As per usual, the weekend’s festivities included abundant quantities of food, drink, laughs, and couch time.

Camille and Sunny are two wonderful people who embody Aristotle’s sentiment “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.”

Of course, this is their reaction after expressing such sentiment.

As you also read in The Wolfe-Conradi Cabin, Sunny is a Port collector and we had a beautiful bottle at the cabin. Sadly, we were in mourning over the loss of Sunny’s collection and disasterous circumstances left him with only one bottle left. Ever the trooper, he was out the next day picking up a new bottle to rebuild the fallen army.

Camille inspects carefully as Sunny pours the last hero.

Empty bottle of port off frame, vacant cheese board in the foreground, and a nice French wine in the glasses - you’d smile too.

Now prying Sunny away from any form of work for a weekend is a feat of nature belonging to the same category as planetary alignments and the reversing of the poles. However, when you do get him away - one never knows what is going to happen. Walking trough the village, we lost Sunny only to backtrack and find him in the outdoor adventure office.

“Anyone want to go snowmobiling? It’s the first day of the season.”

Sweet.

I don’t have any pictures of the experience as it was just too much damn fun to be encumbered by a camera. It looked something like this though:

Amidst eating, drinking, and sleeping there were several walks with tonnes of snow.

The start of the walk

Ended like this

While Camille may seem sweet at first.

Don’t get on her badside. See here as she takes on this former thai boxing champion.

Why are there so few long weekends in the year?

However, with a little time this summer I am attempting to finish The Journey - Part 1 (Part 2 is currently sitting on my shelf also pleading for attention). It is a documentary charting a little bit of BC history and centred around Victoria (although there is a little side trip to Barkerville for you Engleson-types out there). It is intended for the wee ones I teach to give them a better idea of how things fit together. It is definitely in the draft stage and there is still 20 more minutes to come. You will also see that it is a little Jeff-o-centric but these things happen when you are producer, director, screenwriter, actor, camera man, sound man, production assistant, gaffer, best boy, foley artist, and caterer all in one with a budget of well over $50.

I post this now to invite your criticisms - I want to know what’s wrong with it; be honest and brutal — because 10 & 11 year olds have no mercy.

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For those having trouble with the Windows Media, try this Flash version

While not particularly about my own disposition, I never promised that this little self-indulgent narrative would focus solely on my own wanderings.

I have just received news that Grant, Carole, Gabriel, and Lydia are returning from China to the motherland –> and BC of all places.

For a little back story: After two years in China (one setting up the technology program) I decided to retun home to Canada. I was asked to screen the resumes of potential applicants to ensure that they were technically proficient enough to meet the demands of the growing school. One individual was brought to my attention by the principal, a certain Grant Potter, as being recommended by another staff member. The principal wanted to know based on his resume if he had what it took.

I said no.

A new resume was furnished with updated technical qualifications which passed muster. A year later I was back at Maple Leaf and finally met the aforemention Mr. Potter; and discovered his technical abilities greatly superior to mine. This man is a guru; in all things technical, musical, and funkadelic.

Carole, I was to find, exuded this unearthly aura of calm and tranquility (yeah Carole, it’s true even if you don’t feel it yourself all the time). She’s the only white girl I know who is a tai ji master. Centred.

So I met the Potters (3 at the time), and some of the most interesting and outstanding people I know.

The coolness factor in BC has just shot up ten-fold. We are as happy to have you as China is sad that you are taking your leave — even if you are moving to Huston, fly-fishing capital of our great province.

You can get a preview of the coolness by checking out Carole’s Catharsis and Potting Along in the blogroll to your right.

Great. Now I’m going to have to write up entries on all of the other cool people I know. This might take a while.

Thanks for the great party everyone.

A fabulous video was made by Paul & Kel. Get out your 3-D glassess for the laser show begininng and note the stylish Kid & Play haircut of my youth (sory it’s a .wmv Paul, but I figure you’ve probably seen it enough times). Thanks to everyone for their contributions - I was blown away.

From a previous entry, The Vancouver Brunch we met Camille and Sunny. Camille is the sister of one Adrian Conradi: intrepid China pioneer, hockey ambassador, planner of crazy capers, and wise purchaser of land and a cabin by Deka Lake near 100 Mile House.

