a baby….
The Groggers are what they’d sound like. Granted, since both are bands comprised entirely of guys, this is a biological impossibility, but still. I found them through Kochava over at You’re Not Crazy (a great blog, incidentally), downloaded their album and have had it on heavy rotation since. Their songs definitely have Jewish content, but they aren’t as loaded with Hebrew as, say, Matisyahu. One of the winners is “Eishes Chayil”:
Other winning lines include, from “One Last Shatnez,” “One last shatnez but one big chance/’Cause I got these fibers inside my pants/There’s just one thing that gets my head spinnin’/It’s the feelin’ I’m feelin’ in wool and linen….”
They’ve got a couple of other videos up on YouTube, both of which are also great. Definitely worth checking out.
Guess Where I Am?
Yes, my friends, I have reached the Promised Land, otherwise known as Shanghai. And I get to stay here in this magical wonderland of Mexican food, highly walkable streets and unicorns for two and a half weeks!
Lest people start reaching for their pens to write to their nearest congressperson, outraged at the amount of vacation time we government flunkies are getting, I’m not actually here on vacation. The short story is that some posts here in mission China are having problems getting their visa interview wait times down, either because of the unprecedented numbers of applicants or due to space and personnel issues. My post, fortunately, isn’t having as many of those issues, so we were asked to farm out a couple of people at a time to various other posts in China.
A friend and I actually thought we were going to Beijing together, but as it turned out, we were more urgently needed in two other posts. One was here in Shanghai, and the other was somewhere, uh, significantly less cushy. We did rock, paper, scissors, and yours truly won. I bought my friend lunch as a consolation prize.
I don’t actually have lots of time at the moment to talk all about Shanghai, but a few brief observations:
• It’s clean. Like, really freaking clean. I mean, I saw someone (a Westerner) use a public restroom yesterday and emerge looking quite pleased with the experience, as opposed to gagging and looking like he’d just seen the Cryptkeeper. What madness is this?!
So, It’s Been a While….
Well, I didn’t really intend to go three full weeks without posting when I wrote about the trip to Chengdu, but work has been crazy lately, and with the Parental Unit in town, I didn’t have a ton of free time. She just left today; I have to say, it was tougher saying goodbye than I expected it to be. But we had a good visit and did a lot of stuff, so two thumbs up for that. My only regret is that because of the timing, I wasn’t really able to take time off to hang out with her during the week, only on weekends. Still, it was a good visit.
Aside from that, work is uber busy. We’re still inundated with hordes of students and tourists, interviewing as fast as we can, and we’re losing several great people this coming week, who are moving on to their next posts. Obviously, this is the nature of Foreign Service life, but it’s going to be weird not seeing them every day. Fortunately, their replacements seem to be good folks, which is the most important thing.
Last week, my mom, some work folks and I went to trivia night at a local bar. A great time was had by all, except for the fact that the questions seemed to be written by an Indian Catholic with a penchant for field hockey, given that a ton of questions focused on India, a bunch more on Popes (though yours truly correctly identified both Pope Pius X’s baptismal name and the patron saint of Australia- not sure what that says about me, actually, given that yours truly is not and has never been Catholic), and a few on hockey, and not the kind you play on the ice. As tends to happen when I engage in feats of a trivial nature, we were really roughed up when it came to the sports questions; the only reason we got as many as we did was because the focus was on British sports, which meant lots of soccer, tennis and a bit of cricket. The questions about darts and snooker, however, were ridiculous. They might as well have thrown in stuff about chess! In any case, we came in fourth, which was a pretty respectable showing for our first time out, I thought. I’m definitely going to plan on a rematch at some point… hopefully after finding a sports fanatic with no life who wouldn’t mind tagging along.
And to keep up the geeky theme of this post, I want to share this, a blog that dissects some of the more… unfortunate fashion choices made during the filming of Star Trek: the Next Generation. It’s hilarious stuff, at least if you’re a Trek fan. This is also great, though more for the Original Series crowd.
Also, I just finished watching the film Nowhere Boy, about John Lennon’s teenage years in Liverpool, and I highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in Lennon and/or the Beatles. The filmmakers did a great job, though I can say with all the authority of a semi-OCD Beatlemaniac that John Lennon’s eyes were not blue. How hard would it have been to find the lead actor a pair of contacts or something? Anyway, it’s a good movie, so go and watch it if you get the chance.
So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Nothing thrilling, unfortunately (though I do have some pictures I’ll post at some point), but without any three-day weekends recently, I haven’t had much time to go gallivanting around China. Soon, though; roll on, Labor Day!
Chengdu: Home of Pandas and 肚子问题
So, happy belated Fourth of July, all. I actually had every intention of posting something stirringly patriotic (or at least mildly amusing), but my Parental Unit is visiting, and we spent our Fourth exploring Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province (and also where my FSI co-sufferer from A Daring Adventure will be headed shortly. My initial hope was that Chengdu might be marginally less sweltering than the city from whence we had come, but that hope was promptly dashed when we got off the plane only to be slapped in the face by a wall of wet heat. It was maybe a few degrees cooler, but that’s about it. Feh.
Anyway, we stayed at a very nice hostel, for those of you who don’t mind more backpacker-y accommodation, where they took good care of us. On our first day in town, we mostly wandered around Chengdu, visiting the massive complex at the Wuhou Temple, eating some good street food and taking a walk through the Tibetan area of town. That night, we went to see some Sichuan Opera. If you go to the Chengdu area and have never seen Sichuan Opera before, I can only tell you to go, because it’s awesome. I was actually a little skeptical before we went, because I’m not a huge fan of Western opera, where I theoretically know what the heck is going on, let alone Chinese opera, where I probably wouldn’t have the benefit of English subtitles and had no cultural or historical reference for any of the stories they’d be telling. But no matter! Aside from actually managing to read some of the Mandarin subtitles they had on offer, the opera itself was more of a collection of greatest hits from the Sichuan Opera tradition. It included acrobatics, a great erhu performance (the guy played Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5 on a two-stringed instrument when I probably couldn’t do it on a violin without hurting myself), puppetry and 变面, or “face changing.” “Face changing” is a little hard to explain, but it’s basically the art of swapping different, brightly-colored masks using sleight of hand.
They actually had a puppet that did face changing, which I still have no idea how they managed.