Year of the Dragon

A shadow hello from Dunhuang When we moved to the US in 2001, one of the things that most baffled my family and I was the sudden change of scale. Everything in the States is larger than life, cars, houses, cups of soda and people come in monstrous proportions that had us feeling for a long while like we suddenly shrank. China, too, messes with your conception of size, but in a completely different way. Like in the US, the distances here are unfathomably vast, but China isn’t only big, China is thick. Unlike Florida, stretching forever in airy suburbs with houses that never touch each other (God forbid!) China manages to pack twenty million people into a city you’ve never heard of. China is huge, enormous, infinite, but when you’re in a city it never seems to feel that way because your own little chunk of it has so many others pushing against it and into it. Dunhuang was a break from that, and that is only one of the reasons that I liked it so much. It took me 26 hours of buses, minibuses, private cars, taxis and a train to get from Xiahe to Dunhuang. The distance that I traveled to get between two towns in the same province would have taken me from Paris to Naples. And it might as well have, because I was in a completely different country. Where Xiahe was a cold town in the mountains, its life revolving around a monastery full of red robed Tibetan monks, Dunhuang was a world apart, an oasis hidden within the sandy dunes of the Gobi desert. On the same day that I arrived, I took a trip to the dunes in a small camel caravan. Riding past fields full of cotton, and fat purple grapes ready to be picked, we slowly made our way through a traditional cemetery and into the sand dunes of the desert. On my way back, long past nightfall, as I rode with guide on a four wheeler, a sky exploding with stars, the Milky Way brighter than the Shanghai skyline, it was hard to believe that I was in the same country where I’d gotten used to smog so thick you can hardly see the building across the street. The dunes were without a doubt one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, perhaps especially striking because they were so unlike anything I had seen before. Larger than I can possibly describe (they are the Singing Sand Mountains in Chinese), they reach towards the sky in sensuous curves that look too perfect to be the work of nature. The monotony of the landscape makes it impossible to have any sense of scale; there are no cues to indicate just how far you are from the top. So, as you climb and climb the camels get smaller behind you but the summit looks the same distance as it did when you started. The sand is impossibly soft, and as you step, it slides from under your feet, and sometimes you slide with it, causing you to walk for several steps in the same location. As it slides down the slope, the sand is fluid like water. Playing with it felt as foreign and exciting as playing with the mercury of a broken thermometer when I was a kid (but was hopefully less dangerous). I can understand why people go insane in the desert. In addition to the desert, and the peaches and grapes I stole straight from the trees, Dunhuang had the Mogao caves, a big complex of Buddhist “chapels” that silk road travelers built over thousands of years. That, too, was spectacular, and I was very lucky to get the English guide all to myself because no one else showed up (you can only see the cave complex with a guide). Anyway, I could wax poetic about this place for days, but that’s no fun to anyone, so here are some pictures of this awesome Silk Road post. Me, fearless camel-rider! A very strange cemetery that we crossed to get into the desert He's a good boy

Camel footprints

Our caravan, as we got ready to start climbing the dune This is how small the camels look, and I'm only half way up the dune (and never managed to make it to the top!) The view was spectacular Corn drying Delicious grapes, and the dunes of the desert in the back I really do love the contrast of the fields and the sand in the back. The part of the dunes preferred by Chinese tourists appears to have a very small loop for a camel ride that I can only imagine feels a bit like riding a carousel. Hey, but it's long enough to take a picture! I hope you can see it in the picture. This is the road to leads to my hostel. Almost like a little farm, a place hidden in trees and plants next to the dunes. Trees! can you believe it? I'd never seen peaches on the tree before this Just a love tap, I'm sure

“I’ve never been to China, and you?” he asked me earnestly by the side of the dusty road as I tried to stuff my jacket into my backpack. I knew better than to point out the fallacy within that statement. “Yes,” I replied, “I was in Beijing for six months studying Chinese.”

