Category Archives: 中国

11.12.19 [Monday]
Leave a comment
australia, travel, vancouver, 中国

adventures don’t go smoothly

Because of the different ways Holly and I got to Sydney we’re flying back to Vancouver on different planes and will have very different journeys.

Holly’s heading back through China because we were saving money when we were figuring it all out back in May. She’s in the air now (I think) heading to Guangzhou then Beijing then Vancouver. (I’m flying back direct to YVR in about an hour.)

I have a two checked bags allowance which I’m actually using, since Holly only could take one through her perambulations, as she learned to her great pain and sacrifice in June. So today when we got to the airport we thought we were pretty prepared. Now I’m not sure when I’ll see her again.

You see, she has no Chinese visa, because she will be in China for less than a day, and the consulate and the airlines told her that was no problem. Today as she checked in for her flight we learned that might be a very big problem. Long story short, the airline wouldn’t guarantee that she’d make her connecting flights (which we booked with plenty of time between flights, but have inexplicably shrunken since then) so getting out of China before her 24 hours is up may prove difficult.

To help with this, we did another repacking so I took her checked bag so she can go carry-on only and run around in Guangzhou to make her connection. My checked bags are now just under their maximum weight limit (I had to put some cookbooks in what is now the heaviest carryon bag I’ve ever carried).

But Holly’s on her flight. She has her international credit card to solve any problems that might crop up, but Holly’s way better at dealing with that kind of thing than I am. I hope she’ll still get to Vancouver on schedule. If not we might only meet up again in Seattle or Virginia.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.08.08 [Monday]
Leave a comment
australia, food, travel, 中国

heterodoxies of the gut

Yesterday Holly and I hung out with Lee and Lisa, who you might remember from the wedding we attended in Nanchong last December (the one with all the roasted 羊肉). Part of hanging out involved heading down to the big vegetable market and buying our week’s supplies of food. Because we know how to show people a good time.

On our way back we also bought three bags of frozen jiaozi (饺子) for dinner, to go with our 豌豆 (it’s possible that’s the wrong character for wan). I love 饺子. Love them to pieces. But I’ve learned that when it comes to prepackaged 饺子 (ie ones that aren’t lovingly created by the hands of SchroederWiebeUnrauPankratzes at Xmas time) vegetarian ones are kind of lousy. So we got a variety of types, all containing meat. We fried them and they were delicious (though we need a better dipping sauce next time).

Peter was eating supper at the same time we were. He’s usually curious about what we’re cooking, asking about techniques and stuff. And he asked about the 饺子, not because he didn’t know what they were, but because “I thought you were vegetarians.” And so Holly explained my curiously arbitrary standards that aren’t very good at being standard at all.

Peter said it turned his image of me completely upside down. I guess that’s good to do sometimes, even if it means I’m not particularly orthodox a vegetarian. I’m not particularly orthodox in any of the rest of my definitions either.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.06.24 [Friday]
Leave a comment
australia, games, library, travel, 中国

travel days ahead

I’m heading off to scenic Gippsland, Victoria tomorrow for some Koha training. I was talking to Sean the other day about how weird small businesses are. I mean, these librarians are paying for me to go out and teach them about this software I’ve only been using since April. I feel like at a lot of places I’d have needed more training than I have had (which is actually pretty extensive since I’m helping people with their Koha problems all day). Whatever works, I guess. And it means I get to see more of Oz while I’m here.

I’ve been pretty bad about going out to see stuff recently. A lot of hunkering down here in front of the internet. My friend Jamie is off to do his practicum in London (the real one) and got scolded by another of our classmates for solving internet puzzles while he’s supposed to be on vacation. But dude, I completely get that. I’ve been spending far too much time planning out Blood Bowl teams (speaking of which, I found an unofficial Blood Bowl client for playing online which almost works completely well apart from me not being able to simply stand up prone players – let me know if you’re interested in playing).

Of course, a week from today all of that will change since that’s when Holly arrives from China. I’ll engage in a tiny bit of understatement to say I’m looking forward to being in the same city as her, especially without an end-date.

Finally, if you miss my voice, you can now listen to me read Firing Squad, my Machine of Death story whenever you want. Though the magic of reading (and recording) it’s my voice without my innumerable hesitations, filler words and false starts that litter my real speech pattern, so it’s probably more pleasurable in every possible way. You can pump that story through your speakers and pity the poor shmucks who have to deal with me speaking without a script at them.

