Bootstrappin’

Long cow is looooooooong! We’re now about halfway through the second half of the Annapurna Circuit (the “Jomsom Trek”), and this gigantic bovine showed up out of nowhere! My friend Brian (from Ireland) took this photo, and Hans is the one in the middle.

Today my friend Tee and I were walking along the shore of Namtso Lake here in Tibet, and we were approached by these two young “monks.” They were boys, around 12 or 13 years old, adorned in red Tibetan Buddhist robes, but there was something off and un-monklike about them. Maybe it was the fact [...]

…it pours. I love the ponchos that everyone in China has, especially these special bike ponchos. The moment it starts raining, the streets become a sea of plastic reds, blues, pinks and purples. The pedestrians, of course, whip out their umbrellas (which appear instantaneously, out of nowhere). There are even bicyclists that ride bikes with [...]

The Chinese sure love order and discipline. I was walking down the street in Xi’an this afternoon, when I heard the distinct call-and-reply of a drill sergeant and his troops, only it was all in Chinese, and the voices were a whole lot daintier than anything you’d hear coming out of the Army. A few [...]

Yep, this pretty much sums it up.

I just got my first haircut in China, for the outrageous price of 10 RMB ($1.47 US)! It was at the sketchiest back alley barber shop in Beijing, a two-seater about the size of a walk-in closet — and I was pleasantly surprised by the service. The woman working there spoke no English, but I [...]

The official line from the Olympic organizers is that all Olympic tickets are SOLD OUT, but that certainly doesn’t mean every seat is filled. Here is the row of seats behind me at the BMX Cycling event I attended today: The number of empty seats is painful, especially when the demand is so strong. I [...]

Interesting fact about the world’s most popular soft drink… Coca-Cola is pronounced ‘ke kou ke le’ in Chinese, which coincidentally translates into “Delicious Happiness.” Where it came from: In the 1920s, Coke created the four Chinese characters that, when combined, approximated the English sound of “Coca-Cola.” As the official Mandarin-language Coca-Cola logo gained visibility, local [...]

This was on the deck of a ferry in Okinawa. I guess they had problems with people stripping on the boat? Or something?