 We were, of course, both standing in Chinese territory that very moment, in a small town in the mountains of the Gansu province. Xiahe, or Labrang, in Tibetan, is a town that revolves around the largest Lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan monks) outside of Tibet. I had expected some ethnic tension, of course, but not this level of denial. Chodak continued to talk gregariously, as two other monks, a bit younger than him, with the same long deep red robes wrapped diagonally across their bodies and short cropped hair fiddled with the gears and bell of the red mountain bike I had rented minutes earlier. I was on my way to the Sanke Grasslands, 14 km north of town, and had stopped to fix my bag and take off a layer. He had approached me immediately and started to speak to me in English. He had been teaching himself for years, he said, but rarely had the opportunity to practice. His grammar and vocabulary were impressive, but I understood about as much of what he said as I would have if he had been speaking Chinese. I could see the problem with learning a language completely on your own, his pronunciation was atrocious. After a few minutes of small talk, he asked me if I would be willing to get dinner with him when I got back to town. His round face lit up when I said yes and he dug through his robes to pull out a flip phone and take down my number. He warned me that Sangke was not worth a visit, and promised he’d call at five. I put away the bizarre feeling of having just arranged a date with a priest, and got on my way. He was right about Sangke, of course. The way there should have been a pleasant ride through a valley that would take me to what was once pastures used by nomads for their herds of yaks and, according to the Lonely Planet, was today a sort of tourist circus complete with fake nomad tents, Chinese tour buses, and hawkers offering rides on tired old horses. Instead, it was a miserable two hour ordeal on an uncomfortable bike over a dusty road in the process of being paved. Every passing car raised a cloud of dust and asphalt particles that found their way deep into my eyes and lungs. When I finally made it to the “grasslands” there were fake nomad tents for sure, but no tourists and no one to cater to them, and thus no lunch to be had anywhere. There were also no yaks and nothing to do but to ride right back as it was getting quite cold and the emptiness in my stomach was starting to hurt. Although these are not yaks, it looks beautiful and idyllic, right?

Wrong. Wrong when you realize that this is what I was breathing the whole way there.