Like the librarians in Gippsdale next week.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.05.31 [Tuesday]
Leave a comment
australia, travel, 中国

when you find a stranger in the alps

My mother is complaining I haven’t been blogging enough. This is because she doesn’t read Librarianaut. Six posts in the last week. That she doesn’t care about my topics over there is a completely separate issue. (Hi Mom!)

Recently the exciting secrets I’ve been keeping from the blog include how I went to get backup keys to my apartment copied, and the place in the mall told me I had to go to a certified locksmith. I suspect that’s because these keys have “Do Not Copy” stamped on them.

The other day Javier was playing guitar in the common area. It turns out he knows something like three songs and can spend hours trying to play them correctly.

Friday was the last day at work for one of my coworkers. We went to the fish market for lunch. At the fish market there are very few vegetarian options, which wasn’t a problem for me, since I could have a greek salad. But my boss felt bad so he ordered me two salads and potato wedges. It was an amount of salad designed to be ridiculed.

My boss was so happy today when he learned I know a bit about Photoshop. At quarter to five he got me to install it on my computer so I can begin graphics tasks tomorrow.

The last couple of days have been very rainy. I told Holly she should bring a Chinese umbrella since throwing one away there and buying a replacement here that costs ten times as much would be annoying. I think I’m also going to forgo trimming my beard till she can bring along ultracheap clippers. So far that’s the main thing I forgot to bring from Canada that I kind of need. It’s one thing to have a massive hobo beard when I’m off travelling but another when I’m going to work every day.

I do love the small office vibe we’ve got where I don’t have to feel underdressed in jeans and a half-buttoned shirt (over a tshirt – I don’t expose my Hemsworthian pecs to the office just yet). It’s possible I’m being ruined for corporate work, but that’s all right with me.

Okay Mom, there you go, a pile of boring minutiae. This is what happens.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.04.26 [Tuesday]
Leave a comment
books, religion, sports, vancouver, 中国

so close to vagabondery

Yesterday I did my advance voting and there was an Indian gentleman in line in front of me. He was probably in his fifties or sixties and he was pissed off at the election volunteers. See, he gave them ID when they asked and then they had the temerity to ask for something with his address on it (as per Elections Canada rules). He seemed to take it as an affront to his citizenship, saying stuff like “I have lived here for these forty years! You are wrong” Why do you want me not to vote? Fine! I will not vote!” The volunteers were saying that they just needed a bill or something that proved he was voting in the correct place, but he was just angry and convinced everyone was stupid but him. After the supervisor came over to help, he stormed out, leaving his passport behind so he could go get “some stupid piece of paper that I don’t even need!” They were really happy when I was easy to manage.

Then I picked up a pile of great books from Abraham, one of my classmates. A whole shwack of stuff about Chinese history and language and religion, plus a bunch of Italo Calvino books. So good. He’s pared down his books to two boxes which is really impressive. Some days I feel like I’d like to do that. But my books are important to me. I’m not as conflicted about them as I was last year. We’ll see how I feel when I move them away from Vancouver.

And today I packed up all my books and clothes into my storage space. I was very conscious of the order I put stuff in there today, so the most necessary books are more accessible than the infamous theology books. Also, my winter gear is right at the front and accessible for when Holly and I return in December from the height of Antipodean summer and stop off to go to Virginia for Xmas (and for me to make Santa Claus jokes I’m sure no one in that state has ever heard).

I like living in a city undergoing a traumatic sporting event. Everywhere today, people have been talking about this Canucks game tonight. The buses always have their Go Canucks Go signs in their lights, but today they felt a little more urgent. At the van rental place the guy said they might be closed by the time I returned the van “because, y’know, the game.” We’re hosting (I say “we” and “hosting” in the same sentence like I’m actually doing stuff beyond showing up – hell, Marlis is cleaning the kitchen right now while I type) a potluck tonight but it came to our attention that we’ll need to have the hockey streaming or else everyone would stay home. I doubt it’ll be like this in Winnipeg if they really do get an NHL team back, but maybe I’m just a pessimist.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.02.21 [Monday]
2 Comments
australia, library, school, travel, vancouver, 中国

and now back to the internet

Holly went back to China this morning. Le fucking sigh. We had a pretty excellent almost-two weeks though. She came to UBC a couple of times, met most of my friends here (at least briefly), ate salmon and bought stuff for the bakery at a thrift store. We went to Kalama (and Seattle and Portland) with Phil. We read books and watched HBO shows and researched visas.

