Solitude

A reminder to self. Being alone doesn't mean you're experience the benefits of solitude. You can be alone yet easily to busy and preoccupied to meditate and reflect, to know yourself and evaluate your strengths and failures, to know what you need and what you want, to know where you stand ethically and morally, to know how far you are from God.

On the other hand, time spent with others does not preclude being able to set aside some time, even a moment, between yourself and something great.

Geneva, day 1

There's a big difference between Geneva and Amsterdam. All the expensive looking cars and women really gives a feeling there's a lot more money in this town. Oh, and all the watch stores and private banks as well. But the banks here actually aren't that impressive looking from the outside.

I need an excuse.

I haven't posted up the photos from Budapest two weekends ago. Or the ones from the beach at Zandvoort aan Zee last weekend. How long will it be till I get the pics up from Geneve this weekend, or Perpignan next week?

Chez moi

The problem with getting into a routine is that you get unmotivated. Instead of striving forward and pushing yourself, you get comfortable and lazy. Instead of planning ahead and thinking of a meal for dinner, I just end up buying whatever looks good at the supermarket and combining it with whatever I had in the fridge. Usually I make it work, but I have to admit, while being edible and tasty, it's hardle restaurant quality.

Today's supermarket haul: belgian endives, haricots verts, cooked crawfish.
What was in the fish: sausage that looks like kielbasa (but tastes like spam), arugula, a block of parmesan reggiano.
Sitting on the counter: basil plant.

1. Boil haricots verts for about 3 minutes, then toss in ice water to maintain colour.
2. Peel belgian endive leaves.
3. Chop up belgian endive hearts and spam-sausage. Chop up or grate parmesan. Chiffonade 5 or 6 basil leaves.
4. Sautee chopped up endive hearts and spam-sausage, flavour with salt, pepper, paprika, oregano and thyme in olive oil.
5. Toss cooked crawfish into sautee.
6. When chopped up endive hearts are browned and spam-sausage is crisped, turn off heat.
7. Toss haricots verts, endive leaves, arugula, parmesan and basil in pan, along with a splash of balsamic vinegar.
8. Serve salad with a tall glass of acai and passionfruit juice (preferably generously spiked with export strength Tanqueray).

To be honest, it would have been pretty damn good if it wasn't for the spam-sausage. I should have known better than to keep it around. Maybe if I have visitors, I'll be smart enough to toss out anything spam-flavoured from my fridge (hint hint).

As Usual, Time Flies

I had a constant sense of unease during the first week here, trying to figure out how to get around a new city, not knowing where I'll live, and being unsure of whether my luggage would still be there when I got back from work. The second week was quite the opposite though; it surprised me how quickly I got into a routine. The weekdays on the past week have flown by.

I try to leave the house by 9:30am, it's a 25 minute walk to work to get there by 10. I've been leaving work around 7pm, and by the time I walk home, buy groceries, make dinner, and clean up, the day's pretty much over. I found a climbing gym, so a couple of nights were spent climbing (kinda expensive at 9 euro to boulder for an evening). Wednesday night was home group night from one of the two churches. after a week I hadn't had time to start working on the side project I had wanted to work on at home, and I've barely gotten through processing photos or updating the blog.

So I've been meaning to put up photos of the apartment for a while:







It's pretty roomy 1 bedroom, and fully stocked with IKEA furniture. The kitchen is pretty well stocked with IKEA kitchenware, and has a decent spice rack too. I'm pretty much set for visitors, in case anyone wants to come by.

Things here are definitely more expensive than the US. I'm feeling it but I'm trying not to do the currency conversion in my head. One of the cheapest meals I've found is a "turkish pizza", a round flatbread with some toppings (ie spinach & feta), covered with some sauces and condiments and rolled up. They can be had for as low as 2 euro. A bagel with cream cheese goes for around 3 euro. Falafel sandwiches are usually a little under 4 euro, shwarma sandwiches are usually around 5 euro. These constitue the majority of the cheap fast food. The cheapest sit down meal I've had was a 10 euro quarter chicken with fries and salad.

Drinks and juices tend to be fairly pricey. A 500 ml bottle of pop at a corner store tends to go for about 2 euro, a 350 ml beer around 2.30 euro, a coffee at a cafe around 3 euro, a large fresh orange juice around 4 euro.