At four thirty, Chodak’s excitement got the best of him and he called half an hour early. We arranged to meet in the Nomad restaurant. As I looked through the menu, he dismissed everything I showed an interest in until I settled for noodles with yak meat. As we talked over our green tea, I got better at deciphering his bizarre pronunciation and slowly began to understand that he was talking about Chinese leaders, not “letters” and justice, not “juice tease.” He took out a notebook, pushed back the sleeve of his robe, and began to copy a list of words that he had written with pen on his wrist. He pushed it towards me to read out loud so he could finally know how to pronounce them: sympathy, conscience, incredible, spiritual. He took notes in the curly and elegant Tibetan script to remind himself how to say each of them after I was gone. Next to the vocab written on his wrist, he had a small tattoo. It was a black swastika. I know, of course, that that was a Buddhist symbol long before being tarnished by the Nazis, but it has never stopped startling me. I asked him what the tattoo was about, and he told that when he joined the monastery at age sixty (he meant sixteen) he and his friends had seen on television how people wrote on their bodies by injecting themselves with ink, and they decided to try it. “But we didn’t know it would hurt so much!” he laughed. As time passed the conversation got increasingly serious. He talked about self-immolating monks and the way they were ridiculed by the Chinese press as being simply people that had gone crazy, and not people that had become so desperate for freedom they had nothing left to lose. He told me that the police in the town wanted to make it illegal for the monks to use the Internet so they wouldn’t get in touch with troublesome foreigners. I shifted on my seat, paranoid, and looked around for Chinese informants that could make sure I never got my visa renewed. He told me that he had once had a foreign friend who tried to help him move to the US, but after a month of bureaucracy, his efforts had been thwarted when a female police officer demanded ¥5000 RMB to process the document with the required seals, even as he saw Han Chinese on the same line getting the documents done for free. He paid the money, and came back two weeks later to find that the passport was not available and never would be. Later, another American woman, Rachel, who really liked to talk to him about Jesus, had asked him for ¥7000 to help get him the passport and eventually disappeared without a trace. He assured me that he didn’t have anger in his heart, as he diligently wrote down and tested the pronunciation of the new words I taught him: scam, trick. As we talked, I learned about life in the monastery, and I understood why some monks walked around playing with their iPhones while others seemed destitute. The Chinese government pays them, he said. Upon further probing I discovered that it was not some sort of government subsidy of religion, which would have been very surprising, but individual officials that, needing all the support they can get for their projects, pay the monks to pray for them. This sort of spiritual bribery seemed especially Chinese, but it reminded me of Medellin’s sicarios, the paid assassins that wore Virgin Mary’s face on a chain around their neck as they set out to kill. Chodak paid for dinner, and invited me as we left the restaurant to come to his house. I had toured the grand, lavish halls of the monastery, housing enormous golden statues of Buddha and filled with the smell of burning incense. I was dying to see the human side of this big God enterprise but as I stood in the street I thought of the tea scam I was a victim of in my first week in Beijing and felt afraid of following a man alone through the labyrinthine and quickly darkening streets of this town in the middle of nowhere, red robe or no red robe. I considered leaving my bag at the hotel first so I’d have nothing worth stealing, but the thought of the missed photo opportunities inside the private quarters of a Tibetan monk changed my mind, and I decided to trust my gut and follow the man with swastika tattoo into a dark alleyway. (doesn’t it sound terrifying when I put it that way?) Chodak kept smiling and laughing at everything I said, a slightly flamboyant child of 32. After a few twists and turns through unpaved streets, we entered a garden, then went through a door into a large single room with two beds, two nightstands, and a makeshift kitchen on one end. The room was poorly lit by a single flickering yellow bulb, and the dirty walls were decorated with a strange combination of posters: a hand drawn pencil portrait of the Dalai Lama, a poster of a Chinese teen pop band, a famous Tibetan poem with a picture of the author, a Chinese calendar with a roaring dragon on top. On one of the beds, two young monks sat in their red robes sharing a book, reading aloud a long list of English vocabulary to each other.  They kept practicing unconcerned as Chodak and I sat on the other bed. Soon, one of the studying monks left and was replaced by another, a charismatic man with big ears that stuck out of his shaved head like two little satellite dishes. English Vocab monk went to the kitchen to prepare dinner, and he hand stretched long flat noodles as Satellite Dish monk launched Chodak and I into a two-language profound conversation about the meaning of religion. As the night advanced, he explained how all humans are the same regardless of the language that they speak or the color of their skin, and that everyone should investigate and experiment with many religions before choosing the one that truly speaks to them. I struggled with Chodak’s English as Satellite Dish went on poetically in Tibetan, sitting on the bed in with his legs crossed, moving his hands emphatically as I nodded. “The heart is faster than the body,” “we must awaken the sensitive mind,” and then, completely oblivious to how this contrasted with all of the previous messages of peace and love and equality in humanity “Chinese people have very small hearts. They don’t have a sensitive mind.” After my second bowl of delicious noodles of the night, and a good amount of tea and further philosophizing, the three monks walked me all the way to my hotel to bid me farewell. Chodak has no email address and no mailing address where I could send him the photos we took together, and when he asked hopefully when I’d be back in Labrang, although I couldn’t give him a satisfying answer, I promised to tell any friends that came this way to give him a call so they could have some tea together. So whenever you visit Xiahe and you want to have a truly fantastic experience and make a friend, give Chodak a call. Email me for his number. Note: Because I am not sure exactly how intense the Chinese government is about combing the internet for evidence of Tibetans getting a little too close to foreigners, I have changed the monk’s name and did not publish photos of him. For pictures of him and his house, click here. Unfortunately, you will only be able to see them if you are my Facebook friend. To make up for it, more pictures of wonderful Xiahe: The only yaks I saw were on their way somewhere... One of the bad things about traveling with such a small bag is not being able to buy things like fresh Tibetan honey... One of the dozens of temples in Labrang, with their beautiful windows and deep warm colors Hey, monks need to get around too! Cellphones are monks' favorite activity. I didn't get to write about it, but during the main ceremony of the day, when hundreds of not thousands of monks sit on the floor chanting in what was for a few seconds a very spiritual-seeming experience, I caught a few of them texting, which really kind of ruined the moment. I swear, even trash is hilarious in China A woman cleaning a temple. There is a pah around the monastery, the Kora, that Tibetan pilgrims follow, spinning hundreds of prayer wheels and praying as they go. Monks walk the Kora too. In the mountain, the tiny little huts are for some monks to go into meditation and isolation during some specific festivals in the year. They are tiny. Are these girls gorgeous or what? These are the prayer wheels that the pilgrims make spin as they walk around the monastery. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, and when I attempted to go for a few minutes spinning them I got so dizzy I had to stop. Some monks are sent into the monastery at a very very young age. These are playing with a little toy car, as the adult monks congregate for the biggest ceremony of the day, around noon.

The older monks, after the ceremony.