The Wolfe-Conradi family purchased this little nugget in order to have a place to “come home to” when they visited Canada during the summers.

The aforementioned cabin has been a harbinger of ill will to those who have chosen to open its door in the past. The maiden visit apparently delivered mountains of garbage and a deck that wanted to fall apart but couldn’t quite summon the energy to do so.

The second visit by Camille and Sunny delievered a floor black with rodents and evidence of a squatter.

For the May long weekend, we decided to see what surprise lay ahead.

After a bottle of port (more on this later), an early morning, and a long drive, we arrive at the Conradi cabin with great anticipation as to what will await us this trip.

A sinister surprise is afixed to the door — the census. What would we fill out for the inhabitants of this domicile? Would we need to send away for extra pages for the hundreds of rat families? Could Bob the squatter be listed as a dependant as he hasn’t quite learned how to use the outhouse yet?

To much joy, the cabin was almost exactly as it had been left the last time it was cleaned up. An ant colony had moved into the wall on the deck side of the cabin; I was just about to start filling out the new occupants on the census form when Sunny pulled out an arsenal of sugary insecticides and terminated the inhabitants… with extreme prejudice. As the census requires information on members LIVING at the residence, we decided not to fill the form out at all.

After a quick clean, the weekend began; and by “weekend” I am referring to the period between Friday and Monday where the three of us went on vacation and our livers started pulling triple shifts.

My proclivity for all things fermented isn’t exactly a secret. However, it turns out that Sunny had been holding out that he was a collector of fine port and recently decided that his long-standing port collection needed a little air. So we kicked off the weekend with this beautiful 16 year old bottle of Smith Woodhouse.

and the Laird said it was good and for three days and three nights a bounty befell the cabin three. Port begat wine, wine begat beer, beer begat mohitos, mohitos begat more mohitos, more mohitos begat watermelon slushies, and watermelon slushies begat blackberry port.
and on each day they rested.

Sunny and I enjoying the port

There was a lot of this going on

and much of that as well

Between this and that, we did a few odd jobs to break the monotony. Camille recuts the steps to the cabin.

Funny how it seems so much further when you have a shovel in your hand.

The sauna needed a little maintenance…

… and an addition.

We really enjoyed the music selection left at the cabin. However, I think a royal commission in China must be launched into the presence of this album in the collection. I charge Potter with investigating the implications of the Geneva convention on the possession of “Turn the Radio Up” by Bobby Curtola.

Two bald eagles sitting in front of the cabin

Thanks Sarah, Adrian, Hanna, and Cosmo.

This has the additional bonus to most of you, who have probably heard these stories a hundred times, because you can now tell me to “Shut up! I’ve already read it on your blog.”

As well, I’ve got the idea from my friend Rebeca that this will make a great diary of my journey through this thing called life (of course, she has a few more individuals to document). This won’t mean regular entires like the people on the blogroll to your right (welcome newcomers to the world of public privacy), but at least there will be something up when I’m not travelling and actually have to work for a bloody living.

First gleaning: the camping on the great wall.

During the May holiday of my first year in China a friend’s sister who was studying Chinese was coming to visit. Therefore, I chose to coincide this with a trip to Beijing (she flies in, we can hang out in the capital for a while and then go back to Dalian). Of course, I get deathly ill just days before (amazing what a couple glasses of Chinese tap water will do to a guy) but must go to meet her anyways as my friend is much taller and more athletic than me and I didn’t relish the repercussions of telling him that I abandoned his little sister at the Beijing airport.

A group of us went to spend the week in Bejing and have joyous time. My friend’s sister arrived, and at some point during the “joyous times” (usually involving a meagre amount of fermented beverages) we decide that it would be a brilliant idea to go camp on the Great Wall of China.

No, we had not heard of anyone else doing this; no, there wasn’t some Lonely Planet itinerary that we might follow; and no, I don’t think it was particularly legal or encouraged by a government who had assigned people to keep tabs on us in our homes.
However, after sufficient quantity of the afore mentioned fermented beverages it seemed like a damn good idea at the time. Luckily, said beverages also have the effect of ensuring that one forgets about hair-brained schemes and cunning capers the day after.

Days pass and a friend Nicole, staying with her Sister and Brother-In-Law (who have been living in Beijing for a number of years), called us at the hotel saying to meet her at Starbucks (we were shameless) from where we would sally forth to our camping destination — she has a map.