Part of the visa research was because I got a co-op job as a systems librarian in Sydney. Australia. I’ll be going in May and coming back in December (? the dates aren’t finalized yet). We weren’t getting our hopes up for this at all, but my interview went well and now I get to live on the other side of the planet for a while. Crappy thing: Holly’s got to stay in Nanchong until the end of June. Excellent thing: when she’s done, she’ll come to Sydney, and then we’ll come back to Vancouver together for me to finish out my degree. So today was the last of the multi-month separations at the airport, which is great because those suck.

So my time since my last blog-post was eventful and excellent and the only downside is that it’s over.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.01.22 [Saturday]
Leave a comment
library, photography, school, travel, 中国

ramble ramble

Today I learned about Lexis Nexis QuickLaw and the interesting things you can do with it. Here are my notes, which may or may not be useful to you if you weren’t there. It was another of the Special Libraries Association week events at school. They put on good events. Useful stuff. On Wednesday we got to tour UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections which included watching a robot go and find a metal box in this vertically huge storage area and bring it back to us so we could see what was stored inside a smaller box within that box. It was Robert E. Lee’s wife’s hair. Which was very blonde.

If you don’t read my library blog you might not know I didn’t get the job I interviewed for last week. Which is why I’m home this fine Saturday evening. I know eventually I will work again, but the lack of money coming in is starting to make me a bit twitchy. And I’d rather be saving money right now for when Holly gets here (in 17 days). She apparently likes to eat something called “food” rather than my preferred subsistence: gnawing on the aspirations of children. Not that I have any legitimate right to gripe about money, not when I gladly make the choice to do these intercontinental flights every few months. If it was that important to me I could sit here with a few more thousand dollars and be much less happy.

But enough about that. I was at Brenda’s parents’ place in Abbotsford last night watching slides and eating Croatian food. It was pretty excellent. It made me want to travel somewhere that isn’t Nanchong (after the next time I go to Nanchong, of course). Happily, I know someone who might also like to do such a thing. There are lots of places in the world that aren’t Nanchong. They are fun to speculate about.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.01.10 [Monday]
Leave a comment
australia, games, library, music, school, vancouver, 中国

little skinny dynamo

The new term has begun for real and I finished two assignments this weekend. One’s a little cataloguing thing that was actually pretty fun and useful, and the other is for my Community-Led Libraries class, which is only due in February. I discovered last term when I was prepping for my China trip that I like getting on top of things early and getting shit out of the way. This term I’m trying to organize things so that when Holly comes in February I have to do as little homework as possible while she’s here. At this point if all goes to schedule I think I’ll just have stuff to do for my online Info Policy class.

But on Friday I went to see the Oh Wells at the Biltmore. I really liked them when I saw them compete in Shindig back in November or whenever it was. I think they ended up winning it. And they were good on Friday. The other bands were okay, but the kinds of music I’d need to listen to the CDs a bunch of times before I’d like it. I usually need to parse the words in songs before I can really like something. Except if I accept beforehand that it’s in another language (see Sigur Ros) or practically nonsense (see Deerhoof).

On Saturday Kerry and Alex had a casino party which was fun. I lost all my fake money and didn’t win the prize, but I had an epically creepy run at Small Stakes Go Fish (every time you have to Go Fish you put $10 in the kitty, which was won by the person with the most pairs at the end). There were eight people playing and I asked the right people for the right cards at least seven times in a row before having to fish. And it was early in the round too, so it’s not like I was remembering what people had.

Yesterday I read and relaxed. Today I’ve been prepping for my job interview on Thursday and doing some research for a cool Co-Op opportunity in Australia. SQL queries are easier than I’d expected. I’m also working on a volunteer project that used to have a terrible name, but is now known as NetworkEd UBC, so that’s kind of fun. I’m trying to embrace my identity as a blogging-type library person, but I think this job I’m interviewing for is less about the actual blogging, and more coordinating, which would probably be good for me. We’ll see.

I’m also hoping to find some time in the next couple of weeks to paint up my Blood Bowl team because there’s a tournament at a local game store in a couple of weeks. It’s been too long since I’ve painted.

I’m also spending a lot of time on Skype, hanging out with Holly. I love that we can just turn on our computers and both go about our business (she has more business to go about since she can only get online at the bakery, where there are often customers demanding her attention) and chat when there’re spare moments. It’s not like it’s some big special thing, just life and a bit of connection. Long-distance sucks for relationships, but this is a pretty decent time in history to be doing it, all things considered.

