Author: Darren

Categories
Astro Swing

Swing, Northern Lights, and Rainbows

I’ve had two great experiences here in Edmonton so far, to do with the sky. The first was when I was walking back to my car after being out at a Blues club with the some of the Swing dancers here. It was some time after midnight and I was heading home. I thought I saw some northern lights in the sky, very faint, like wispy white clouds in the dark sky. So I left my car and went to the nearby park which has an awesome swing set, and I swung for a couple of hours under the lights. As expected, they got brighter and more active. Very beautiful, and an excellent reminder of why I live (or used to live) in such an amazing place.

The second was last night. There’s a fair going on here called Klondike Days, and a Swing band was playing at the outdoor stage that night. So eight of us dancers went and crashed the show, dancing off to the side of the stage. It was cool, but a bit difficult to dance to everything the band was playing. There was some threat of rain, but we only got spit on at the start of the show. But as I was dancing, I noticed a very bright rainbow hiding in the clouds, in full view of the stage. The audience missed it since the rainbow was behind them, but I’m guessing that the band and I were the only ones who saw it. So I got to dance Swing under a rainbow. Now that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Categories
China Swing

Back in Canada, eh!

After a long flight on Sunday, the I-arrived-before-I-left flight from Beijing to Vancouver, I arrived pretty tired back in Canada. I tried sleeping on the plane but it was quite futile. When I want to sleep, they serve me food, and when they want me to sleep, I’m awake and looking around. Oh well. The long flight, its cost, and the jet lag  are the reasons I don’t do this more than once a year.
 
It was fun being in Vancouver for two hours. I wasn’t looking forward to the customs and immigration experience, but it went by without any problem. I even got to see the cute little customs beagle at work.
 
It was pretty easy to tell that I had arrived back in Canada. It wasn’t very long before I noticed people were apologizing and being extra polite. One lady in the customs line stepped backward and hit my foot slightly, so she apologized. A man stopped suddenly in front of me while we were walking and he apologized too. I held a door for a third person and he thanked me. Kinda fun.
 
I guess I paid enough attention to the people on the Beijing flight that I recognized a few of them later at the gate to board the flight to Edmonton. So I sat down and introduced myself to a young girl there. She’s currently a Chemistry PhD student at the University of Alberta. She had been visiting her family in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province for her two-week summer vacation. We compared notes about our opposite overseas experiences. I told her about my plans for the coming month and invited her to check out the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival that will take place this August. The Fringe is one of my favourite things about summer in Edmonton.
 
But the excitement that I’m really looking forward to on this trip is the Swing Dancing in Edmonton and Calgary. Here in Edmonton, there are Lindy Hop classes every Wednesday night for the summer. They’ll have a social event—a charity dance—on August 7. Then I hope to catch a dance in Calgary on August 14.  There’s even a dance workshop taking place in Vancouver around August 27 that I heard about. Maybe I’ll have to push back my return trip to Beijing far enough to go. Why not? I’m young, and dancing is my life these days.
 

 

Categories
China

Beijing Dirt

My friend Eydie sent me this clever little short message to my phone the other day. Welcome to the strange world of old men in China.

As I walked to work just now, I saw a man open a bag of dirt and pour it in a fat stream along the sidewalk. He was adding dirt to the street. Adding it! Like the roads and walkways of Beijing aren’t dusty enough. Then I got to thinking, maybe this is the secret behind the city’s grime-enrobed thoroughfares. That in fact there are many men who stealthily coat the highways and byways for reasons unknown but no doubt nefarious. Makes me almost want to be an investigative reporter again. Though I’d probably be thrown in jail and sentenced to work on a road gang—spreading the dirt!

Categories
China Rant

Death Traps R Us

I’ve just spent two days in Hefei, doing some collaboration work with a research group at Anhui University. They’ll be building a temperature and precipitation dataset like I did for my masters degree over two years ago.

Here’s a picture of the fire exit in the hall outside of the hotel room where I stayed on campus. The double door is situated at the end of the long hallway.