I'm hoping to save at least a little by eating in more. Here's a sample of my first grocery trip (click through for prices), and the price of a meal of pasta comes out to about 4 euro. Right now though, I think I'm spending a lot more on snacks than on meals themselves. For example, Kettle Chips are 2 euro for a 150g bag, and a pint of Haagen-Dazs went for 6 euro. The Kettle Chips here are made in the UK, and they're far less crispy and crunchy as the US version. They're also a lot less tasty. I don't think I'll be getting any more.

I've also noticed that they don't seem to have baking soda here, I don't know how they get rid of fridge smells.

Settled In

I have this syndrome that whenever I actually sit down to write a blog, my mind goes blank and I can't think of what to write about.

I could start and write about hanging out in Toronto with friends. I had planned to drop by for a couple of days and not do anything but relax, but I ended up filling up the schedule randomly, meeting up with high school friends I haven't seen in over a decade, and friends who just happened to be visiting from Hong Kong.



Or I could write about going to Jason's wedding and seeing University friends I haven't seen in seven years.



Or I guess I could talk about flying to Amsterdam and looking for an apartment on the day I arrived, and how after looking at 3 rooms, I picked (the wrong) one. The guy renting the place bailed. Staying in the hostel for the first few days really wasn't too bad. The worst part was the fact that I had two suitcases and I constantly had to stuff everything back in them and make sure they were locked up properly every day. If I had fewer belongings, it wouldn't have felt as difficult.



I could write about giving up in frustration and calling up the rental agency I had called while in California, but which I dismissed because of the price. I think maybe it just indicates how spoiled I am in just throwing money at the problem and getting myself an apartment. It's not quite as central a location as I initially wanted, but it's fully furnished, and more than large enough to have visitors, and it's actually within walking distance to work.



Oh that reminds me, the one thing I thought I'd write about was that both churches I checked out on Sunday (after staying up way too late on Saturday) ended up playing the same song to close the service. They must really like this song here.

Blessed be your name
In the land that is plentiful
Where the streams of abundance flow
Blessed be your name

Blessed be your name
When I'm found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed be your name

Every blessing you pour out,
I turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say...
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be your name

Reading.

The test of our work is not the profit gained from it or the status we receive from it but its effects on creation. Are persons impoverished? Is the land diminished? Is society defrauded? Is the world less or more because of my work? We have become so accustomed to evaluating work in terms of productivity that we have little sense of its meaning in terms of creativity. We have for so long asked the questions of efficiency and profit that it does not even occur to us to ask the question of virtue. But Adam Smith is not canonical and Psalm 82 is.

-"Where Your Treasure Is", Eugene Peterson.

I've been doing a bit of reading lately, which I think is a good thing. I finished Peter Enns' "Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament" last month, and I thought it was an excellent book, and much more honest in terms of dealing with problems of Biblical interpretation than I tend to see in most Christian books.

Recently I've been trying to finish Eugene Peterson's book, which I was supposed to have read for my intern class a few years ago. It's one of those less honest books, that reads a lot out of a few lines of scripture. But at the same time, it's really quite encouraging, and I think he makes valid points.

Cheese

Cleaning up my stacks of junk revealed a cheese menu from Gary Danko. From flickr, it looks like the last time I went was back in August 06.

I had forgotten to take a picture of the cheese course. It consisted of:

gorgonzola dolce - italy
epoisses - cow's milk, Burgandy, France
cravanzina - sheep's milk, Langhe, Italy
carre du berry - goat's milk, Loire, France

I keep junk around for way too long.

Charlie Foxtrot

Happy Canada Day!

Last week, as I was walking back to my condo in the dark from the parking lot in the dark after dinner at my aunt's house after dinner, CRRRUNNNCH!!! Since the sprinklers come on in the evening, the snails come out to frolic on the pathways, and it's pretty easy to accidentally step on one in the dark.
Somehow I managed to step on six at once.


On an unrelated note, I've been trying to work my way through all the tea I have stashed away. I've been a vietnamese coffee drip thing with the assam granules, and that seems to work ok, although initially the water drips right through until the tea expands a bit and slows the drip rate. It comes out reasonably strong, and I think I'm a bit overcaffienated this week.



I've been wanting to try out Kappa restaurant ever since I read the SF Chronicle review last year. We had gone looking for it once, but never found it, the little hidden location adding to the mystique.

This time, a little better informed, I found it easily. It's located up above the old Denny's in Japantown (now reopened as "New Danny's", but it looked like it was serving the same swill), beside a Korean karaoke bar. The restaurant consists of a row of bar seating for maybe 8, and a little small room with a tiny table. From the outside, all this hides behind a nondescript black sliding door, with no windows and no sign. The only clue is the japanese style lamp beside the door.

