Chicken and Egg

I pondered my choice of hairstyle yesterday as I crossed the GZ/HK border. In my passport photo I have bleach blonde hair that looks perfect because I had just been at the salon...so perfect that I think customs officials are having a difficult time determining if I am the person in the picture...now that I have practically no hair. One official asked me what my name was. Another asked me why I would do someting like that. (He was the Indian customs officer...they like their women to have long hair). And if I were to look closely at my picture, it does look like I could be wearing a wig. Or I could be using someone elses passport. Its crazy. I think to get into difficult or troubled countries I will need to go blonde again so I don't have to follow the "red" line on the floor. Or perhaps I need to get a blonde wig.

Its like the time my grandmother asked "whose grad photo is that?"  My mom said "Debbi's."

I should become a spy if all it takes is a hair cut to make me look like a completely different person. Maybe a sniper too. I have really good vision. I see a new career for myself.

Christmas is just around the corner. I am hoping we have our own house by then. But the best part about Christmas time is that it is the time of year when The Nutcracker is on! And because we are in Hong Kong we can actually afford to go. For the last few years I have harrassed Dave into getting tickets. But we were always too poor. Now its cheap! We have great seats for like CAN$50 each. I"m so excited. I love the ballet. We have tickets for the 23rd. Whoohoo

And another thing to be exited about is that we are in Guangzhou, my old stomping grounds. Dave is getting dragged all over to my old haunts including: the "Northern" resturant, the cement park, Vanguards: the mega superstore, and tonight we'll meet up with some of my old friends and go shopping! hurray!

I know this is a wee bit random of a post. but i'm just so excited about getting to eat all the delicious things in GZ that I can't focus. Lam mien, here I come!

Well Kids. The judges have come back into the room with the results. We have come to a decision. Dave and Debbi are moving to Hong Kong.

We have been impressed with Hong Kong from the moment we stepped off the airplane. Transit is amazing. People smile and laugh here. The expat population is huge. We can get organic food. The potential job for me (Debbi) is very good. We already have friends here. It is clean. It has English speaking universities so I can do some courses if I want. We are going to the Nutcracker this Christmas....and we can afford it! There is a huge arts community. I mean I could go on and on about how much we love Hong Kong but you'll have to come and see it yourselves. Many of you did mention that you were interested in visiting Hong Kong. (We're trying to get a apartment with a second room)

So the main reason that we chose Hong Kong was because we couldn't think of a reason not to. Our 3 complaints against Hong Kong thus far are: 1. They speak Cantonese so I can't use my Mandarin skills. 2. There is pollution...like everywhere in Asia. 3. It is expensive to live here. (If I get the job I'm hoping for there is a housing allowance and Dave and I are planning on living on the outskirts around a village called Sai Kung. It is a really stunning area to live in. Its right on the water and there is lots of hiking to be had. And its cheap)

So why not. It isn't behind the Chinese firewall and it really is not like the China I remember.

So here we stay.

As Debbi mentioned earlier, due to the fact that S. Korea is suddenly changing their requirements for obtaining a visa for English teachers, we can't go there anymore. So we need to find another place to live. We have about 2 weeks before we need to be there, so we need to decide fast. And basically the world is our oyster; we could go anywhere. Well anywhere where that Debbi can find a job, probably as an English teacher, and I can do my work (building grassroots, progressive, political, oftentimes American, sometimes left-wing websites) without fear of being thrown in a gulag. This has ruled out a few possibilities including Saudi Arabia and Mainland China.

Having anywhere in the world is too many options, so we're leaning towards East Asia, cause that's where we are now, and getting back to N. America is pretty easy (as opposed to say central Africa). So I've been doing research on the different options from my point of view, while Debbi is simultaneously investigating the job market.

