it happened in koh samui, thailand and it happened again here in china. this time i was sober but again, this time, i almost said yes.

i get a call in my hotel room and the lady is talking gibberish (it's all chinese to me). i urge her that i don't understand and hang up the phone. 10 seconds later, 4 prostitutes of varying attractiveness, shoot through the door and proceed to, at first, offer me a massage. i repeatedly say no and after some time, one of them pulls out a condom, points to my crotch (as if i didn't know what it was for... well i knew mostly what others used it for) and continues her chinese gibberish.

i continue to say no, but in my head, i'm actually considering it. really, you should've seen one of them... she looked like the chinese version of mary kate olsen (see christmas wish, below).

after some time of repeated rejections, one of the friskier prostitutes begins grabbing at my bulbous crotch. this, naturally signaled the others to pounce. so there i was, in some random hotel in the middle of china, being aggressively seduced by 4 diseased prostitutes. finally, i pull out a picture of some random girl that happened to be nearby and, under heavy duress, quickly look up "girlfriend" in my translation dictionary. i think they bought it. they left me with the offer of a 100 yuan screw if i changed my mind. i mulled it over all night until finally, i fell asleep.

Posted by thejerk at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

i'm at the train station hotel in xining and a girl comes to my door and asks me if i want "anmo." after a bit of arm flailing, i realize it's a massage she's offering.

to my disgust, apparently, the word "massage" has a completely different definition in china! instead of what i'd expected, i actually received a massage! what kind of country is this!? where i come from, when a strange attractive woman comes to your hotel room and offers a massage, it'd better end happily!

Posted by thejerk at 04:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

my tourist visa that is! so i'm legal again in this country. and just when my search for a shipping container on a ship out of the country was going so well. the silly officer didn't even notice i was a day late. (and asians are supposed to be good at math! pshaw!) maybe i'm being a bit too harsh but he shouldn't been so nice to me. niceness is weakness! he should've put me in jail... it would've made a hell of a story! perhaps his way of "sticking it to me" was to charge me nearly 3 times the amount he charged my canadian friend. well, tragedy narrowly averted. now if i can only get a juicy big mac in me, i'll be a happy man.

Posted by thejerk at 04:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

look, i'm not gonna lie to you guys... i have a thing for women with flaring nostrils. it doesn't necessarily mean anything deeper, i'm just sharing.

Posted by thejerk at 05:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i fled the city that was giving me such headaches. now in xining.

apparently my atm card was not cancelled at all, according to my bank. i'm assuming it was demagnetized somehow during my 7 day bus journey. or it could also have been as a result of its use as my nightly dental floss (ran out of floss a month ago). still without an atm card, i took out a massive cash advance on my credit card, at an exorbitant fee of course. it feels like a vice grip slowly crushing my testesexuals b/c the juice (interest rate) apparently runs every day on the advance. well, what can you do.

now with my newfound wealth, i'm eating again and i can finally go back to US$5 hookers instead of the US$2 prostitutes i relied on in desperate times. female hookers cost a lot more tho.

the visa extension paperwork was submitted today. we'll see if they notice i'm a day over my visa. if so, i'm hopping on the first illegal immigrant barge headed to America, and to freedom. give me my freeeeeee!

Posted by thejerk at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

so i planned on extending my tourist visa (expiring tomorrow) today at the border town i'm currently in... with little success.

here in golmud, most traffic destined for tibet gets processed and sent off, including tourists.

most of tibet is closed to tourists (cursed commies!) and those areas that tourists are allowed require alien travel permits. it's fairly easy for us to skirt this alien travel requirement and so the security office that handles visa extensions runs a tight ship when it comes to renewing visas assuming those that renew visas in golmud will simply avoid the alien permit and enter tibet on their own. there are tons of locals that offer transportation at a fraction of the cost of the security bureau's official packaged tour. so to enforce the alien permit, the security bureau packages a tour for (US)$200 and bundles it with a visa renewal. guess what though, i don't have $200 right now as a result of the ATM card fiasco. consequently i can't renew my visa which expires tomorrow. and to add insult to injury, i face a fine of (US)$60/day and detainment for 3-10 days in a chinese prison for overstaying my visa.

what am i gonna do? god only knows! we'll see tomorrow, when things at this point MUST pick up for me.

by the way, it's really f'in cold in golmud. the more i travel, the more i realize, there really is no place like the US and A.