Inside we were welcomed warmly by the hostess. The tiny restaurant is run by an older japanese couple, who have been running the place for 23 years. The man cooks, while the wife serves and prepares desserts in her kimono. Intimate, serene, and homey at the same time, the ambience is probably one of the best reasons to come here.

I was hoping for kaiseki style cuisine, something that's a little harder to find. I've kind of developed a taste for at Toronto's Katsura and have been missing it here. The koryori style served at Kappa was still good, but not quite as splendid. We had the omakase (it's hard to order, the menu is written on the wall in kanji). The items were mostly simple and clean, but not as refined as I was hoping for. There were more deep fried dishes than steamed or soupy. On the one headline platter, there were a number of items that left me wanting much more. The other dishes though, were good, but felt plain. Click on the photos for descriptions.

Overall, the experience was extremely pleasant, although it felt a little more expensive than it was worth (although, one could explain that by the fact that we only saw 7 customers that evening, including us).

Materialism

I know you're not supposed to be able to buy happiness, but pretty new gadgets certainly cheer me up. At least for a little while. Since California's no-cellphone-while-driving law is kicking in July 1, I figured it's about time I got a Bluetooth headset, esp since I went out of my way to get a phone with Bluetooth however many years ago. And it works well for Skype too, double yeah!

I do realize that the fancy box that doubles as a display case means I paid way too much for a headset, but I did read some article a while ago saying that this will actually make me happier.

Time

It's funny that Bob's youngest cousin is the age of the kids that people my age would have.
I don't know if "funny" is the right word.

Callow Wisdom

I'm feeling rough, I'm feeling raw, I'm in the prime of my life.
Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives.
I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin, and fuck with the stars.
You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars.

This is our decision, to live fast and die young.
We've got the vision, now let's have some fun.
Yeah, it's overwhelming, but what else can we do,
Get jobs in offices, and wake up for the morning commute?

-MGMT

Lyrics from a song click when they seem to parallel some personal experience or feelings - good music draws out some internal emotion right?

It occurred to me that often, because of this, we may associate with lyrics, to somehow buttress the way we're feeling - "Hey, I'm not the only one who feels this way". Perhaps even stronger, we may look to our society's bards to give us some tidbit of wisdom, to reveal some gnosis to the rest of us unartsy (and less inebriated) commoners.

Maybe this made sense back in the day when we were in high school or college, when we were the primary consumers of pop music, when artists were far ahead to have a few more years of experience to guide us with. But when you get to this side of 24, you realize maybe all these kids writing the music don't really know what they're talking about.

Albeit, I'm still tired of the job in the office and waking up for the 10am commute.

To be honest, I'm totally misrepresenting the song by just quoting half of it, there's a certain irony to the latter half. I'm definitely digging the psychadelic retroness of this band though.

On Food

Over the years, I've realized novelty is one of the things that drives interests more than almost anything else. I tend to lose interest as things get repetitive, and the initial excitement and awe of fine dining has faded a little. I find it rarer and rarer to find a restaurant worth ranting and raving about, and even less inspired to actually blog about it when I do. That's not to say I haven't had any good meals lately. I have (Cyrus was particularly amazing, more interesting than the famed French Laundry), but I find that since I don't blog about it, it just tends to be another experience that fades from memory.

I'm finding that in the past couple of years, I'm prefectly satisfied by the everyday, done well. And more and more I'm finding it's the company that makes the meal, and when that's the focus (rather than the food), I try not to pull out the fat camera in the middle of the conversation. That solid bowl of pho or ramen could be the perfect meal with the right person. It's no 5 hour tasting menu, but something you could do every day for the rest of your life.

Anyways, for the sake of trying to record some of the nicer meals in the past few weeks:

Lucien

A surprisingly standout meal, especially after finding that this was opened by the same people as the thorougly unimpressive YYZ. I had checked out YYZ quite a few years ago, when the Canadian dollar was substantially weaker, and still thought it delivered nothing special for what it cost. Lucien however, executed its fusiony ideas from various cuisines deftly. Asian and mexican/spanish influences were at the forefront, but not obnoxiously so.

The Berkshire pork belly with clams, cuttlefish, kimchee, toasted barley and a slow poached egg was to die for. On paper it sounds almost like a Korean horror movie, a slab of jiggly meat, bright red and spicy and sour, with that hint of rank fermented vegetable and fishy seafood. In practice it was perfect. The pork was slightly sweet and buttery, melting in your mouth like a good Shanghainese pork shoulder. The "kimchee" itself was entirely untraditional. Rich and spicy, with a hint of tang, but with no vinegary taste or odor whatsoever, I could have just chowed down with that on white rice for a week. The egg was perfectly done, the rich orange was soft and gelatinous, but not runny at all.