So yes, that’s my recent activity log. A bit more than one thing a day.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.01.04 [Tuesday]
Leave a comment
food, music, school, travel, vancouver, 中国

sex drugs and spoken word

I don’t think I’ve been this blah about returning home in a long time. It’s not like I was out of money. Longer visas than a month are possible. And I wasn’t sick of hanging out with Holly. Ha. But still, here I am. Far away.

We spent New Year’s Eve with our friends Michelle & James in Chengdu. We had dinner at their apartment (which thankfully had the heat on) with a couple of their friends and then went out. There was a Euro techno-style DJ at the place we went, who seemed very good technically, and if I was into that kind of music I probably would have really liked it. There was another foreigner in a red track jacket who was hanging around the DJ a lot, kind of being nosy, like a small dog that wants to see what’s going on. Red jacket was given the chance to spin a few records and well, yeah, it was obvious he’s not super experienced. He fumbled around a bit, not matching things up quite right. But the music he was using was way more to my taste than the first guy. If I saw Red Jacket a year from now I’d probably like him a lot more. But I didn’t see him in the future. I saw him four days ago at the beginning of 2011 when he still sucked.

The male female ratio in our group was skimpy on the estrogenous, and became moreso when Holly and I left around 2 (because Holly’s 1/3 of the female contingent was much more significant than my 1/12 of the male). The first cabdriver wanted to charge us 50Y for a 20Y ride. We were already sitting in the back seat and when he told Holly that the apartment was too far away we got out again to get into the cab behind him. (The second didn’t try anything funny.) The next day James had a theory that that first cabdriver was actually off-duty and just looking for someone the right amount of drunk for something like that to work. And maybe he did. There were a lot of people in that bar.

New Year’s Day we spent reading on the couches of James & Michelle’s. Then we watched Moon. I love that movie so much. And then Holly and I went to the good Turkish restaurant, where the food wasn’t quite as good as the last time we had it, back in the summer, the night before we left for Winnipeg.

And that’s part of the blahness. Last time we parted Holly was heading back to see her family so she was excited. And I was about to move to Vancouver so I had distraction aplenty. This time I just came back to take more courses, which is less new and exciting. Especially since I was prepared at some level to be a library school dropout. Not a really prominent level, obviously. I worry about my inability to make the grand over-the-top gesture of throwing away a career(ish) for love. I mean, it’s probably for the best. Especially when Holly gets here for good, but now at the beginning of the term it just feels crappy.

Anyway, once assignments start piling up, it should be a little distracting, right? At least enough for the next six weeks.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
11.01.02 [Sunday]
Leave a comment
travel, vancouver, 中国

PEK-YVRwards

And my month with Holly is over. Le fucking sigh. The flight from Chengdu to Beijing this morning was nice and smooth, uneventful, but even without problems or delays and such it’s a lot crappier flying alone when you’re not being met by someone wonderful at the other end.

In the last week we celebrated Holly’s birthday at Nanchong’s newest five-star resort. It’d been open for ten days. Holly was getting some flyers for the bakery printed and in the printshop there was a stack of little brochureish things for this resort that they’d been working on. Maybe the stack was like the offcuts or something. I’m not sure. But Holly saw it and said “Hot Springs? Nanchong doesn’t have hot springs!” And then she called to find out if she was reading that wrong or what the deal was. It turned out that there were hot springs (human-created) and that rooms were half-price. So we booked her birthday off from the bakery and went out to live in the lap of luxury for 20 hours or so.

And yeah it was really nice. The hotsprings were outside, but hot enough that I didn’t die. They had like twenty or so different pools where you could soak in water with different stuff in it. We sat in rosepetal water, chrysanthemum, salt, and red wine. We skipped beer and milk. There were more, but we watched the sunset and really that was enough. There were a bunch of rich businessmen and their meinus also taking the waters. Our balcony looked out over the hills and the whole thing was very relaxing.

An interesting thing about the room was the shower. Holly’d seen this before, so it’s more a China thing than a “this hotel” thing. The wall separating the shower from the bedroom had a floor to ceiling window, with a shower curtain on the inside. I don’t think I’d ever really thought about showering as a spectator sport before. Especially not with a Chinese shower and its traditionally fickle hot water supply. My dancing back and forth between scalding and freezing would have been at least as entertaining than anything on the TV.

The rest of the week was mostly at the bakery. We played some Settlers and read some books. I started getting ready for school to start again. And now I’m flying home. Good news though, Holly’s planning to come visit Vancouver in February, so it’s only six weeks. Not too many more long-term departures are left.

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
← Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 309 other followers