Camping? Map? Sally?

After nearly a year, I had learned that a Nicole with a plan was a force of nature not to be reckoned with. So, that’s how we found ourselves outside Starbucks, sipping guilt-inducing grande somethings, when our intrepid leader pulls up in a taxi and proceeds to unload hockey bags stuffed with camping gear from the trunk.

The gear: on loan from Nicole’s sister.
The map: a criptic set of directions scrawled on a scrap of paper.

The glorious work of cartography

Imagine this. Eight seasoned travellers standing around a mountain of duffle bags on a street corner in Beijing with a dodgy map ready to go camping, and not one of us had thought about how to get to our ultimate destination. The scene could only have been made more farcical by the addition of pith helments.

After much debate and visits to hotels in search of a van who might know where the hell we were going, we decide to screw it all and just hire a couple of cabs to take us out to the golden location (two hours out of town we estimate) and to pick us up the next day after camping.

The cabs are amicable of the price we negotiate and we head off. Half and hour into the trip Nicole notices we are heading in the direction of Ba Da Ling - the most heavily touristed and developed area of the Great Wall… clearly the cabbies didn’t get our intention. We correct them and b-line it through the farmlands of outer Beijing and start on our way to our version of “the beach”.

Miraculously, we manage to follow the scrap paper map and find the second-to-last land mark “the water park” (water slides, if you can believe it). We then enter the mountains and that’s when all hell breaks loose; we get more and more remote as the skies get darker and darker. Then the heavens open up — it was retribution in biblical proportions. The earth becomes black, lighting starts tearing the ground around us, rain is falling in sheets, and I was just waiting for the fire and brimstone to begin to cap off our camping adventure. The cabbies start freaking out as we enter the third hour of our two hour drive.

We are waiting for the final landmark to present itself (our burning bush): the water pipeline where we will hang a left down a road to meet our destination.

Three and a half hours pass and Nicole yells “Stop!”.

We are nowhere.

Nicole annouces…. “I think this is it.”

uh……

huh?

There is a village consisting of three houses, a dirt road to our left which could be confused for a deer trail, and an empty field to our right. I inquire as to Nicoles sanity, and she states “I think this is the water pipeline, and if not… people are starting to go over the edge.” It was true. The cabbies were losing it, the other passengers were losing it, even I was not looking forward to the prospect of seven hours in a cab just to go back and sleep in a Beijing hotel (okay, I had lost it after the lightning storm… I was already back to finding it again).
I glance into the field and see what Nicole is talking about. From the hills in the distance, I can see what can only be described as a black garden hose snaking its way through the field. Not exactly what I would consider a “water pipeline”. After a quick consultation with the other cab, we decide that some action must be taken and we turn down the dirt road (the cabbies are dubious, but we assure them only a few more minutes).

Five minutes later we come upon a farmer in a field with a water buffalo. We get out and inquire, with the limited Mandarin we had, “Great Wall?”
The farmer stares at us stoically. Then slowly raises his hand pointing in the direction down the dirt road.

Yes.

Five more minutes and in front we see the promised land. A beautiful valley, mountains encircling us and along the top of these mountains like the snaking back of a sleeping dragon — the Great Wall.

We manage to find a house in the village of thirty or so where the road end where they will feed us dinner and seel us a case of beer. Turns out this house also rents rooms to wayward travellers who stumble upon their sleepy lair. A couple of Chinese guys on a bike trip from Beijing approach us.

“What are you doing here?”
“We’ve come to camp on the great wall.”
“How did you find this place… nobody knows about this place.”

Oh yeah… we found it - we had a map. In China, something isn’t worth visiting unless it is “very famours” (not a spelling mistake); which generally means at least a million people come to see it every year. We had found exactly what we were looking for. A couple years later I took some new teachers to Beijing and promised them a camping trip on the wall. I couldn’t navigate the map again and we ended up somewhere equally remote and amazing but nothing could replace the first time we stepped onto the ancient crumbling wall. Ten feet across, with trees growing right out of the middle of the stone. We set up tents between the protective walls and explored the old bastions imagining the Huns camped out in the distance. In the morning, we scaled the mountain side as stone crumbled beneath our fingers and ate oranges in the dawn.