I'm collecting information on things like quality of living, political stability, political freedom, internet availability and pollution. But man it's hard to find hard information on pollution levels. What I would really like to see is charts that compare air pollution and ground water quality for Asia's major urban centres measured over time. But such information is not on the internet. Part of the reason is that governments don't publish the data that they collect. It's bad for tourism apparently. Really ?!?!? But I might suggest that It's not the publishing of information that scares the tourists, it's the actual pollution. Everyone knows that Asia has the worst pollution in the world, whether you publish actual numbers or not. So all I have to go on are qualitative phrases in newspaper articles and blog posts. Which is probably specific enough for our needs.

So here's what we're thinking so far in no particular order. For those of you who are geographically challenged I also created a map.

Malaysia

This ranks high on our list. We had a stopover in Kuala Lumpur the other day and it was quite impressive. Low pollution (we just came from India so just about anything is low in comparrison). Littering is a punishable offence (also a sharp contrast from dirty India). And it ranks high in all our other categories. Oh and there's nice beaches there.

Hong Kong

We've done little more than ride the transit and go for dinner, but so far it seems like a great city. We want to look around a bit more, but this seems like a promising option. The tapwater is drinkable!

Taiwan

Also ranks high. Though I'm getting the impression that the pollution might be a bit higher in Taipei than Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur.

Singapore

Singapore is always rated as the number one place for expats to live in surveys like this one by a big HR firm. However the primary language is English which means that expat English teaching jobs are scarce.

Macau

Haven't done much research on this yet, but it ranks high too.

Thailand

It might be an option. Need to do more research.

Japan

It would rank high, however there's currently a low demand for English teachers. Also the high cost of living and low value of the Yen will cut into out ability to save.

Mainland China

China scores terribly in every category except the avaialability of English teaching jobs. So we likely won't end up there.

So we pretty much need to have this figured out bu Monday at the latest so we can book some flights, get there, find Debbi a job, find a place to live, and get me setup to be able to get back to work by year end.

Wish us luck.

I can remember times back home when my seasoned traveler friends would gripe about the substandard transit systems in Alberta. "Nothing connects well; you always have to wait at least 20mins for a bus..." I always thought that they might have been overreacting a bit. After all, you can still get from one end of the city to the other in under 2 hours.

Well today we arrived in Hong Kong, and I have now experienced transit the way it was meant to be: Clean, efficient, lots of space, on time, and frequent. And you get these pre-paid RFID cards that you just hover over the payment machine as you walk by.

We needed to get from the airport (which is located on a huge man-made island) to the New Territories (read suburbs) where we're staying with Debbi's friend Ellen. Total distance is about 50km. And it only took about an hour. Hong Kong has 11 metro lines. Eleven! Calgary has two. We took three different trains. But it was super straightforward, even though we can't read Chinese. The whole experience is designed to be real usable: You get off one train, walk 10 steps across the platform and step on a train from the next line which has just arrived.

There's dynamic maps all over the place that update your current position, show the next stop, what side of the train the door opens, and what lines connect. Wow. And there's lots of room, even at 4 in the afternoon (cause trains come every 5 mins); A far cry from Mumbai.

The trains are about 100M long, and are basically all one car. I bet if you rode late at night when there's not that many people around, and brought your skateboard, you could do some tests of Newton's laws of thermodynamics. I think that if you got on at the front of the train, got on your skateboard and gave a little push right when the train started moving, you could ride all the way to the end of the train; basically staying in one spot while the train moves forward. Unfortunately I don't know how to skateboard, and I'm not gutsy enough to mess with the authorities.

Back to our trip. After the subway we got on a minibus. These little 16 seaters come ever 5mins. And they have seat-belts. Seat-belts, on a bus?!?! Crazy. And there's a numeric display above the driver telling the current speed of the vehicle. There's so many buses that there's so little traffic, so you get to your destination real quick.

Needless to say my inital impression of Hong Kong is pretty good.

Several things have happened in a rather short span of time.