Posted by thejerk at 06:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

through my many years of travel, i've never been in a worse situation than i'm in now.

6 out of the past 7 days, i've been on a bus for at least 8 hours a day. the southern silk road is a complete misnomer. there is neither silk nor anything resembling a road. the dirt kicked up from the bumpy bus ride seeps through every window pane leaving you coated in a fresh coat of filth every hour. as a result, my hair is now a brownish gray color and now i can distinguish the flavors of all the dirt i've ingested over the past few days.

i haven't showered in 4 days but it gets worse... i ran out of chinese money 2 days ago so i haven't eaten anything in over 36 hours. you're probably asking, "why don't you just pull out more money, you idiot?" i tried this morning... get this... my bank has cancelled my ATM card. what am i gonna do you ask? well after soiling myself and crying for a good 1 1/2 hours, i'm gonna regroup myself and see if i can meet any foreigners and hit them up for some dough.

i left my french canadian friend 2 days ago, and immediately afterwards, i realized i didn't have enough money to even buy a bus ticket to my next destination. the southern silk road's towns are small and wild. banks don't exist and i've had to rely on the kindness of chinese folks to help me with a few yuan here and there. yes, i have devolved into a beggar in a strange foreign land.

well, from this point, i guess things can only get better. don't pray for me, i'm already dead.

Posted by thejerk at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i'm not proud of what i did. i apologize to all dogs out there. it didn't taste good and i'd like to chalk it up as an experiment. frankly, i don't even know what body part it was. i'll never do it again. i swear...

(unless it's flavored and marinated a lot better!)

Posted by thejerk at 05:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

nearly died last night on a sleeper bus attempting to sleep at below freezing temperatures.

i'm on the southern silk road right now and it's pretty damn cold. i'm with this french canadian guy and we decided to take a sleeper bus for a 20 hour journey but little did we know how crappy the conditions would be. trying to protect ourselves from the cold with their blankets barely helped. the blankets smelled strongly like mutton so bringing that dirty soiled rag near our faces was the greater of two evils. everything on the southern silk road smells like a putrid combination of mutton and wet dog. we're cold, miserable and stuck in some god-forsaken town called qiemo as the next bus out doesn't leave until friday. i wish i were dead. other than that, things are going fantastic!

Posted by thejerk at 01:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

china has a historical figure named "cao pi"?

Posted by thejerk at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

why does food look so unappealing in styrofoam? the chinese have mastered the art of food served in unpleasing ways including serving noodle soup in a clear plastic bag.

Posted by thejerk at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

when will these western chinese muslim people understand that they have to cater to my culinary tastes. enough w/ the mutton already! as worthless as chinese food (here it's unsurprisingly called "food") is, i'm dying for some cream of sum yung gai or the long dong (horse meat).

it seems like ages ago in eastern china that i was dining on pu pu platter wearing my galoshes and raincoat (provided by the restaurant w/ every order). and without a working knowledge of the chinese language, ordering off a menu was limited to choosing a numbered dish. for comic purposes, i always chose the #69 which quite often and appropriately was named the "tu can chu."

(thank you, i will be here all the week... hello? is this thing on?)

Posted by thejerk at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ok, i'm finally here. almost as far west in china as i can possibly go. the city, kashgar, has an interesting mix of 'stan people (kyrgistan, uzbekistan, pakistan, etc.) instead of the usual ungroomed chinaman. not much to report just yet as it's only my first day here. at the very least, it's not cold and the majority muslim population have yet to discover i'm american... so i won't be kidnapped and beheaded (yet).

Posted by thejerk at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

look, you gotta cut me some slack. the communist government here censors all internet cafes so no usb ports or cd roms actually serve its intended function. in short, i can't upload any pictures. if it's any consolation, the pictures are worthless. i haven't even yet bitten into my first set of chicken feet. that is all for now

Posted by thejerk at 06:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

so i'm headed out to western china, a recommendation from an american gal i met ages ago in india

the 2 koreans (real ones from the motherland) from my mongolian adventures have joined me, making life instantly better. one of them actually speaks enough mandarin to obtain favorable hotel rates as well as order restaurant foodstuffs that noticably lack animal parts otherwise considered suitable only in dog food. my first week in china i was rather convince china was an expensive country. US$20 wasn't uncommon for hotel rooms which sound reasonable but i've learned that everything is negotiable. on average, i now pay US$2 for a night of housing, $1 - $2 for meals. i've traded one planner (taverstock jo who ditched me for the lure of st. petersburg) for another (korean ju wan) and so i've left my mind on autopilot. often i neither know (nor care) what city i'm in, leaving everything up to someone that has the sense to plan a course that'll have us in the far west of china in a week's time.