[Fire Escape]

Yep, that’s right. That’s a bicycle lock threaded through the two door handles. So, when I first checked in, I thought I’d entertain myself and ask the staff to unlock the door for my safety. For one thing, the Chinese characters on the sign above the door translate into “Safety Exit”. I didn’t expect them to honour my request, but I wanted to see what would happen if I insisted. I had a good laugh when they responded by saying: “It will be less safe for you if we unlock the door.” I told my translator to tell them, “No, you’re wrong.” I should get an honourary degree in cross-cultural diplomatic relations for coming up with that one. I stood my ground for a few more minutes, but I didn’t bother getting angry. I mean, I really didn’t have to because I wasn’t taking it personally, nor did I expect them to do anything anyway. But one of the staff members involved in the conversation with the “crazy foreign devil” was smart enough to realize that a person could fit through the open doors when the lock stretched to full length. So they took me back upstairs from the front desk and we opened the two doors so that I could see that a person of my stature could fit his head, and hence his body, through the space between the two restricted doors. I told them that was good enough and that I was satisfied. Of course, I then wondered how having this more-or-less useless lock there in the first place made me “more safe”? I guess it would keep someone from sneaking a lion into my room while I was sleeping. But what about a smaller animal that was just as hungry?

Anyway, this is just a typical example of the state of fire safety in buildings in China. The lock wasn’t even a problem, really. I inspected the doors before making my request and realized that even a ten-year old could kick the doors open if necessary. All over China actually, and here in my hotel room, any windows on the first and second floors are covered by bars that are bolted to the concrete door frames. The only way to bust them open is with a moving car and a strong cable. That, or a half-stick of dynamite. (I keep a half-stick in my backpack just for this purpose!) Sometimes they even bar the windows on the third floor. Most fire exits are treated as potential entry points and are thus locked. Typically, they are used as storage closets too. In the case of the hotel, I suspect they are trying to prevent television sets and furniture from walking off. But anyway, when I hear that dozens of people die in a building fire in China, I am never surprised. Death traps are endemic despite being 100% preventable.

Yet through my little stunt in challenging the hotel staff, I didn’t actually get any closer to understanding how the Chinese think about fire safety. Well, okay, I can infer a lot from the fact that everyone who joined in the conversation burst into laughter—laughing directly at me, in fact. There was a hotel fire in my neighbourhood last month and about nine people died. So my office decided we needed to replace all the powerbars in the room (the supposed cause of the hotel fire) with brand new ones. But we still keep the doors on most floors propped open to the stairwells. (This is hazardous because smoke will spread from the floor that is on fire and prevent people on all floors from using the stairs—the only way of escape.) So I don’t have much faith in their reactionary way of doing things. It’s not going to make a lasting difference. It never does. So to the people laughing at me over the fire exit request, “See you in hell” should have been my response. It’s a literal possibility from my point of view.

Categories
Audio China Swing

Dance, Dance, Dance

Boy, I’ve been having fun dancing. Two guests from the States, Amanda and Eric, came to Beijing to join our Swing Beijing! group. Eric is leaving to go home tomorrow. Amanda will be around for another week and then move on to Shanghai. It’s been great having them. Adam, our teacher, also came back from a week-long furlough at his home in San Francisco. So all three of them brought some new styles and new moves that they were able to show us this week.

We had a Saturday night party, an emergency session of sorts, at our Thursday location at the Move! studio. It seemed like reunion night. Don came back to join us after being gone all winter / spring. I got to see and dance with Linda whom I haven’t seen for so long. She’s one of the people who joined our group for about two months way back when we started last July. Eric and Amanda were there. Adam came back that night, too, bearing gifts. It felt like Christmas! I had ordered some earphones and had them shipped to Adam’s house, so he brought them that night. He also brought me a 4-CD box set of traditional bluegrass music. A total surprise. Thanks, Adam! Other people got their new swing shoes that Adam brought back to Beijing with him. But beyond all the gift giving and excitement, there was lots of dancing. And lots of follows for me to dance with. At one point, I turned to a friend and said, “So many follows, and so few Darrens.” Sigh. I was in Swing heaven. Same thing tonight at our Monday class. I danced and danced and danced. We ended the night with real New York cheesecake in celebration of Eric’s birthday. Mmmmm. Cheesecake.

Update: You can read Amanda’s report of her trip here.

Categories
China General Swing

Experiences

I’ve had a wide variety of experiences over the last few days, so today’s entry will just be a random walk through where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.

Casting my vote

I voted today. Prime Minister of Canada, Paul Martin, announced an election last month scheduled for June 28. Since I’m in China at the moment, I get to vote by mail. So I faxed in a photocopy of my passport picture and signature pages, plus an application form. The ballot came in the mail last week. It’s an interesting system, really.

