The castle in Orebro


Typical Swedish town. Please note the price of gasoline -- that's 12.24 kronor per liter, at about 7.5 kronor to the dollar. Yikes! It cost me between $65 and $70 to fill my rental-car gas tank.


Cute little houses on stilts.


Cute little houses on a hillside. All cute little houses in Sweden, if they aren't just natural wood, are painted red. I don't think it's actually mandated by law, but it might as well be. Everywhere you look, it's green fields and little red houses.

Update, finally

Alright, I've had you look at these grody pictures long enough. Time for an update. I did eventually make it to Sweden, though I still have not shown any signs of Baltic herring poisoning. That could be because I don't know what the signs of Baltic herring poisoning are. It certainly isn't from lack of trying -- there were days I ate herring for brunch, dinner and snack. Mmm-mmm. Tasty.

Getting there was not part of the fun. When I left, I had just been stitched and pinned back together and was supposed to keep my left leg as straight as possible so as not to rip the stitches out. Had this huge leg brace, very gimpy. When I got to the airport I gimped up and asked them if I could have an aisle seat so I could stick my leg out and keep it straight. They happily gave me one -- too bad it was on the wrong side of the aisle. Thanks, folks! Oh well, at least it was only a 10-hour flight or so.

What with the brace and my hand splint, I attracted a lot of strange looks, not only at the security gates. (THAT was fun.) People kept asking me what had happened. I got bored of telling the truth, so after a while I started saying I'd been in a plane crash. Most of them quieted right down after that.

Tried to pick up my "reserved" rental car at the airport, but Avis decided to cancel it without telling me, since they didn't have any automatics available. Luckily, Hertz had some. I picked out the smallest, which was HUGE. Off I drove.

It very quickly became clear that driving, even an automatic, is pretty hard to do while keeping one leg totally straight. Ouch. I was set to drive a loop around the southern half of Sweden -- from Stockholm to Falun and Mora to Gothenburg and all the way down the coast, then back up to Stockholm. Hard to do on Vicodin. There were a few times when I was glad I was alone in the car so I could just scream and cry, but for the most part it went okay. I didn't dawdle, that's for sure. And by the end of the 10-day drive, my leg was magically bendable. It still killed when I sat still for very long, but I was no longer gimpy, except on stairs. Hooray!

Photos from the Sweden trip will be up soon.

The day after I got back to Portland, the docs took my stitches out. Awesome. They left the pins in for two more weeks. Not awesome. I couldn't get my hand to work right with the pins in -- it just wouldn't grip anything without catching the fingers on the little sticky-outy "ears" -- so I decided to skip the huge Memorial Day weekend ride all the boys went on. Damn. It snowed on them, but I bet they had fun anyway. Oh well -- next year!

Two weeks later -- May 31 -- the pins finally came out!! Yeay! They were only in for five weeks, but those were some LONG weeks. Best part: getting to wash my hand in actual running water. And showering without the plastic bag over it. Heaven.

Now I'm doing all the physical therapy stuff. Exercises once an hour, which is a LOT more often than it seems like it would be. Not sure how much progress I'm making, either. The thing is still fat and very reluctant to move. It won't bend much and won't straighten all the way. But I can type fairly normally. And I think I can ride -- off to find that out in a few minutes! :)

Pics and further Sweden stuff coming soon.

finger puppet

wednesday, april 26.

finger unveiled.

well, the knee looks much better. it's a single, straight line of stitches, not the bow-tied triangular pus-pit i had grown used to.

and now for the fin -- ugh, i can't really look at it. that isn't my finger, man. it's a miniaturized Macy's Day Parade float representing frankenstein's piglet, attached to my hand where my finger used to be.

it has ears. little yellow ears.

well, i guess that's sort of cute...er...



the cool thing is, now i can tell people i've had plastic surgery and watch them try to figure out where.

follow-up

4/21

patrick's giving me a ride to the surgery on monday. i've been actively trying to grow meat back on my knee, and it's almost healed (well, i mean it almost has skin on all of it), so i kind of hope they decide not to reopen and beautify it. we'll see. i'm nervous about the finger, too, but i'm sure it'll be okay.

sorry. as i told my grandpa, i didn't think i was old enough yet to start boring friends and family with my medical problems! :)

i sat on the hawk yesterday, and it started right up and sounded great - but i definitely can't bend my knee enough to reach the footpeg. nor can i pull the clutch with one finger. sigh.

crash pics

broken hand



kneeburger, day 2

Crash!

april 19.

ok, so the quest for baltic-herring poisoning has been delayed.

