Seoul

I often describe Seoul to those who ask me as a "Tokyo Lite." Like Tokyo it is modern, clean, blessed with an extensive and easy-to-navigate subway system, and full of lighted signs. It's also very crowded, fairly expensive, and difficult to get by speaking English. On all these points, Seoul is similar to Tokyo, but I would say Tokyo is more extreme on all counts. Less quantitatively, Seoul feels a little more relaxed.

I definitely enjoyed the food. Korean BBQ is expensive even in Korea, and I indulged on my first night. They fill your table with dishes. I also ate the standard bulgogi and bibimbap many times. I was surprised to find that restaurants almost never had any English translations on their menus, nor picture menus (both are common in China). This had the unfortunate effect of limiting what we would order, since the staff rarely spoke English. We lucked out on our first meal without our local guide Young when our waitress turned out to be Chinese.

At one restaurant, a tiny hole-in-the-wall in the basement of a building, we were the only guests serviced by an old lady who was hostess, waiter, and cook. We pretty much let her decide what we would eat. She would make small dishes, bring them out, wait and watch us while we had the first taste so that we could show our approval. Only then would she smile and go back to make the next dish. I ordered a beer; she said something I didn't understand, left, and came back with a beer she had bought from the convenience store upstairs. A very local experience.

Unfortunately it wasn't until our last night that we discovered a food street near Gangnam station, which had dozens and dozens of excellent looking inexpensive restaurants.

We saw a few of the standard tourist sites, some with Young and her husband Moe. The one that really stood out to me was the Changdeokgung, one of several palaces in Seoul. In structure and scale it is similar to the Forbidden City in Beijing, though I found it much more beautiful and friendly. In particular it has a Rear Garden, which was stunningly beautiful and very relaxing. Touring the palace took almost two hours, and the experience was tainted by the requirement that you go as part of a tour group, and generally have to keep up with the group rather than viewing things that interest you at your own leisure. Nevertheless I was captivated by the melding of natural beauty with traditional Asian architecture.

The other major tourist thing I did was visiting the DMZ. The tour is run by the USO, and because it involves going on US military property, some nationalities are not permitted to take the tour. China is on that list, so Jessie couldn't go with me. Besides seeing the DMZ itself, we got to visit a series of blue UN huts which actually straddle the dividing line between north and south, so that in walking from one side to the other, you are crossing the demarcation line. The huts have one door on each side, and the policy is that the hut may be used by either side by entering and locking the opposite door. The huts were meant to house negotiations, which have never taken place. So in a strictly technical sense, I've been to North Korea while inside one of the huts, though I don't actually make that claim.

The DMZ tour also included visiting tunnels deep underground, dug by the North to act as a conduit for soldiers to invade the South.

The final noteworthy event was the excuse for coming to Korea in the first place: Young's wedding. It was held in a large banquet hall in a hotel. The guests numbered somewhere between two and three hundred. The whole event was pretty quick, maybe two hours for a ceremony, some speeches, and a quick meal. Afterwards there was a private ceremony where Young and Moe dressed in traditional wedding attire and did a tea ceremony. Jessie and I got to watch for a few minutes.

Letter Published in The Economist

I had a letter to the editor published in The Economist this week:

Kinky Kindles

SIR – One of your readers urged us to “remember the lesson of Betamax video” when considering which e-book reader to buy (Letters, January 9th). One of the factors in the demise of Betamax was the availability of pornographic movies on VHS.

I bought a Kindle. Perhaps I should have waited to see on which e-book reader Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt choose to distribute their magazines.


Gabriel Nell
Seattle

Well, I can check that one off my life's to-do list. I noticed there is a slight undercurrent of sexuality to some of the writing in The Economist. For example, they felt obliged to explain tea-bagging in an article this week. I traded on that tendency in this letter, and maybe that was part of why it was published. Besides it being extremely witty, that is. :)

China's Southwest: Yangshuo

After spending so much time in Asia, I've realized that most of it has been visiting large cities, following that modern-day Hitchhiker's Guide, the Lonely Planet. It hasn't exactly steered me wrong, but it does put you in the same place as every other Western traveler. So, I decided that my last days in China (for 2008) must be spent in natural and rural splendor.

Step one: purchase Lonely Planet's China's Southwest.

Sigh.

But really, what else could I do?

I took some time to decide between Yunnan province and the areas surrounding Guilin. I settled on the Guilin area because it seems that the interesting stuff was all clustered within a few hour's bus ride of Guilin, whereas Yunnan is rather spread out. I booked a flight a week ahead of time, and booked my first hotel the day before I left. This trip was going to be one where I shoot from the hip, with the Planet only providing maps and advice on accommodations.