The ballot itself is just a piece of special paper with the following sentence (in English and French): “I vote for…” and then you fill in the candidate’s name. It was up to me to find out who is running in my riding and to fill in the full name of my choice. Once the name is filled in, the ballot goes inside an “inner envelope” which has no markings on it. Then the inner envelope goes inside an “outer envelope” which has my name, my riding, a bar code, and my signature. The signature must be there and must match the one I used to apply for the ballot.

The system insures that I don’t vote twice, that someone doesn’t use my ballot instead of me, and it preserves my anonymity. It works like this. When the mail-in votes are counted, the outer envelope information is checked against the registry. Then it is put with the other ballots from my riding. The outer envelopes are opened and the inner envelopes are all mixed together. This way, the ballot is no longer traceable to me. Then, the inner envelopes are opened and the ballots removed and counted.

I say I voted today because I went to the Embassy here in Beijing and turned in my set of nested envelopes. They will ship mine and everyone else’s ballots to Ottawa tomorrow. I doubt that my candidate will win, but that is not necessarily how I choose my candidate. In fact, all votes, even those for candidates that lose, are important because the number of votes that a given political party gets in this election will determine their status and funding from the government for the next election. Most people don’t realize that, figuring that their one vote doesn’t count for much. They are wrong.

Okay, enough preaching. But it was fun to vote from abroad.

No sleep

I didn’t sleep last night. Except for maybe 20 minutes of sleep when I first crawled into bed after midnight, I stayed awake the whole night. I eventually turned on the light at 03h30 or so and started to watch South Park on my computer. One of the problems with my insomnia here in Beijing is that sunrise right now is at 04h46 and it starts to get light at 04h13. (Hey! I just realized that it’s the Solstice today. I can’t believe I wasn’t paying attention.) Once it starts to get light, I find it almost impossible to initiate sleep. If I’ve already been sleeping, it’s no problem, but if I haven’t fallen asleep before 04h00, I’m screwed. I did laundry at 07h30, and then I started to fade waiting for it to finish the spin cycle. I made it to the end, hung up my shirts, and then went to bed at 08h00. I had no trouble sleeping then. I woke up four hours later in time for lunch. I’ll probably be tired again by supper time, but I should be able to readjust and fall asleep normally tonight. At least I hope so. As for the cause of this insomnia, I don’t really know. My suffering from Restless Legs Syndrome has a lot to do with it. I need to write about this topic sometime later cause I won’t attempt to fit it in here.

The latest Swing news

The weekend was pretty good. I got to go out with my Swing Dance friends (pretty much my primary social group now) on Friday and Saturday night. Since Zuma mysteriously disintegrated, we have no place to have our Swing parties on Saturday nights. This is a huge disappointment. Zuma wasn’t perfect, but it was a venue that we were quite happy with. The only thing really missing was a live band, but that takes more than just having a venue. Now we have neither.

This is a problem for this week especially. We have a guest dancer from California joining us tonight (don’t know how long he’ll be here) and another guest dancer, Amanda, from Texas coming this week as well. Amanda is working on her Masters research in cultural studies, and Swing Dancing in China is her topic. At least this is what I understand it to be. I’ll learn more when I meet her on Thursday. She’ll spend over a week with us and then move on to join our fellow “hats and cats” in Shanghai.

Update: You can read Amanda’s report of her trip here.

A private honour

I visited Qiao Ying in her teahouse yesterday. Aside from some guests, we were the only ones there, so we got to spend some quiet time together. It was good to feel her spirit again and leave behind the world of negative thought that I inhabit so much. As we were saying goodbye, Qiao Ying told me that her teahouse was “my place”. She wasn’t just saying, “make yourself at home”, but she really meant that I belonged in her teahouse and that it belonged in me. I could welcome no greater honour than this.

A needed vacation

I guess I could announce it here. I’m going back to Edmonton for a one-month vacation next month. I’ll leave for home on July 18. In fact, Michael, my German best friend, is also going home for his family visit at this time. Some projected highlights for my trip:

  • Blueberry Bluegrass Festival
  • Chris’ 30th birthday
  • Seeing my family: mom, sister, brother-in-law, and nieces
  • Being bathed in nature’s freshness
  • Swing Dancing
  • Hanging out with some local astrologers
  • Whatever else the Universe has in store…
Categories
Python

Pigs and Cows and a Tiny Little Server Farm

There’s a weblog that I like to read on a regular basis. It’s called Pork Tornado, and the guy, Dusty, is hilarious most of the time. Very dry humour.