somewhat predictably, i crashed my motorcycle on the SFRC (www.sang-froidridingclub.com) season opener ride, two days before a big trip i'd planned. it figures. at least the crash wasn't scary. but the complicated business of being injured has made me realize that it's not enough to say you accept the idea of getting hurt while riding motorcycles. that's an easy assertion to make – that you ride despite knowing you'll probably crash – but it's too abstract. crashing and getting hurt is the easy part; being hurt, at least in my case, turns out to be a long, drawn-out hassle that is much more complicated and time-consuming than merely scary or painful.

but still – it's totally worth it. no question.

ok, so i broke my ring finger (you'll never get anything over that now, says patrick) and got what they call a "starburst puncture wound" on my left knee. both were very gross, but neither hurt at the time. hooray for shock! the finger was pointing three ways at once, and the knee looked like a creature from Alien had just burst out of it. happily, as i noted on my way down, i missed sliding into a roadside pile of dogshit by about a foot. lucky!

it was freezing out, but even so, three of the guys hung out and shivered with me, donating gloves, hats, vests, water and a granola bar, until one guy who hadn't gone on the ride arrived in his truck to fetch me and the bike. i tried not to bleed all over his girlfriend as we drove up to the ER at OHSU.

(the bike suffered barely any damage. patrick had it fixed and back in my lot the next morning. yeay!)

i tracked mud all through the hospital to my little room. zach arrived with sandwiches and made inappropriate jokes about where all my other bruises had come from ("she walked into a door, huh huh huh"). the nurses cringed. then he demanded that they cut off my clothes, since he'd been excited about that idea for hours now. they obliged.

i got IV'd and x-rayed, and they numbed and cleaned up my knee wound, cutting off the dead bits and flushing out a few pounds of gravel. at one point i looked up (mistake, fyi) and saw that the nurse's index finger was buried two knuckles deep into my knee hole. she was biting her lip, looking skyward and digging for rocks.

they decided not to stitch up the wound yet, for fear of infection. gross.

later, they gave me about fifty tiny shots all around the base of my finger to numb it, then pulled it straight and splinted it. well, not straight, but straighter. one more x-ray and i was outta there. i took a cab to the after-party, which was fun and ended up, like all such nights, at the sandy hut.

a couple days later i went back for more. they renumbed the kneeburger, cut off another few pounds of meat, and put four stitches around the gaping pus-drainage hole in the middle. the grad-student nurse who did the work had to wear a splashguard. at one point, the nurse practitioner asked her, "have you ever done a stitch before?"
"yeah," she said, "we had it in lab..."
i pretended to be elsewhere.

a few days later came the consultation with the hand surgeon. i was hoping she'd say they could just yank it straight, splint it up and send me on my way, but no. you definitely need surgery, she told me. not too surprising when you look at the x-rays and consider that typing is pretty much my only marketable skill.

so, i'd already canceled my plans to ride out to colorado for the grand opening of my dad's cancer center - i was going to fly out instead, but now it looks like i have to abandon the celebrations altogether. plus, there's no way i'll be going to sweden for guidebook research as soon as i'd planned. they squeezed me in for surgery as early as they could - monday - but i still have to reschedule everything. bummer!

on the plus side, one of the girls in the hand-doc's office told me as she was wrapping up my broken finger that she's looking to buy a bike and might want my old one. how cool is that?

Hong Kong

I got lost in the airport. There, I've said it. Go ahead, laugh! It's not like I need navigation skills for my job or anything. Anyway, I finally found Jennifer, and we took the fancy train 2046-style along a glowing blue line to Kowloon station. She pointed me toward the taxi stand; she had schoolwork to do, so we arranged to meet later. The system for getting a cab from the station is the only orderly queue in all of China. (Everywhere else, there are big, colorful, universally ignored signs saying "please don't push each other," "be considerate in crowds," etc.) People are funneled into a single-file line, and there's a guy at the end who lets you out one at a time through large sliding-glass doors as each cab approaches. Incredibly efficient, and no fighting. ALL the cabs are red.

They drive on the left. There are British-style double-decker buses careening around everywhere.

Everything in Hong Kong is crammed together, mountains and skyscrapers, filthy slums and glittery architectural trophies. It's half grimescape, half futuristic airport city.

My rented room was teeny but plush compared to the Beijing hostel – not to mention 50 degrees warmer. Its bathroom featured an "exhausted fan" and a stockholm shower (ie drain in the floor, nozzle over the toilet, careful where you put your towel). Free tea and coffee!

I spent my first night in HK just wandering the neon wilderness in a daze. For dinner I had deep-fried papaya shrimp at a Thai place and tried to eat them with chopsticks, but they had these ungraspable clawlike bits sticking out all over and kept squirming away. At least the waitstaff got a good laugh out of it.