When we moved to the US in 2001, one of the things that most baffled my family and I was the sudden change of scale. Everything in the States is larger than life, cars, houses, cups of soda and people come in monstrous proportions that had us feeling for a long while like we suddenly shrank.

China, too, messes with your conception of size, but in a completely different way. Like in the US, the distances here are unfathomably vast, but China isn’t only big, China is thick. Unlike Florida, stretching forever in airy suburbs with houses that never touch each other (God forbid!) China manages to pack twenty million people into a city you’ve never heard of. China is huge, enormous, infinite, but when you’re in a city it never seems to feel that way because your own little chunk of it has so many others pushing against it and into it. Dunhuang was a break from that, and that is only one of the reasons that I liked it so much.

It took me 26 hours of buses, minibuses, private cars, taxis and a train to get from Xiahe to Dunhuang. The distance that I traveled to get between two towns in the same province would have taken me from Paris to Naples. And it might as well have, because I was in a completely different country.

“I’ve never been to China, and you?” he asked me earnestly by the side of the dusty road as I tried to stuff my jacket into my backpack. I knew better than to point out the fallacy within that statement. “Yes,” I replied, “I was in Beijing for six months studying Chinese.”

 We were, of course, both standing in Chinese territory that very moment, in a small town in the mountains of the Gansu province. Xiahe, or Labrang, in Tibetan, is a town that revolves around the largest Lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan monks) outside of Tibet. I had expected some ethnic tension, of course, but not this level of denial.

As you may know, I have now moved away from Beijing and I am traveling a bit around China before settling in a new part of the country. I have also decided that it was time to graduate from Tumblr, and find a new platform to be furious at all the time. In comes Wordpress. 

I have been working on creating a new website that is now hosted at www.laurajaramillo.com. It's a work in progress right now, and a lot  of the old posts broke during the migration, which I will work on fixing slowly since I have awful hostel internet most of the time these days.

I hate guided tours, I really do. Yet, perhaps because I thought I’d be able to enjoy one of the world’s most famous historical finds if I could understand it better, or perhaps because I was feeling a little scared about figuring out the public transportation to get there on my own, I decided to take a tour organized by my hostel to see the Terracotta Army, as well as some nearby mausoleum that sounded interesting and I made the mistake of not investigating beforehand. And that’s how I ended up with a busload of Germans, an unintelligible and overeager guide, and, strangely enough, a now headless terracotta general of my own to carry around China for the next few months. I won’t go into too much detail about the tour, except to say that the general was a gift from my tour guide, who sneakily held me back behind the tour and handed me a red plastic bag wrapped around something slightly larger than one of my shoes. “It’s a gift for you. But don’t tell the others!” As it turns out, when she became a tour guide the first people she ever led were a Colombian family. They were so nice that she has been grateful for years, and since I’m the only Colombian she has ever seen since that day, I was the lucky receiver of the karmic rewards they accumulated so long ago. Thanks, anonymous Colombian family, for a thoughtful, beautiful, and wholly inconvenient gift that I’ve already managed to decapitate in my bag as I find my way around this country. In addition to my poor General, I was also introduced to what is possibly the biggest tourist trap in the entire world, right next to the famous Terracotta Army. The army was protecting a tomb, and the tomb itself, an underground city with rivers of mercury and jewels, and 3000 buried concubines lies just a few kilometers from the site. I know you’re thinking that that sounds awesome, and it does. Except that, according to my guide, the many traps that the slightly insane emperor that first unified China set up to protect the tomb 23 centuries ago are still considered too dangerous for the currently available technology. Oh, and besides, the Chinese think it would be “bad luck” to open what sounds like the most awesome archeological site of all of history. Sigh. So when you visit, expect to see a very green hill in the distance, covered in some nice pine trees and totally devoid of rivers of mercury or concubine skeletons or anything worth getting out of bed for, at all. As for the Terracotta Army itself, I really loved it. The site is crazy crowded, as is to be expected, and the absolute majority of the warriors are in tiny pieces that will allegedly take another 70 years to be pieced back together. However, the sheer magnitude of the site, and the insanity of the undertaking of building this underground army was impressive enough to make it worth it for me. I know some of the people I was with were underwhelmed, but such is life. To not do:

Waste time seeing Emperor Qin ShiHuang ‘s “mausoleum”

Put a terracotta figurine in your backpack

Get a guided tour to go see the Terracotta Army. It’s really easy to go on your own.