But I’ve had lots of trouble connecting to the site, with the domain name system (DNS) unable to find the site all the time. I’ve tried from work, at home, and even from my computer in Canada. Sometimes I can load the site, sometimes I can’t. I honestly thought that their DNS entries were misconfigured and not refreshing themselves on the Internet properly. I wrote a Python script, even, to regularly look up the site’s DNS information to track the history of the intermittent problem. I had the script running on the above-mentioned three machines.

But just two days ago, I figured out the real problem: it was me all along. All this time I’ve been typing

http://porktornado.dairyland.com/

instead of

http://porktornado.diaryland.com/

Can you see the difference? Now try the links. The first one doesn’t work; the second one does. Now here’s my explanation.

I honestly thought that the site was related to dairies (cows) and it never crossed my mind that the key word was “diary” (writing in a journal). How dumb. Besides, the website is a bit cartoonish, so I just assumed “cows” again, cause cows are oftentimes drawn as cartoon characters. Furthermore, I had been really careful to spell “porktornado” correctly because it is a difficult word to type and I didn’t want to accidentally type “toronado”. There you have it.

Now that I’ve got it right, I really need to just make a bookmark of the dumb site.

Categories
China Swing

On the cover of the Rolling Stone

Well, it’s not quite Rolling Stone magazine, and certainly not the cover, but it’s still pretty cool. My swing dance group, Swing Beijing! and I are featured in a one-page article in Cosmopolitan magazine here in China. Page 130 of the June 2004 issue. I wonder if it’s available in Canada, perhaps in Vancouver or Toronto.

Follow this link or click on the cover to see a scan of the article. I’ll be bringing a copy home to Canada when I visit to show my friends and family.

Swing is a relatively new thing here in China. The media is getting a little tired of Salsa and other Latin dances, which are now quite popular after about four years of hard promotion by the original Salsa dancers. So Swing is appealing as a new thing, and we are quite glad of the publicity. We hope to grow the popularity of Swing so that there are more people to dance with and more events to dance at.

Swing Beijing! has been going well now that spring has arrived. We had a really good turnout at our Saturday night Swing party at Zuma. Perhaps 25–30 people, and many of our missing regulars decided to return. So we all had a great time dancing our hearts out to the great music. As heat and humidity continue to climb, we’re getting more of a workout, oftentimes with our faces drenched in sweat after a fast song. I love it!

We are considering holding a live-music event at the end of June, and an even larger event with a guest band from America sometime in the Fall. Things are looking good for Swing in Beijing.

Categories
Astro

Venus Transit on June 8 — You gotta see this!

I don’t have much time to write about this — I’m very busy — but check out the following link and do your own homework. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

A Venus transit is where the planet Venus travels across the disc of the Sun. So it’s like a solar eclipse, except that Venus is only a small disc and won’t cover the Sun at all. It will be visible to the naked eye, provided that one uses welding glass to cut down the brightness of the Sun as well as the infrared and ultraviolet radiation which can damage the eyes very quickly. I’ve personally waited for this event for over 7 years, having read about it in an astronomy book. The rest of the world has been waiting 120 years since the last Venus transit.

Because it is also an inner planet, Mercury can also transit the disc of the Sun. This is more common than a Venus transit, but it is still a rare enough event to be quite special. I hope you can find a local astronomy club or observatory (who will have the necessary equipment) that you can join to watch this event. It happens Tuesday, June 8 during the day (obviously). It lasts for over 6 hours.

2004 Transit of Venus

If you are in Beijing, contact me and I’ll bring you along on my journey to the stars.

Categories
General Swing

Longing

I’m sitting outside on the patio of my girlfriend’s teahouse. I’m waiting for her to come back. Her father is flying to Paris from Fujian via Beijing today and so he’s landed and making his way to join us for supper. I’m looking forward to meeting him. He’s a famous tea art man from Fujian. But at this moment I’m just sitting here by myself, drinking Jasmine tea, watching the girls go by, longing to see Qiao Ying again. Since I live in the North and since I’m swinging all the time, we only get to see each other a couple of times a week. It’s only Wednesday evening and we haven’t seen each other since Sunday. Sigh!