I had fun exploring the goldfish market in Mongkok...they hang the fish from wire grids in little plastic bags. The non-fish critters go in large tubs.



One night I met Jennifer for dinner at a little diner called Restaurant Macau, where we ate roasted pigeon. It's a delicacy there – and damned tasty. Like everywhere else in HK, the restaurant is always packed, so they cram you into any empty seats in other people's booths – we ate with a couple on a date – the dude totally ate the head of their pigeon. (We saved ours for, um, later.)



Afterwards we went to the fabulous aqua bar and drank $85 drinks while floating in a glass-and-steel cloud above the spectacular HK skyline. But Tony Leung was not there.

He also, surprisingly, was not hanging out at the HK Film Archive – no one was. It would be an awesome place to do research (ie totally geek out) – huge film library and a great reference library.

On the way back from that, I fell permanently in love with Hong Kong egg tarts. Sigh.

Went to Causeway Bay – but all that commerce without the grime made it less fun than the seedy Mongkok markets. Retreated to the Temple Street night market: cheap clothes, fake watches, neat faces, appalling smells, wriggling food.

A lot of this stuff is a blur, sort of kaleidoscopic, just because the city is so chaotic. Points of refuge I found included the history museum, the art museum, the Star Ferry – all really cheap. The closest I got to Tony Leung was stumbling across his handprints on the waterfront Avenue of Stars. Riding the tram up Victoria Peak was great, if terrifying – you really feel certain the angle can't work and the whole thing's just going to plunge backward right off the hill. I stayed up there long enough to see the sunset – and not just because I was scared to tram back down.



Then I met Jennifer for a drink at the Peninsula Hotel – the bathroom alone is an intensely luxurious experience. With her friend Dorothea we went to a Korean bbq place – fun and incredibly yummy – and then sat outdoors (this was early Jan and it was plenty warm) at some terrace bar drinking pitchers of "Around the World."

We tackled our hangovers early the next day with a trip to Lantau to see the Giant Buddha. The train ride out there was a piece of cake, but then we got on a bus that rattled through all these narrow, bouncy, stomach-twisting roads...I nearly lost it. Had an ice-cream at the top and felt a lot better. The Buddha was huge. Gorgeous day, amazing landscape. The monastery at the bottom smelled of incense and oranges. Not a bad way to finish off a visit to wild HK.

excuses

Apologies to all you swarms of devoted readers for the lack of updates here - been distracted by trying to figure out a better way to put photos up. I'll at least get it done before the Next Trip - my attempt to get mercury poisoning from Baltic herring. Which isn't, frankly, too dramatic and wouldn't preclude a later bout with either mad cow or bird flu, if my sources are trustworthy.

More soon.

Brief update from the homefront:

Last night I learned how to say, in Mandarin, "I want to meet Tony Leung, naked, immediately." It's also written down on a napkin in Chinese characters so next time I'm in town I can just hand it to somebody who knows him. Sweet!

Beijing pics

An alley near the Friendly Welcome restaurant


Good advice

Tiananmen Square


Neat-looking old motorcycle we saw in an alley...


...with a sidecar.

This is where we found the antiques shop selling human skulls.


Tourist photo!


Another tourist photo!

A few random pics from Beijing:



Hutong wall art...




This was on a sign above a cooking (corking?) school.



The only stripmall you'll ever need: "Beer Hut" right next door to "Sex Shop."

The next day we went to the Great Wall...it's pretty great. This part's all fakely restored but it's still tough not to be impressed. It's tough not to be hospitalized, frankly, while walking up the thing. You might think the haze you see in the air is, like, mist or something, but having been there and smelled it and seen the factories we drove past to get to it...well, I don't think it's mist.

This was also the only time Jennifer and I were overtly flirted with while in Beijing. As we were leaving, a boy who worked in a cafe near the bus parking lot blew us kisses from afar. We were so surprised that all we could do was smile and wave. He was cute, though.

More photos...the first one is Wangfujing food street where we ate the bugs on sticks. (Well, one of us did.) The next two are at the Snake Vodka Restaurant. You'll notice they're a little blurry...