To eat:

Rou Jia Mo, the Chinese hamburger, a sort of juicy sloppy joe between toasted English muffins. One of my favorite things to have in China

Lamb paomo, a noodle dish with pieces of flatbread in it.

ALL of the street food.

After an unfinished blog makeover and with a long list of tasks still uncrossed from my very long to-do list, here I am again. This post is being written from the middle of three bunks in a hard bed (second class sleeping compartment) of a train headed for Xi’an. After a tumultuous but unforgettable affair, I have said goodbye to Beijing, at least for now. I finished my daily Chinese classes, having now reached a very comfortable level of Chinese that lets me accompany my vigorous pointing with grunts that are occasionally understood. I had a small round of goodbye parties with Chinese friends, which included new thrills like eating pig ears and wrapping dumplings. I said goodbye to my wonderful roommates with a heavy heart, and to the smog and traffic with a glad one, and I put all of my stuff in a suitcase I abandoned in my old apartment to be picked up at some undefined point in the future. My house is now on my back, in a very lime green backpack that my yuppie of a boyfriend insists makes me look like a “homeless pothead.” Like many a lost soul in American literature, I am heading West, at least at first. But unlike California, my west will include terracotta warriors, Tibetan villages, a grape-growing oasis and massive sand dunes where I hope to hitch a camel ride. I will visit the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang, in a mini sampling of the ancient Silk Road. From there, I will fly to Shanghai, visit the water town of Suzhou then head to Wuhan to visit my high school friend Erin who just moved to China about a week ago. The trip goes on after that, but I don’t want to spoil the surprises all at once. But here’s the really crazy part: I’m going alone. Just me and my anxieties and my gross bitten nails and my propensity to forget everything and my awful sense of direction. Just me, one person. Sometimes, fans of going on tours of the flag-chasing variety will tell me how brave and/or stupid I am. I won’t argue with the latter, but I’ll tell you for sure that there’s not a single thing brave about me right now. I am absolutely petrified. So what do I do to make myself go through with it anyway? Well, it’s easy. The first thing I do is talk to travelers, preferably backpacker types. When women start telling me about their trips solo across South America for six months not speaking a word of Spanish and going on intense hikes in the Andes I start feeling a little silly about freaking out about going to cities that, although the majority of you have possibly never heard of them, which I hope scores me major travel hipster points, are actually huge domestic travel destinations and on the very well-beaten path of Chinese tour buses. If grandma Zhao can do it, why can’t I? When that isn’t enough, I just read a few travel blogs, those are good for making me feel like a wimp. Besides, I’m going on the Silk Road for god’s sake. People have been taking that path for thousands of years, before the Lonely Planet, and Hostel World reviews and the Internet. I think of it as something like the process giving birth. It sounds anatomically impossible, much less believable than a stork or any alternative explanation, but, guys, everybody’s mom has done it! It HAS to be doable, right? The other game I play with myself is a game I’m calling: “What’s the worst thing that can happen? (within reasonable limits).” This means that in an act of effective self-deception, I discount all possibilities of physical aggression, natural disasters, illness and civil unrest as “unreasonable”. I am left with the not-that-terrifying options of getting my stuff stolen (sucks, but things are things, presumably one day I’ll have a job and I’ll be able to replace them) OR getting into some sort of accident, which I dismiss as the kind of calamity that would happen whether I had ever left Beijing or not, an act of destiny.  Besides, Bogota, where I’d likely be living if my life hadn’t taken so many wild turns in the last 11 years, has a higher probability of both the reasonable and unreasonable risks that I just mentioned than any city in China. Perfect logic, right? But anyway, enough of that. Today, I am traveling by train for the second time in my life, and in a sleeping compartment for the first. It rained on the way to the station, and I had to walk well over a mile with my heavier-than expected bags in the rain (it’s hour three and I already want to light my bag on fire. No wonder backpackers smell so bad, they just carry the  one shirt they’re wearing). The station was like a beehive, not that I should ever expect anything different in China. Once on the train,  I sat outside of my compartment, contemplating the six beds arranged in stacks of threes that made me feel more like I was being put in storage than going to sleep. I waited until someone else climbed first so I could figure out how to get up there. This is second class, and the space above the bed is not tall enough to sit up, and the mattress is very hard, but it’s an awesome way to travel. And instead of thinking of the people on the nice soft beds, I think of the ones that got standing room in this 12 hour train, and the tiny stools that they sell in the entrance to the station. What a luxury being able to stretch out in my own little shelf! I wish airplanes had these! The station. Why is everything always this crowded? Here we goooo! This is where I’m being stored for the night. Earlier, the compartment next door played a loud card game, the old lady in the bunk under mine played an awful radio that produced extremely loud static interspersed with what sounded like Chinese children’s songs (old people here don’t believe in headphones), and my compartment mates ate vacuum-packed, black, fermented chicken eggs. Now everything is quiet, and I should go to sleep like everybody else, I have a long day ahead tomorrow. I will arrive in Xi’an in the morning, from where I will post this as soon as I have internet access. I hope to update often during the trip. Although I have a completely unreasonable travel itinerary, I plan to replace nightlife with blog-writing, so I hope I’ll have some time. —— Quick update as I post, now safely arrived in Xi’an