I arrived at Guilin and wanted to go directly to Yangshuo. I stopped by the travel service desk at the airport to find out how to get there, and there I met two others who were trying to do the same. One was David, a Chinese oncologist living in Houston, the other was Florian aka Flo, a German journalist taking the long way back after covering the Olympics in Beijing. We decided to split the 300 kuai taxi ride into Yangshuo.

I knew this trip would be interesting when we discovered that the road to the airport was unpaved and full of potholes. David (who speaks fluent Chinese) negotiated with the taxi driver so that we could take a bamboo raft down the Li river for a price not too much more than we were going to pay anyway. So we agreed.

As with every other travel plan in China, we would find out that we had not asked the right questions beforehand.

The bamboo boat doesn't quite start from Guilin. It starts at Xiangping, a good distance downriver. Ok, whatever. But by the time we get there, we're hungry. So we make our second mistake and go to a restaurant recommended by the taxi driver. Inside I had my first experience actually picking out a chicken to slaughter for our lunch. I went with a server into the back next to the kitchen, where a number of caged animals, including snakes and rabbits, awaited their fate. I selected the smallest chicken, which the server pulled out from the cage and rather preposterously tried to weigh it using a peasant-style scale, literally a stick and some weights. Preposterous, because the chicken was flailing wildly, making any decent measurement impossible. In the process the chicken escaped, and the server ran in circles trying to recapture it. As feathers flew mere feet away from the kitchen, my thoughts couldn't help turning to bird flu. Eh, whatever. If it happens, it happens.

The meal was quite good, but when the bill arrived we found that the chicken and the fish both were priced per jin, a chinese unit equal to 0.5kg. Our lunch ended up costing over 400 kuai (almost USD $60), which is absurdly expensive.

I brushed this classic tourist trap off and we got onto our "bamboo" raft.  The boat was made by lashing several painted PVC pipes together and attaching a lawnmower engine on the top with a prop at the end. The float down the river was very pleasant. The place had a unique beauty to it, with a very Chinese quality. We even stopped to take some pictures standing in the river after the raft ran onto a sandbar.

The raft trip didn't quite end at Yangshuo as we expected. Instead it arrives somewhere approximately in the middle of nowhere, with someone who owns a double-sized tuk-tuk waiting to drive you to the bus station for 30 kuai. The Yangshuo bust station? Hah, of course not ... it's the local bus station in the middle of nowhere that takes you to Yangshuo in a brisk hour. We opted for the tuk-tuk ride, given that we had no alternative.

Basically it took us 8 hours to go about 100km, having traveled by taxi, raft, tuk-tuk, and bus, with an overpriced tourist lunch for good measure. I wasn't too put off by this, because I've become used to it, but Flo was fairly annoyed. This was one of the few times when I have traveled with someone more irritated by circumstances than myself.

Yangshuo is a very strange tourist oasis ... it attracts mostly Chinese tourists but enough Westerners visit that there is a thriving trade in stupid hats and ridiculous clothing appealing to 22 year old spoiled hippie backpackers. On the plus side, coffee is readily available, as well as bars. The bottom line is Yangshuo is not a village in China, it is a tourist attraction in and of itself, and quite comfy.

So, we wanted to get away. Flo and I decided to rent mountain bikes and explore the villages and countryside outside the city. We left with only a vague notion of what was where; we only knew that it might be nice to see the Yulong Dragon Bridge. We biked through dirt-poor villages, the kind built of mud and stone, with chickens and other farm animals wandering around. We got lost a number of times, but anyway the point was to get lost. We biked through villages and rice paddies, marveling at the scenery and the fact that we were actually passing through it.

We had gone a while in the direction we thought the bridge was in, but we were sure we'd passed it. Eventually someone drove by on a motorcycle, and I flagged him down. I was glad that my Chinese had progressed to the point where I could explain where we were trying to go and understand his answer for how to get there. I'm not really good at Chinese, but I guess I can survive with it.

We reached the bridge and chilled out there for a while. The bridge was built in 1401. We decided to bike back on the other side of the river. Again, we got lost and ended up on the other side of the mountains (hills, really). The road really sucked, it was a gravel road meandering beneath and next to a brand new highway. After a rather long time on this really poor road, we came upon a house where some people were digging a well in the front yard, and I stopped to ask them how to get back to Yangshuo. It was not an easy conversation but we did establish that it would be faster to keep going rather than double back.