So now we're up to Saturday, Jan 7th. We'd sort of planned to check out the Great Wall today, but we didn't really know the bus schedule and didn't quite give ourselves enough time in the morning. Also had a dinner date planned for that evening with Ada and wanted to be sure we got back in time. So instead we ambled slowly toward the bus station to find out when we had to catch the bus the next day. (9am, it turned out.) We went through Tiananmen Square but were too late to see the waxy corpse of Mao. Then we aimed for this famous old market, and on the way there we were swept into a jam-packed warren of silk shops and tea shops and crap shops of all sorts right behind the bus station. It was great, so much to look at. Pretty soon we got hungry, so we stopped for lunch at this place called something like the "Friendly Welcome Restaurant." You walk in the door and all the guys working there yell something, presumably a friendly welcome, and then everyone cheers. (It wasn't just us -- they cheered for every customer.) We had some really great (steamed?) calamari and another enormous bowl of soup noodles in the best broth I've ever tasted in my entire life. (With "beef." Haha!) Under drinks we noticed it said "Snake Vodka." It was well after 10 a.m. by then, so, naturally, we ordered one beer each and a shot of Snake Vodka to share. (They also offered Lizard Vodka, but that looked gross.) They scooped it out of what looked like a failed aquarium, with gravel and dead snakes curled up on the bottom. Tasted pretty good, actually. (It's supposed to be for guys, to increase virility, so the boys working at the restaurant thought we were outrageous. They couldn't decide whether to be amused, disgusted or scandalized but eventually they settled for just giggling a lot.)

Eventually we both had to pee. The "bathroom" outside the back door of the restaurant made both of us kind of wish we'd had bigger shots of snakejuice. Let's just say it was pretty freakin' virile in there.

The rest of the day we wandered in a snake vodka trance through all kinds of random alleys, being regarded with extreme curiosity by everyone we saw. The streets got narrower and grimier and more fascinating the further we walked. I wouldn't say we were lost, exactly... we were exploring.

I might've mentioned this before, but when you walk around in both Beijing and Hong Kong, your nose assumes the end of the world has arrived. It sees its entire life flash before its eyes. Every smell you can imagine and many you'd rather not think about -- the olfactory experience switches from good to bad to GREAT to bad to GAG REFLEX to Pavlovian food-drool and back again, all within about five steps. EVERY five steps. There is not one inch of either city that doesn't smell VERY strongly of something or another. You have to be pretty careful if you're going to walk around while you eat.

We found the historic market we were looking for and went into a crazy antiques shop there. Among the dusty museum pieces for sale were actual human skulls, mostly just the tops, some decorated with silver. We didn't buy one, though. Too hard to pack.

Then it was time for dinner with Ada. The restaurant was unbelievable -- she described it as looking like a Zhang Yimou film set, and it did. We got out of the cab and stepped onto the red carpet. Beautiful hostesses in glimmering silk cheongsams were stacked seven or eight deep on either side of the double doors, smiling and bowing us in. The huge dining room was like an exaggerated version of some decadent Roman palace or something...columns, marble, wooden-doored VIP rooms, massive orange lanterns. Our table was at the very front, by the stage. Oh, yes, there was a stage. The food was spectacular but it had to compete for our attention with the performances. There was a mini Beijing opera, a kung-fu show where a guy broke a metal bar with his head, traditional musicians, and a ten-year-old contortionist girl who balanced about a dozen flaming candelabras in positions that anyone who studied anatomy could tell you are impossible for the human body to assume. Crazy.

Just in case everyone starts to think I've become obsessed with food, here are a couple of poop-related observations instead. Little change of pace.

Most of the narrow alleyways in old Beijing do not have indoor plumbing -- not even close. Our hostel did, but you weren't allowed to throw your toilet paper into the toilet -- it goes in the trash can, just like in Greece. Lucky janitors! You pretty much have to keep tabs on your toilet paper at all times, maybe just stash the whole roll in your purse or something, because the showers are "Stockholm style," ie just a nozzle right over the toilet. There are public bathrooms all over town, and they're free and, well, sort of clean, sometimes, if you don't look too closely. (Sort of like with the "chicken" -- it does what it's supposed to do, so why get all picky?) The public toilets and the ones at the tourist sites and most of the bars and restaurants are the footprint kind. Hole in the floor, ceramic footprints on either side as a clue to the inexperienced. The best piece of travel advice anyone's ever given me is this, years ago from James McQuillen: Make sure, before you drop yr pants and squat above the footprint toilet, that your keys are not in your pocket.

Another hilarious fact about pooping in China has to do with small children. (No surprise there, I guess.) Toddlers in Beijing, once they're old enough to toddle, are dressed in special brightly colored puffy pants with NO CROTCH. Yup. That way, as they're toddling around on the streets and sidewalks of the city, anytime they need to lighten their toddler load they can just squat down and do it right there on the street. No pesky interference from diapers or clothing or pointless inhibitions. I know a couple of boys who would put that style of trousers to excellent use.

More soon,
Becky

snake vodka

Since everyone's asking about the snake vodka...I haven't typed that part in yet, but here is a pic of the jar they scooped it out of. Yum! (Snakes on the left, lizards on the right.)

This page left intentionally blank.