A burst of energy after the long ride

Some of our rag tag group

Home for the night, our morning climb in the distance

Our camping spot from afar

We survive the death defying hike

Our morning alarm call beckoning for sustinence

We depart, changed forever

The cabbies had slept in the village below and took us back the next day, new people.

My journey (by plane) began at 5:30 am on Friday, December 2. I set out from my base in Victoria, BC for Dalian, China; it would become known (thanks to Air China and a series of unfortunate events) as the long long long march.

The flight from Victoria to Vancouver went of without a hitch and I arrived in plenty of time for my supposed noon take-off for Beijing; just enough time to swing by the domestic departure terminal to stock up on a couple of dozen Tim Hortons donuts hermetically sealed in ziploc bags to be dutifully delivered to my gracious host, Greg Boone, and the salivating maws of numerous other Canadians — wanton for a taste of the great canadian pastry.

Shortly before boarding (which has been changed to 1:00) an annoucement comes over the PA system: one of the ground crew vehicles has had a run-in with our plane; there will be a delay while they get a replacement part and the next announcement will be at 3:00.

Oh no! I have a connection to catch…. but no worries, I had a five hours layover in Beijing — plenty of time to fix a broken cotter pin, or tire, or whatever other problem could be caused by a ground vehicle bumping a well-built, made in America, Boeing 767.

Now why is everyone staring out the window at our gate? What could possibly be….?

Oh %$@^!

Obviously they haven’t initiated the graduated licensing program for ground transport vehicles; or perhaps there is some special skill training involved because I have no idea how a half-tonne luggage container can make it from the front of the plane where the loading doors are to halfway down the plane to connect with the freakin’ engine!

Now, if we were already in China and this happened they simply would have grabbed the nearest ball-peen hammer and banged that badboy out of there. However, we were not in China yet; flight cancelled until 5 pm tommorrow.

Well half the passengers go ballistic demanding compensation (standard practice in China — flight vouchers aren’t just handed out; you need to put on a show first) and I make my way to the Delta Airport Hotel passing several RCMP officers who have been called in to deal with the situation.

I catch a movie in town with friends… I notice the ring leader of the demonstration, who was screaming the loudest demanding to fly out immediately, at breakfast the next morning. His verbal prowess was obviously not great enough to provide lift for the grounded flight.

$200 US cash waiting for me at check-in for compensation; I guess there IS something to this loud whinning thing. Interestingly, the annoucement about the money is only made in Chinese. I inform my fellow yang gui zi (foreign devil) passengers and we are off the the land of the sleeping dragon.

Arrive in Beijing and sprint to make my connection. I glance at the TV screen overhead: Beijing to Dalian flight — cancelled (ice on the runway). Another night in a hotel — flight is rescheduled for 10 am the next day. In case you are keeping track, that makes roughly 64 hours in transit so far. The next day, no one at the airport seems to know anything about this 10 am flight and I am told that the next flight to Dalian is a 4 pm, but that it is full. I try the whinning and complaining trick and am told to go speak to a manager. I am bumped around to three different managers until one says — “Check-in desk D12″. Sure enough, there is a handwritten sign taped to the desk announcing the make-up flight.

Oh thank god.

At last, it’s over…… with the exception of our two-hour delay sitting in the plane waiting for a mystery passenger that never arrives. They hand out the snacks and crank up the heat to prevent the few poor unfortunate souls who have taken the exact same flights as me from going completely postal.

Finally, 68 hours after leaving my front door I arrive at the welcome sign of Boontown where the lovely Jo Zhou and the incomparable Greg Boone are my hosts for the duration of my stay.

This journey wasn’t the same as most of my travel stories. I was explictly there to see friends, and it was great. My days consisted largely of early afternoon coffee with Greg discussing the meanings of life, love, and happiness; an ambitious task for the day (such as buying a couple DVDs, or getting a massage); dinner with some friends, and then beers with Greg discussing the meanings of life, love, and happiness (and comparing the effects of stimulants and depressants on said conversations). Of course when your house is at that bar many wonderful people keep dropping by to see you.

A little Christmas shopping on the way back in Beijing… and a flight that was quicker than the Guomintang’s retreat to Taiwan.

And now, some pictures:

We the teachers have been defying a law that forces us back to work and defying a contempt of court ruling. We are defying bill 12, and I’m proud of it.