The first being that Dave and I ended up staying in Goa for 15 amazing days. It was great because we got to meet up with Byron again and we ended up with a wonderful group of people. We became like a group from summer camp and were really reluctant to move on. It was so sad when we all left (on the same day).  But our extended stay in Goa meant we needed to do some fast travelling to get to our the last few items on our to do in India list. So we went off to  Bangalore, en route to Pondicherry. We convinced a postal worker to extend his hours so we could send Christmas presents home and hopped on a very deluxe bus to Pondicherry. We would have one night in Pondy, one night in some random town while we waited for the train to Ooty. Hopped on a train to Ooty and have one day there and then hop on a bus back to Bangalore. We would have had one day in Bangalore and then flown to Hong Kong.

The second thing that happened was that on the day we were supposed to go to Ooty, I got quite ill and had to lay in bed for more than a day.  So currently Dave and I are stuck in Pondicherry. The benefits of this are that we aren't travelling everyday for an entire week. But I miss out on the toy tain you take up to Ooty. Oh well. I guess if we can miss the Taj Mahal, we can miss the toy train. We'll save those for next time.

The third thing was that there are many new visa restrictions in South Korea for ESL teachers that will be coming up and we aren't sure where we will be in a couple weeks time. Any suggestions? 

I just finished reading E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. This novel has helped me to understand many of my experiences in India; of why I see "poor India... where everything was placed wrong." And how "there seem[s] no reserve of tranquility to draw upon in India. Either none, or tranquility seem[s] to swallow up everything..."

But if I search deeper I find that perhaps the problem is not India, perhaps it is me: "This pose of 'seeing India' which had seduced him... was only a form of ruling India." The West expects the Rest to wait upon us, our slaves to rush to our every whim.

[What the book conveys] is Forster's growing skepticism in the wake of the First World War about modern civilization's ability to solve on its own the immense new problems it had created - to deal with for instance, the heavily armed nation states and empires that fought each other and pre-modern peoples for control of the world, enlisted scientists and historians as well as artists in their conflicts, and, whether totalitarian or democratic, demanded the subjugation of individual conscience to the allegedly higher needs of the body-politic.

A Passage to India is however not primarily about West/Non-West relations, rather about how things are not as they appear. It is so very easy for us to deceive ourselves. We devise ways to justify our wants and to manipulate others to achieve our ends. But the whole thing happens on a level that is almost sub-conscious. We must ever strive to unearth our malicious tendencies, to climb the superficial barriers that we create. Many of these barriers are between ourselves and those people different from us. It is "us" and "them". But if we only take the effort to question our assumptions, and put our wants on hold, we can bridge the divide.

Experiences, not character divided them; they were not dissimilar as humans go; indeed, when compared to the people who stood nearest to them in point of space they became practically identical.

I'm finding that really it takes very little to begin to break down this barrier. Simply asking a rickshaw walla his good name and asking about his family is enough to move mountains. "One kind action was with him always a channel for another, and soon the torrent of hospitality gushed forth."

I struggle with being in a position of colonial supremacy while needing to find ways to overthrow it. And in the 21st century it is not just the lingering British colonialism that I'm talking about; it's the West's cultural and economic colonialism over 2/3rds of the world. And some days I think my presence here only serves to reinforce it.

And then unrelated to the main themes of the book I noticed this quote that really speaks to one of my pet peeves:

[T]he conversation had become unreal since Christianity had entered it. Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the national anthem, but objected when it attempted to influence his life.

Our life on the beach:

We wake up. We read in bed. We get dressed. We brush our teeth. We put on our shoes. We walk to breakfast. We order almost the same thing everyday at the same resturant. We read during breakfast. As we have been alone for a long time, we don't have much to say to each other. We finish breakfast and go to internet. Then we usually complete our one task for the day. Tasks have included: rent scooters, lay on the beach, buy a skirt, book tickets out of here, wash clothes. We usually only do one task per day. Then we read. I am averaging 1.5 books a day. Its a good thing the book store buys the books back, otherwise Dave's pack would be so heavy! ha ha. Then we go to dinner. Sometimes we get the girls in the shack to join us. And then we go to bed. Usually we fall asleep while reading.

That is a day in Dave and Debbi's life right now. Isn't it grand.