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A Journey to nowhere and everywhere with a little joy, pain, and growth.

Lost In Chengdu

7/30/2018

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Bridge outside of Chengdu

​It was raining. What else does it do in Chengdu in July? There was a western restaurant I wanted to try. So I hopped on the Chengdu Metro and got off at the station closest to the restaurant. My hamstring suddenly screamed at me. I was finding it hard to walk. Lately, I have had to stretch my hamstring to be able to walk very far. But today it had crept up on me. Here I was in a deluge and two blocks to walk to my destination. But I could not walk; I was stuck in the rain. I found a bench to stretch my leg while trying to stay dry. I was not staying dry. But I did get my hamstring back in tolerable shape. So I pressed on. I knew the restaurant was on the other side of the street but decided to find the restaurant before crossing.
The side of the street I was walking had construction going on. I went down one of those alleys with businesses on one side and temporary walls placed there by the construction folk. Little did I know this path would not have an exit for another four blocks. Along the way peering over and between the wall I saw no restaurant. I was drenched now. When the alley stopped I found myself far removed from where the restaurant was located. I decided to get a cab and return home.  But I had anticipated going back by metro and did not have my hotel address card with me. So when I stopped a cab he did not know where I was telling him to take me. I had to exit the cab.
There is no more lonely feeling to look around and not know where you are, hungry, and to be totally drenched in a foreign country. I reminded myself I was a champion traveler even if I did not look it at this particular moment and looked closely around. Suddenly I saw an ugly pvc pipe sculpture that sat in front of a vegetarian restaurant we had ate at last week. Of course I did not know where that was but at least it was familiar. I looked across the street and saw a sign MUNCHWICH. I had seen reviews of this before when I had researched western restaurants. I knew there was probably an English speaker in there. So I went to the door and entered.
I was a polite customer I folded my umbrella up and left it beside the door. Of course my clothes were drenched so I left a trail of water behind with every step. I finally arrived at the counter and asked to see the menu. It was only right it was a French woman who spoke English who handed me the menu. Many ages ago on a trip to New York City I visited the Guggenheim Museum. I had Maya my daughter in tow. She was two. The Guggenheim for some ungodly reason did not allow strollers in the building. But they had awkward backpack child holders to tote your child around the museum. The backpack child holder was unwieldy and stretched a foot from my back. But art and Frank Lloyd Wright demanded I proceed.
Maya was sound asleep and everything was going well. Until in one gallery I turned to see a painting behind me. I heard a gasp. I turned to see where the gasp came. Suddenly my companion Monica said Mike be careful. So naturally I turned to see what she was talking about. She pointed behind me and I turned once again only to realize this time that the back pack child holder was hitting this young French girl every time I turned. The French apparently are not a particularly bright bunch. Instead of moving out of the way she stood frozen as I hit her each time giving me a stare of incredulous disdain at the Awkward American who kept hitting her with the backpack. As I apologized she only spoke in French with disgust and started to berate me when my good friend Monica stepped between us with a menacing look. At this point she backed off. Maya never woke up. But through the rest of the museum the French girl kept her disdainful look askance at me. And when I sat in an arty chair in the hallway of the museum she gasped and called everyone’s attention to my complete lack of respect for art. She apparently thought the chair was for looks only and the stupid American did not know any better. So yes it was only fitting it was a young French girl behind the counter now.
I made my order and sat down next to a table of Chinese college students. The college students looked at me and spoke softly with one another. They were concerned; they probably had heard of the crazed white man who entered buildings and shot everyone. I ate my meal and drank my precious hot tea and slowly regained more of my dignity. After I finished I walked up to the counter to the French girl and said, ’It is probably obvious but I am wet and lost and need help. Do you know how to get to the Ascott Hotel.” She nodded, grinned and with a Mother Theresa compassion started to draw me a map to the hotel. I considered adopting her as my daughter but I probably did not look much like adopting material at the moment. “Then she asked was I planning to walk in the rain.” I said, No my plan was to take a cab.” She looked and said,’ Do you have money to do that.” I said yes but could she write the address of the hotel in Chinese for the cab driver. After a moment on her smart phone she had written the address for me. Yes it was over a decade later but the French had finally redeemed themselves in my eyes.
I left and five minutes later I was in a cab headed for the hotel. The cabdriver dropped me off at the front of the building. All I had to do now was walk two hundred yards around the side of the building to be home. It started raining hard again. I opened my umbrella and it immediately folded up and would not work. I trod the last hundred yards. I passed the concierge with my head held high, walked through the lobby to looks of ‘does he really belong here’ and with gusto arrived home.
And as I changed and dried off I thought I now had my Chengdu story of me and my French Girl. It was a wet day and she was a beautiful young woman with a French accent. She showed me love in a time when I had forgotten what love was about. But her French sensibility and sense of joy of life was what I was left with. Aw the last fling of my summer and the French girl will live with me forever.