So, we kept going on the gravel by the highway, which was about 10m above us on an embankment. We noticed that only one car every few minutes was passing by. We decided it would be better to bike on the highway. We carried our bikes up the embankment, over the rails, and onto the highway. It was brand new, and had not even opened yet. It was wonderful. We biked for probably a half an hour on the best conditions you could imagine: a newly paved highway with beautiful scenery and no other car or bike in sight. It was really fantastic. We could have never planned it and after that highway opens no one can do it again. This is what we had come for.

Eventually we came to the not-yet-opened toll plaza and the highway became populated with cars and trucks. It took much longer riding back on the highway than I expected, and it was probably the hardest exercise I had in the past six months. But we made it back to Yangshuo just before dusk, which was a great relief as I didn't want to be biking on an active highway at night.

Back in Yangshuo, we went on two different occasions to a bar owned by an Englishman, the primary attraction being one of the only billiards tables in the city. Flo was particularly interested in playing pool. The Englishman told us he loved living here; that he'd lived here for ten years and was never going back. He did mention that the financial side of things was not so great; he was barely breaking even on his bar and renting out a few rooms upstairs. But he had a pretty girlfriend who cooked delicious dishes for him, and so I guess there wasn't a lot to complain about.

We ended up finding another billiards table at a different bar, and played a few matches there. A group showed up, a westerner who taught English and a few of his Chinese students. The westerner struck me as a kind of creepy guy. Another group of young Chinese showed up, eager to play pool. One girl, who brought her own cue, had an extremely serious air about her. She won a few matches, and then Flo's turn came. The match was very competitive, both were pretty good amateurs. At one point the girl sank a ball which was clearly not intentional, aka "slop." She started to set up her next shot when both Flo and I objected -- slop doesn't count, your turn is over. She tried to argue something about "Yangshuo rules" but we overruled her. She was clearly embittered by this. The match continued, and Flo managed to eke out a victory, at which point the girl began to storm off without saying a word. Again we both objected - "Hey ... HEY! Good match!" She looked at us with a mix of confusion and resentment, spat out "good match" and left.

Altogether Yangshuo was a lot of fun. It felt nice to get out of the cities after spending months in ones with 10m+ populations. Where I went next, Ping'An, was even more remote, though I couldn't quite escape touristy things there, either.

Brazil

I was in Brazil, along with Eddy, Ben, and Karin, for Bryson and Raquel's wedding. The wedding itself was beautiful, although I was a bit distracted by some kids with very permissive parents who were making quite a racket at the back of the church through much of the ceremony. Nevertheless everything came together nicely, and particularly nice was the villa where the reception was hosted. A Mediterranean-style mansion, it was a very classy spot to host dinner and dancing. The event was marred only slightly by one of the guests having a seizure on the dance floor, probably due to the DJ's strobe lights.

Outside of the wedding, the primary activity in Porto Alegre was eating and drinking. We had several meat-filled dinners at churrascarias. This was initially a source of confusion for us, since we had always heard these Brazilian grilled meat restaurants as rodizio. Through the magic of wikipedia I have now learned that churrascaria refers to a restaurant serving grilled meats, and rodizio is a style of service where you pay a fixed price and are served continually until you've had enough. In this case the servers come by almost constantly with grilled meat impaled on a sword, which they slice off for you.

We indulged. One thing we had not seen before was a dish which was a block of melted cheese, as seen here with Eddy. At first we were awed by this, but we quickly realized that it was the churrascaria equivalent of bread, meant to fill you up cheaply. We had to constantly disappoint the cheese guy by denying him the privilege of giving us his dish.

There was also a slightly unpleasant matter at our first such dinner at Na Brasa, the churrascaria our hotel staff assured us was the best in Porto Alegre. The waiter in charge of drinks billed us for three more drinks than we thought we drank. I will allow the possibility that my recollection of having three drinks was incorrect (but not wrong by more than one), and he may have charged us for a drink we sent back, but there was no doubting that an error on his part was made. When I confronted the waitress who brought us the bill, he looked on, beside himself with offense at our question. He tsk-tsk'd at the waitress when she went to consult the manager, as though to even admit the possibility of fault was a grave attack on his integrity. We observed a three-way discussion between the drink man, the waitress and the manager, with the drink man clearly upset and gesticulating wildly. He stormed off, and the waitress returned to us with an amended bill.

We all felt a bit bad for what happened, and perhaps there was some cultural misunderstanding, but we certainly did not try to cheat anyone nor accuse anyone of trying to cheat us.