I only tasted the king crab and scallop, with heirloom carrots, coconut, black bean and toasted corn. Again, although it sounds like something they'd serve at a fancy taqueria, it was definitely raised way beyond.

The roast squab soto with rice noodles, bean sprout sambal, lobster tofu was interesting, but not as outstanding. The portion of squab was small, the breast was decent, but the leg was a perfect morsel, deboned, crispy on the outside, and buttery on the inside. The rice noodles were a little sticky, and the lobster tofu on the salty side. Not quite a perfect implementation, but both were creative enough that I didn't feel like this was asian food done poorly and served with a high price tag.

I've already wrote too much, but Alberta bison striploin with hominy, sarsaprilla, poblano, treviso, queso fresco was very good. Seared on the outside, bright red on the inside, juicy and tasty on the inside, and the grits on the side had rave reviews too. It simply blew away the bison short ribs I had later that week at Celestin.

Overall, the service was attentive, and someone who looked like either a manager or owner (I wasn't too chatty) was around to help out the wait staff and check on diners.

Celestin

I've been meaning to try Celestin, since I saw this article in Toronto Life years ago. Finally got to try it, and although it was good, it wasn't outstanding in any particular way. One complaint is that the meal, which was just some appetizers and mains, and not a tasting menu, still took over two hours. Click on the pictures for a description.

Sankyu

This little izakaya in a random strip mall is one of those things you'd never find if someone didn't bring you there, especially as a tourist. The inside wasn't too fancy. On one side were some stalls with the traditional low tables where you sit on futons, a cabinet was lined with bottle of shochu with namecards on them. There were Japanese men drinking and dining in Japanese. On the other side there were some more normal tables. A couple of harried waitresses rushed around to take orders, specials were on a board, written in Japanese.

We were there for the ramen and the Sapporo draft. The ramen was decent. I think the best in the Bay area compares better, but I had no complaints. The side dishes were pretty good too. Deep fried chicken, stewed pork, hamachi collar, gyoza. I've forgotten the other half the dishes by now. Although none were spectacular "you must try this dishes", they were very good, it's one of those places that you could easily call a regular hang out. And we were there hanging out with the people I'd hang out with forever if I could.

Dekalog

I should totally cancel my Netflix. For the last month I've been slowly working through the Decalogue, an acclaimed set of 10 short films by polish director Krysztof Kieslowski. I'd seen his Red/White/Blue trilogy while in high school, but haven't gotten around to watching this series (from the late 80s) until now.

It's not a series for everyone. While not obtuse or abstract like some "artsy" films, the pacing is slow and deliberate. There is very little action, much more dialog, and even more wordless shots that set mood and scene. It's really the latter that makes the series so significant. The series is a critic's favourite, being rated 9.2/10 on imdb and 100% on rottentomatoes.

The series is supposedly inspired by the 10 Commandments, although for most of the films I couldn't really identify the particular commandment it was based on; many of them seemed to point to the laws on adultery or covetousness. The films aren't linked together, there's different characters and different stories in each, although they all take place within a similar suburb of Warsaw. There's one particular character who acts as an observer, and shows up in almost all the films, but never speaks nor interacts directly with anyone in the film. Unlike the standard Hollywood fare which keeps you entranced for an hour and a half with nonstop action, comedy, and skin, this is a series that makes you think and feel. Instead of pointing at the breakers of the laws, the series makes you identify with them and emphathize. At times it's more painful than entertaining to watch, but perhaps you feel more alive for it.

The following's a summary (and complete spoiler) of the films. It's a serious disservice to anyone who intends to watch this series, so I recommend skipping over it.

1. I think I liked this film because it centered around a young boy genius who programmed his father's computer for fun. His relationship with his father and absent mother are poignant. There viewer is given a strong sense of premonition as the father and son write a program to calculate the stability of the ice on the local river. Eventually, we find the boy goes out to skate on the supposedly solid ice, just to fall through, leaving the father in despair.