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Chengdu Buddhist Prayer Tower
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The Way  It  Is

7/16/2018

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PictureThatched Roof Home of the Poet Du Fu
​Chengdu rains a lot in July. We are here in July. Chengdu is the land of the pandas, Sichuan food, shadow puppets, face changing, and more teahouses per capita than anywhere else in the world. It is the land of the thatched roof house of Chinese poet Du Fu. He is considered by many to be China’s greatest poet. He changed the subject matter of poems from how beautiful the landscape or nature is to how wrong it is for people surrounded by wealth to be hunger. Du Fu was poor throughout his life. He had to travel from place to place with his family to find a living as a poet.

It is said that during a fierce storm the roof of his thatched home blew off and he and his family suffered the elements of the storm. But during the storm he wondered about how the people without even a thatched roof house were making it in such times as these. He was a poet with a strong social conscience. Of course if he had rhapsodized in his poems about the beauty of the cherry trees he might have had more wealth. But he instead chose the course of a poet with a concern for humanity. Below are some lines from his poems.
​
Tonight we start the season of White Dew,
The moon is just as bright as in my homeland.
My brothers are spread all throughout the land,
No home to ask if they are living or dead.
The letters we send always go astray,
And still the fighting does not cease.

 "Wine and meat rot behind vermilion gates, while on the roadside, people freeze to death"

Today, his sojourn in a thatched roof home is memorialized. There are shops, a museum, and most substantially a garden. I am overwhelmed by the huge bonsai garden. Bonsai was originated in China. The Chinese originally used the word penjing while the Japanese would use the word bonsai. The Japanese as a rule will focus on a particular tree; the Chinese will choose a landscape. Of course these different styles merge in each country as time goes on. 

Bonsais are amazing as they are usually modeled after something seen in Nature. They are pruned, roots cut, and watered as the bonsai grower meditates on Nature and humanity through the keeping of their bonsai. Du Fu lived most of his life in poverty. This simple fact may have given him eyes to see that poems should be written about the reality of the world. His roots were trimmed and he saw the sometime selfish nature of humanity. Things as they are sometimes in reality.

But these bonsais we see everywhere in his memorial garden show a promise of how things can be. But it takes our loving and intentional care to help them grow into something beautiful. Something much like the landscapes the poets rhapsodize about. 
​
The forecast is for rain in Chengdu, always is in July, but I have plans to make it a great day.

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Vancouver is Anyone's Place to Be

7/3/2018

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PictureVancouver

​This is my first time in Canada. It was with pleasure that I told a funny talkative taxi cab driver that I was from the United States. Suddenly he went quiet. He was of Arabic descent he said “You people do not like me”. I try to explain I had not voted for Trump and I was different. Quiet for a while more. Finally, he said, “Girls (meaning my two daughters) you have good father here.” And he chatted us up for the rest of the trip.     

We are in Vancouver the land of outdoors. Vancouver is one of the most diverse cities I have been in. There was one moment as I was in a shop browsing I found myself surrounded by four other sets of people babbling on in four different languages. I wanted to shout, “This is America speak English.” Vancouver should be very careful. We all know the story of Babel.

The citizens of Vancouver are very nice. As they get off the bus they yell ‘Thank-you’ to the bus driver. The people smile and even the staff smile and say with genuine ease ‘I hope you have a good rest of your day’. Even though they have said it a billion times that day there is an enthusiasm in their words. They were definitely not the dreary words you receive most of the time from American staff.
So kindness and forgiveness are Vancouver speak. But so is a proud sense of the beauty of the land they find themselves in. They are as one might expect in the land that gave birth to Greenpeace very eco-friendly. They have the Pacific Ocean to the West and surrounded by mountains to the North and East.

The citizens of Vancouver are braver than me. They cross swinging bridges like the Capilano Bridge like its nothing. When I cross  the  bridge it involved many a promise to God, holding on to the ropes with  both  hands, clenching of teeth, and swearing  if  another  young  twerp  rocks  the  bridge I will kill them. Of course this murder could not happen on the bridge where my hands are too involved holding the ropes.

Of course the land hungry  early settlers of  Vancouver  showed their insatiable  greed  as  all European settlers did. They pushed the Native Americans off their lands and did their best to decimate their cultures. How the Europeans could come to a village with their huge totem poles and great houses and decide that their culture was inferior or not worth preserving is beyond me. But it was never about civilizing the ‘natives’. It was always about making an excuse to wrest their land from them and seeming pious at the same time.

But now the Canucks are doing their best to do right by the cultures they once harmed greatly. Yet it was not until 2008 that First Nations individuals could make complaints of discrimination to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Change comes slowly even among nice people. The Museum of Anthropology has a great room where the totem poles stand in all their glory. It was a sight as magical as I have seen in any Museum even those exhibiting the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians artifacts.

Which brings me back to my Arabic cab driver ‘friend’. We in the United States have the awesome responsibility of making others feel at home in our great democratic nation but in the current climate we are rejecting Blacks, Arabs, Mexicans, and many others. We are becoming less of a great people by doing this and the world is watching us create our own smallness.
​
Canada is on the rise. We may win a trade war with them but we are losing a basic humanity test with them.    

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The notorious Capilano Swinging Bridge in the Distance
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Vancouver Mountain Waterfall
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A look out to the Pacific Ocean from the bicycle bluff ride around Stanley Park
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