I only put my hostel directions in my phone, which of course, died overnight. I spent the first hour in Xi’an finding an internet cafe. I made the mistake of choosing the “cheap option” (never do this in China, for anything) and ended up waiting a half hour for my email to load. When that happened, I realized that, had I booked it a day earlier, the hostel would have provided FREE TRANSPORTATION.

I got to the hostel and my jeans ripped. Yes, the ONLY PAIR of jeans that I brought. So much for frugal packing.

I forgot my toothbrush.

It all starts with a tuxedoed dwarf that welcomes you at the door. Then a throne, hanging red velvet curtains, and a giant portrait of Napoleon at the height of his glory. Then, as you start your descent into the underground atop a long gold escalator, a swirl of Versaillesque paintings with ornate gilded frames floats above you in unexplainable disarray. It’s only midnight and you already feel like Alice entering Wonderland. You remind yourself you’re not high at all, just in Beijing.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a video of a Chinese man, IN CHINA, saying I just made the best fried rice he's ever had. This seems like such an accomplishment that I had to post some proof. 

And here, more for my future recollection than for anyone else to try at home, is the recipe that I made up. It is Chinese style, of course, with no measurements at all. 

Ingredients: 

Cold cooked rice

Garlic, minced

Ginger, minced

Black mushrooms (mini portobello), diced very finely

Ham, diced very finely

Two eggs

Spring onions, finely chopped

Baby bok choy, finely chopped

Soy sauce

Chinese cooking wine

Vegetable oil

Sesame oil

White pepper

About two tablespoons of chicken stock

1. Pour about a tablespoon of oil in a wok over high heat and swirl it all around until the surface is coated in a light film. Beat the eggs, and add them to the wok, moving it around as if making the world's thinnest pancake. When it's solid enough turn it around and cook the other side. Remove from wok and chop in small pieces. 

2. Add a bit more oil and add the garlic and ginger. When the oil is fragrant, add the mushrooms and stir for about a minute. Add ham, soy sauce, chicken stock, sesame oil, white pepper and wine. Add spring onions and bok choy last, so they won't over-cook and will stay green. Add a bit of salt. 

I have spent the past 2 hours trying to upload some photos here. I give up. This is a total time-suck, and I have so many more posts that I have to write and so many half-finished projects of all sorts (how will I ever have time for a job? I have  zero obligations, and I feel like I'm running around from the minute I wake up til I collapse into my bed at midnight)

So, I give up on crappy, awful Tumblr, and will just post a link to a Google album, which is so much more beautiful and collaborative, and so easy to upload directly from Picasa, which I highly recommend for anyone looking for a good way to organize their photos. At this rate, I might change blog platforms soon, maybe it's time for this blog to grow up. 

I have spent the past 2 hours trying to upload some photos here. I give up. This is a total time-suck, and I have so many more posts that I have to write and so many half-finished projects of all sorts (how will I ever have time for a job? I have  zero obligations, and I feel like I’m running around from the minute I wake up til I collapse into my bed at midnight)

So, I give up on crappy, awful Tumblr, and will just post a link to a Google album, which is so much more beautiful and collaborative, and so easy to upload directly from Picasa, which I highly recommend for anyone looking for a good way to organize their photos. At this rate, I might change blog platforms soon, maybe it’s time for this blog to grow up.