2. A woman seeks her husband's apparently heartless doctor to get a prognosis on his potentially terminal illness, a question that the doctor cannot answer with any certainty. It turns out however, that she's got a deeper reason for wanting to know: she's carrying the child of her husband's friend. It's a child that she wants, if her husband were to die. But if her husband were to live it's a child that she'd have to get rid of. Her problem now also becomes the doctor's problem as he tries to find an answer for her. The ending seems to be the worst case scenario - the doctor predicts that the husband will die. The woman keeps the child, but the husband survives to learn that he has a son.

3. A taxi driver abandons his wife and kids on Christmas Eve to aid a woman, a former lover, find her missing husband. They start off lying that his cab had been stolen to get him out of the house, but as the night goes on, she builds up the lies as they search through hospitals and morgues for her husband. In the end her story unravels, her "husband" was not actually that, but another former lover, from one night in the past involving all three of them. He actually has a family too. She only sought out the taxi driver to keep her company on the holiday night where she felt so incredibly alone. In the end it's not quite clear whether he wronged his family or whether he was simply compassionate towards the woman. Or maybe both.

4. A young woman, who's mother passed away when she was just a child, explores her past in an old letter from her mother. Unclear as to whether her father is really her father, she creates a world where he isn't, and draws him into the incestuous mutual infatuation. In the end, after heartwrenching temptation, she admits that she had fabricated the story. The father and daughter burn the real letter, unopened, the uncertainty to her true father saving their relationship.

5. A maladjusted youth murders a heartless taxi driver in cold blood. His passionate public defender fails to save him from the death penalty. Although the action in the film revolves around the murderer, the heart of the film revolves around the lawyer's failed struggle against the death penalty. I found this movie a little more emotionally detached, but the lawyer's monologue put this as the most political and philosophical film.

6. A young post office clerk falls in love with his older neighbour as he spies on her with her lovers. As he pursues her though, she turns the story around. As she invites him in and embarrases him with his inexperience, he goes from being the crazy stalker to the victim. She becomes penitent for taking advantage of him as he attempts suicide from the heartbreak. Various attitudes towards love are questioned, from his obsessive infatuation to her purely physical and emotionally unattached romps. Fortunately, he survives, but the film leaves the end of their relationship undefined.

7. When a young woman fails to comfort her kid sister after a nightmare, her mother takes over, and the sadness on her face foreshadoes the truth. As she kidnaps her younger sister from a school play and escapes to the countryside, the truth is revealed to the audience. She is in fact the mother; she was underaged when her daughter was born, so her mother raised the child as her own. The situation is complicated by the fact that the father, the man that she's now run to, was her teacher, and employed by her mother, who was the headmistress of a school. As the real mother is distraught by how her daughter only acknowledges her a sister, one wonders then, who really stole the daughter from whom.

8. The film starts in a university class. A journalist comes in and asks the professor about a situation - it happens to be the situation from film #2, what should the doctor have done? The professor's answer is revealing. Distanced from the drama of doctor and the mother, her answer was simple - the child was alive, that's all that mattered. It turned out that the journalist was once a child fleeing from the Holocaust, and the professor had, at the time, turned her down for asylum. The journalist had come back to ask why, the professor answered that she had been falsly informed that the situation was a trap.

9. A prominent surgeon finds he is impotent, and expects his young wife to take on a lover. However, she denies that she would need this. He is suspicious however, and spies on her, tapping her phone calls and sifting through her belongings in her absent mother's apartment. When he finally catches her with a younger man, he waits outside the apartment, afraid to confront her. A secondary relationship builds up between him and a pretty patient. I'm not sure if it was intended, but it almost seemed to show his potential for cheating, if it weren't that he wasn't able to. Later, at another instance he hides in the closet, but this time she breaks up with her lover, and discovers her husband in the closet. In probably the most wincing scene of the series, she's repentant for the pain she caused him. Perhaps she had thought he'd be accepting of it given his initial reaction to his impotence. As he sends her off on a ski trip for some time to heal his wounds, he absurdly discovers that the lover is heading off to the same resort. Crushed by his wife's brazen infidelity, he attempts suicide, not knowing that lover had acted on his own. When she sees the lover at the resort, she flees back home, but it's too late. Fortunately however, (and fortunately for the viewer) Kieslowski chooses not to take the worst possible ending for once, and the husband survives his attempt, and talks to his wife as he recovers from surgery.