Bill 12 extends a contact for teachers (I might add, the inital contact was legislated upon us in the first place) with no opportunity for discussion around that contract.

If a may get a little legal here, a contract is an oral or written agreement between two or more parties.

Well, as a teacher I am one of those parties and I didn’t agree to a god damn thing.

Now the issue at hand has gotten much bigger then it was. In the beginning it was simply a dispute about working conditions and compensation for work. Now, forget class sizes, forget class composition, forget salary increases, forget all those things this was about in the beginning.

Now it’s about self-determination.

The labour movement in Canada has worked for over 150 years to enshrine the ability for a worker to bargain for the conditions of their labour. The movement has tackled: child labour, safety conditions, length of the work day, length of the work week, discrimination based on race, creed, colour, and sex, and a host of other things that were fundamentally wrong.

Now I am the first person to say that unions can be a pain in the ass when it comes to a lot of things in the world of work. Unions can add just another layer of bureacracy to prevent things from getting done.

However, this is what unions were meant for; fighting injustice in the treatment of human beings in their working life. Today thousands of people stood together to protest and tell the government that we public servants are not indentured servants.

Ben’s still big

Buckingham is still “La-Dee-Dah”

and the Tower of London is still advertised as a crime scene

I mean c’mon London… you’ve got the olympics coming… spruce things up a bit!

I did go into the Tower of London this time for a really excellent tour. In one of the towers I stumbled across these two figures

No, really I enjoyed London but the next day I took the train north to the bustling metropoliton area of Leicestershire to meet up with the affore-mentioned Twizzleton-Fifes for some biking, train riding, and stuck-in-traffic fun.

There, Sashez took a shine to my new camera and turned out to be a pretty good shot for a six year old!

Rebeca

Tobias

Me

We got lost on the bike ride and didn’t make it very far. The old steam-train was quite cool as all of the stations were set up in period fashion with separate men’s and women’s waitrooms to ensure proper etiquette which is clearly not required in today’s civilized society.

After exhausting the sights in the Leicester area (three days) we moved on to the pinnacle moment of this trip. Forget the contemplative steps along pristine Welsh coastline, the crumbling iron age forts; sod the spendour of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Toss the many fine hand-pulled brews and Melton Mowbray pies (oh sooooo good).

We’re talking about the crowning achievement in Scandinavian ingenuity and American marketing.

We’re talking about Legoland.

Despite raining all day (kept the lines down), Legoland can only accurately be described as a “hoot”. If only I had known as a child that someday people would be paid to build entire cities out of Lego, I could have done something really meaningful with my life rather than become a teacher. Most of Europe was recreated in miniature out of Lego — why had I spent all of those years backpacking and cycling around seeing the sights; it was all right here!
PLUS rides! What more could you ask for? Sashez became an avid rollercoaster junkie, although no one loved the Spinning Ride where they placed us in a centerfuge disguised as Lego cars and spun us around in an attempt to separate our molecular structure down to the base elements. Here is the before picture:

With tears in our eyes, we left Legoland for London where we spent the day before heading off to Amsterdam.

Sashez in Trafalgar Square

I have visited Amsterdam on each and every trip to Europe. The previous trip, Tobias and I discovered the word “Gezellig” which I have found is why I keep wanting to return there. It doesn’t translate well, but here is one description I found:

“It is a state of mind and a way of describing an atmosphere that the Dutch create without thinking about it. If I were to translate gezellig into Californian, it would come out like kickback or chill out or…”

It is “Tickety” and “Boo”. It is a certain relaxed calm that overtakes you as soon as you set foot in the country (yes, even before you step into the coffeeshops). This is why I keep going back.

I recent years I have found it is harder and harder to find a reasonably priced place to stay during the summer. This time was no exception until I stumbled across an internet site advertising a boat that had been turned into a hostel just 10 minutes by ferry from downtown. I jump on the ferry from the train station and make my way to Lum n’ Abner, an old lumber skip that used to bring wood down from Scandinavia. For 25 Euro a night you get a bed in the ship’s hold and breakfast. I wouldn’t recommend it for the winter, but it was just fine during the warm summer and walking up out of the hold in the morning to the Russian sub parked next to us was kind of a cool novelty.

We also found this on a bike ride out into the countryside. I haven’t got anything to say about it — it’s just gezellig.