Posted by thejerk at 05:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

it took the better part of 7 years for my first encounter with foreign lowlives and a near stabbing. the most surprising part of it all was that it happened in an otherwise safe country (china).

one morning in beijing, i detoured down a busy alleyway full of shops on my way to the forbidden city. feeling a tug on my man-purse, i looked down to see a retreating hand. in retrospect, the most reasonable and safe thing to have done was to continue walking after realizing nothing was stolen. but i have a napoleon complex and feel the need to prove it. i aggressively shouted at the pickpocket in a host of english swear words that i'm sure he didn't understand. i should have known these people never work alone. out of the crowd, a thick chinaman leapt at me, followed by his lanky buddy (kind of a laurel and hardy combo but chinese).

so i'm fist fighting 3 people in a public alleyway, the idle curious gawking and doing nothing, while my long flowing hair tossed this way and that. eventually, they backed off and in my rage, i urged them to "come on!" that's when the stubby buy pulled out a 3 inch knife gesturing at me in a stabbing motion (as if i didn't know what he was about to use the knife for). curse my useless brain. it kept repeating, "do you like the taste of steel, slimeball?" a quote recently heard from Ali G. that's what watching way too much television does to you. i came to my senses and slowly backed away but by the time the police arrived, the scoundrels were long gone and my underwear soiled beyond repair.

and to add insult to injury, i nearly had my backpack full of important documents and money robbed by a scam artist at the beijing train station xray machine (apparently a common scam). this time, i didn't yell, but instead soiled myself in silence.

Posted by thejerk at 05:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

if i hear the words feng shui one more time...!!!

Posted by thejerk at 05:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

food necessarily tastes better if:
1) it arrives sizzling
2) served in a breadbowl (i.e. a hollowed out roll)
3) the person dines in a rotating building
4) served in miniature form (believe me on this one)
5) the meat served is not mutton (instituted as a result of mongolian "cuisine")

Posted by thejerk at 05:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

outside of ulaan batar, the rural parts of the country have an 1800's frontier feel to it (at least what i know from watching little house on the prairie reruns and ronald reagan movies).

we spent 6 days traveling thru the interior of mongolia in a rented jeep staying in traditional mongolian housing called a ger. the gers we slept in amounted to nothing more than a tent pitched behind somebody's backyard making it more or less the adult version of childhood backyard camping. the only difference was that when we were near death from hypothermia (temperatures were well below freezing), the owner barred us from entering her house for warmth. we actually didn't do much on this whirlwind tour except sit around, play cards (loads of shithead) and drink coffee. still it was an amazing glimpse into a country i'd written off as having the singular distinction of producing an infamous warlord.

Posted by thejerk at 05:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

wtf!? there's no such thing as mongolian bbq in mongolia! after some investigating, i've learned that mongolian bbq, the smorgasbord of endless meat slabs and intense bowel complaints, is a western fabrication (much like nike sneakers or the moon landing)

Posted by thejerk at 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

after meeting taverstock jo, i decided to tag along on, what in retrospect was, an ill thought out idea: to travel from beijing to ulaan batar by local trains.

taverstock jo promised the indirect method would save us a good deal of money. secretly, i feel she wanted others to share in her pain. originally 3 people were slated to start the beijing to ulaan batar journey: taverstock jo, swiss michael and thejerk. on the night before showtime, we picked up a recent UPenn graduate in the yuandong hotel's supplemental draft bringing our total to a nice round figure. after spending a night at a sketchy lady's bedroom, we stumbled across 2 koreans who weaseled their way into the fray, brining our total up to six (half of the six, conceived and born in seoul). we took nearly every form of transportation in the freezing cold attempting to reach our destination. jo hitchhiked in a van full of cabbage while i hitchhiked in a trucker's cab. the journey was long and cold my friends. we've sworn never to speak of this fiasco ever again.

relations didn't remain perfect and the upenn grad's annoying habits forced us to trade her for another brit, again named jo (leeds jo). the cast was set for many dining forays in ulaan batar for mongolian bbq.

Posted by thejerk at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)