We went to a second churrascaria for the wedding rehearsal dinner. We were alarmed to learn that Na Brasa was one of the venues vetted; fortunately a different one was selected, and we were spared what surely would have been at best a tremendous embarrassment at seeing the drink waiter again, and at worst an ugly incident. In the event, we had a wonderful dinner, this time with unlimited sushi in addition to unlimited meat.

In what I now recognize as a serious planning error, I decided not to go to Rio de Janeiro with Eddy, Ben, and Karin. I felt (justifiably) that I'd been spending too much time not working on Kikini, so I was trying to keep the trip as close to a week long as I could.

I did at least have the foresight to book a side trip to Buenos Aires, which was tremendous fun, and will be covered by a separate entry.

Why isn't Kikini.com the first result for "Kikini"?

C'mon google! When I search for "kikini" you should like me to kikini.com! Not the fourth page, the first result!

How will anyone be elected president in 20 years time?

With everyone sharing everything about themselves, bad habits and all, on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc., how will anyone be electable in 20 years time? My hope is that the electorate will understand that everyone did stupid things when they were young. Perhaps the wide availability of the evidence will make people so sick of hearing about trivial indiscretions that there will be a backlash against reporting them and we can concentrate on real issues. Eh, it'll never happen ...

My Online Genesis Part 1: The BBS Era

Ever since I've been using computers, I've been online. Before I owned my first computer in 1994, I would go to my friends' house and connect via a 2400 baud modem to a BBS. To put the speed of that modem in perspective, a file that takes 1 minute to download on my cable modem would take 4 days to download on the 2400 baud modem. Despite the speed, this was a gateway to a world of discussion forums, file downloads, and online games.

A BBS was a computer system ran by someone with a spare computer running BBS software and a modem on the traditional phone system. The system would wait for users to call via their modem, answer them, and establish a connection. The interface was a simple text terminal, though a few colors and ANSI characters were supported. Using one looked something like this:

The user would log in and could type commands to interact with the system. Most BBSs offered forums on various topics, had a file download section, and a few door games. The user base of a BBS was very local, since most BBSs had only a single modem (meaning only one user could connect at a time), and long distance calls were prohibitively expensive. This meant at most a few hundred users. Some popular BBSs with generous SysOps would have multiple lines, allowing several people to use the system simultaneously, opening chat as a possibility. However, these were the exception rather than the rule. To connect to a popular BBS, you had to set your terminal software on redial mode, which would dial every 30 seconds or so until it successfully connected. You had to stick around during this process, because most BBSs would disconnect after about a minute if you hadn't logged in.

My friends and I chose Stonehenge, a San Rafael, CA BBS, as our principal haunt. This was my first taste of an online community. The users ranged in age from early teens (I was 13 or 14 at the time) to something like 70, which is how old the SysOp was. I learned how quickly politeness and common decency evaporate when you're simply a user with an alias (mine was sonik). I spent most of my time participating in discussions, and judging by material I can find on USENET archives authored by myself over the next few years, it was probably a lot of inane prattle.

I also spent a lot of time downloading files. Before the Internet really took off, BBSs were the primary way for small software developers to distribute their projects, often as shareware. Unlike the web, BBS systems could support only one thing happening at a time, so downloading files meant you couldn't do anything else while downloading. The most popular protocol was called ZMODEM, which allowed you to restart downloads if they were interrupted. Something as simple as someone calling you while you were online, thus activating call waiting, could cause a disconnect, so this was important.

Through some contacts at Stonehenge I learned of another BBS called Access Denied! This was a shadier scene. Access Denied! specialized in what was known as warez, which mainly means pirated software and small programs called cracks, which remove copy protection from software or upgrade a demo version to a full version. BBSs like Access Denied! were free but worked on a system of "download ratio." In order to download you had to first upload something, and the amount you could download was proportional to how much you upload, usually measured by megabytes and typically could could download about 5 times as much as you upload. Downloading warez was of course illegal, and unlike using bittorrent today, much easier for the FBI to track since you are using the phone system. I'll leave it to the reader to guess my level of participation in Access Denied!

Sometime in 1994, before starting freshmen year in high school, a friend and I started a BBS of our own, Terminal Velocity. I don't remember a whole lot about it, other than that it was fairly derivative and copied much of Stonehenge. We did have a much more extensive download section (from CDROM) and had discussion forums that were networked with other BBSs. We didn't host any warez.

My interest in BBSs waned dramatically towards the end of 1994 after I joined CRL Networks, a San Francisco-based Internet Service Provider. More to come in Part 2: The Text-based Internet Era...