10. A pair of brothers meet at their estranged father's funeral. In sorting through the father's effects, they find his apartment spartan, except for a stamp collection worth tens to hundreds of millions of zlotskys. In a comedy of errors, beginning with the son of one of the men accidentally trading some highly valuable stamps for a pile of worthless ones, the two men attempt to swindle their stamps back. As they are sucked into the world of high value stamp trading, they find at the end that the entire ordeal was an intricate plan to swindle them of the entire collection. As one of the brothers had been convinced to trade his kidney for a particularly valuable stamp, thieves break into their apartment while he is in the hospital, cleaning them out. After pointing fingers at each other, the brothers find peace in each other, despite having lost their father's fortune.

Lust

The rumours are getting louder! If true, June is going to be an expensive month!

Them fighting words

Procrastinating on blogging is one of those things I really should stop doing. Most of the time it results in having some thoughts and never getting around to writing them down. On weeks like this, it's delaying to the point where it's simply not newsworthy anymore, but maybe it's still relevant.

I drove up to SF twice last week to shoot what was expected to be a lively event, the Olympic Torch Relay through San Francisco. Being the only North American stop, plenty of protesters were expected to be in town. I drove up on Tuesday night to catch a candlelight "vigil" organized by the International Campaign for Tibet.



The event reminded me a lot of the March for Freedom I saw in Kashmir; they even had a an open-bed truck, similar to the JKLF campaign truck. It made me wonder for a moment, "What's so special about Tibet, that people would care so much for it, and so little for Kashmir?". I can't say I've done much research, but from the cursory investigations, the main difference seems to be that Tibet has an international PR campaign, while Kashmir does not.



Overall, the event was not half as big as I expected it to be, given the media hype. There was a reasonably sized crowd, but I wouldn't say it was huge. There were people carrying candles, people cheering and chanting, people on stage giving motivational speeches, and a "Tibetan" band playing rock music and a bunch of Tibetan girls right up at the front of the stage cheering them on. Overall, it was quieter than I thought, but the event was photogenic, despite being dark.



The drive up was made worthwhile by discovering the best falafels I've had to date in the Bay Area, at Hayes & Kebab in Hayes Valley.

I took the bike up on Wednesday at lunch, expecting heavy traffic. I had applied for a press pass, but was arriving way too late to go pick it up. I'm not sure it would have helped, since even the press wasn't informed of the true torch route. I admit, I was hoping to catch some passionate protesters. Maybe police in riot gear mixing it up with Free Tibet and Free Burma and Save Darfur protestors all mixed up in a bunch.



A few days before I realized a number of Chinese coworkers were all planning to go up for the event. I was really surprised, since my main motivation was to go catch some pictures of the protestors, but it turned out that the various alumni associations of the major Chinese universities were organizing for their alumni to go up; they were told to bring flags and wear red. Later in SF, I talked to some people who told me that the Chinese consulate had sent busses to schools like Davis to bring in their students. Plus, on Tuesday night I had overheard a rumour that the Chinese consulate was arranging for people to show up early at the location for the start of the torch event, to crowd out protestors.



So I wasn't particularly surprised to arrive at AT&T Park seeing a flurry of red flags and yellow stars. I'm sure the Chinese in the Bay Area (and anywhere in the world, for that matter) far outnumber the Tibetans. The two sides shouted slogans at each other, one chanting "Dalai Liar!" while the other one yelled "Hu Jintao is a Liar!". Not exactly what I would call making progress.



There was a long wait as the torch ceremony was supposed to start, and much confusion about whether the torch would show up; there were plenty of (highly believable) rumours that the route would be changed, plus the layout of the police and barriers already suggested that the torch wasn't going to head down the expected path. After waiting around (and in the meantime finding a random building from which I could quietly dial into a conference call at work), rumours started floating around that the torch had already left, and the crowd started dispersing.



As I wandered around, I almost caught the only potential spot of conflict - some idiotic Caucasian male yelling at the "Chinamen" to "go back home", which, although elicited responses of "kill him!", didn't lead to any real violence.



The most surprising thing really though, was seeing my relatively staid and prim Chinese coworkers whipped into a nationalistic frenzy of red and gold. As I talked to another coworker back at the office later on wednesday, I could sense despair in her voice as she described how unfair it was that the western media was portraying China's police actions in Tibet. Most of the Chinese coworkers were pretty pissed at white Americans waving signs calling for the boycotting of the Olympics for the benefit of the 1.3 billion suffering human rights violations in China. They assert that the vast majority of those 1.3 billion actually want the Olympics in China, and I'm obliged to believe them.



On the other hand, I can't find any criticism for small and supposedly persecuted independence groups seeking publicity and support from foreign governments. Obviously, they'll be ignored at home. And this way is certainly a better alternative in terms of getting attention than say, resorting to terrorism or violence.