The Great Return to Vanuatu

Bae mi stap long Vanautu long 1 week! Bae mi stap long 5 wiks mo mifela makem research long malaria mo research long stress blong bel blong bigfela Cyclone Pam.

Yu no toktok Bislama?

I'm going to Vanuatu next week! I will be there for 5 weeks with my colleagues, researching malaria (cross your fingers for no outbreak!) and prenatal stress as a result of Cyclone Pam.

Mi got wan bigfela flight long next wiks!

I'd like to talk about pooping

After you eat all the delicious (real) Chinese food while in China, you will probably feel the need to sit some more. On the toilet that is.

Only, in China, you often don't sit to do your business. You squat.

I may not have discussed toilets while we were in Vanuatu, but while there, the most common form of toilet was what was known as a 'bush toilet'; you might also call it a hole in the ground with some walls and a roof. (Not always true, some bush toilets had a wooden box seat built in.) Basically it was a composting outhouse built with the purpose of isolating human waste to reduce disease incidence.

Chinese toilets were not bush toilets though. They were charming porcelain commodes built right into the floor, with areas to put your feet, instead of a seat to rest your bum. AND, they flushed. Bush toilets do not flush. We are clearly talking about sophisticated toilets, here.

In addition to requiring users to squat, Chinese toilets, like Vanuatu bush toilets, often come without toilet paper. Some public bathrooms did have a big roll at the entrance to grab some before you went into the stall, but this was not universal, and I often found that the roll was empty when I checked it anyway. So I got used to carrying around a packet of tissues with me. (This packet served double duty as most restaurants did not provide napkins, or you needed to pay extra for napkins. Definitely an important thing to remember.) Interestingly, I also discovered that once you use the toilet tissue, you do not flush it, but you throw it in the waste basket that is often right next to the toilet. Could the plumbing system not handle it? Was this not a habit that's been picked up yet? I don't know. But when in Beijing…

Hong Kong was a bit mixed in the toilet department, for those who are wondering. Generally, I found them to have seat toilets, but some public places also had squat toilets available. They were distinguished by signs on the outside of the stall. In some of the seat stalls, there were signs saying "Please do not squat on the toilet seats". (Sorry, didn't get a picture of those signs!)

This sign means "squat".

This sign means "sit".

For those who may have been interested in traveling to China, but have found themselves rather put off by the idea of having to squat to eliminate waste, I will note that I mostly experienced squat toilets in public bathrooms and that every hotel I stayed at had standard seat toilets, and toilet tissue was included.

But you should really try squatting. It's quite good for the colon.

My First Former Soviet Nations

We had the opportunity to visit Tallinn, Estonia, and Riga, Latvia, this trip. My first former Soviet Union nations! (Interestingly, this was my partner's first time in continental Europe, despite living in Sweden for the last two years. So, lots of firsts!)

Here are some of the things I observed while in the Baltic States:

- In Tallinn and Riga, cars are parked up on the sidewalk, rather than along the sidewalk. This largely seems to be because there are few parking spots on the road along the sidewalk, especially on side and smaller streets. First, I thought I was just seeing some bad parkers, then I realized several people were parked at roughly the same angle, 2-3 wheels up on the curb. That must be on purpose.

- Rock is not frequently used on ice and snow covered sidewalks. In Helsinki and Stockholm, the sidewalks are covered with ground rock, in much the same way as we cover our sidewalks in salt in the US. (Great for maintaining grip with the ground, not so great when you are wheeling a suitcase, by the way.) I noticed pretty quickly in Tallinn that this was not the case. I think due in part to the location of our hotel in Tallinn (a more residential area near the university), the sidewalks also were not well shoveled, which made for some interesting walking adventures. In contrast, our hostel in Riga was on a main road and, while I saw very little rock spread, the sidewalks were well shoveled (we watched it done after seeing about an inch of snow fall one afternoon). This is in no way meant to malign Tallinn; in the city's defense, the cobblestoned streets and sidewalks of the Old Town were immaculate!

- Polyglots abound. Apparently, it is common for people to speak 2-3 languages fluently in both Estonia and Latvia; one of the guides at a museum we went to had 4 or 5 language flags on his name tag, and I heard him speaking at least 3 of those. (Note that I make this observation with extreme jealousy.) And I mean people really were functionally fluent in these languages—we had very little difficulty communicating and finding our way around when we were almost exclusively using English.

Signs are also in several of these languages. For example, the "Do Not Disturb" hang tag at our hotel in Tallinn was in Estonian, Russian, English, Finnish, and German. Sometimes Swedish is thrown in there. (And, obviously, in Latvia, they were using Latvian instead of Estonian.) I was impressed when we noticed that Helsinki had all road signs in Finnish, Swedish, and either Russian or English, but that was nothing to the Baltics. This abundance of languages is due to the history of the area being conquered time after time; they are just in a really convenient place for land grabs, it seems. (Perhaps I will make a post on all the area's interesting history I learned on the trip; until then, Wikipedia will be able to fill you in!)

- In Riga, Latvia, toilet tissue is not flushed, but thrown in the trash barrel next to the toilet. The only other place I have seen this is in China. (I have another post about China toilets in the works!)

Jet Lag

I really know how to time my trips.

While most people use their winter holidays to travel somewhere warm and sunny, I choose the winter to visit dark, cold Scandinavia, where the temperature is hovering right around freezing, and we're getting about six hours of light each day.

That last part is what I am most amused by now, as I sit awake in the middle of the night. I am still adjusting to the time-shift (curse you, west-east travel!), and all the internet tips say if you wake up in the middle of the night, keep your sleeping area dark.

Um, you mean, like it has been for the last 14 hours?

My jet lag tips for those traveling to the poles during noon-time darkness (that is, the opposite of midnight sun): Get outside in that brisk Scandanavian air while the sun is up and tire yourself out. Hopefully the fatigue will overwrite your circadian rhythms and get you onto the appropriate schedule.

Until then: Frequent short naps!

Driving in China

I discussed in a previous post how much of our travel is sitting while moving from one place to another. One form of this transportation that must be discussed in regards to China is driving.

Driving in China is scary. It's like taking all the drivers from Boston, Rome, NYC, and LA, and putting them in a new city with all new rules and just seeing what happens.

What happens is that the rules of driving are totally different than anything I've ever experienced. Drivers beep to notify that they are passing. They also beep to tell you they are about to hit you or you them. Or to note that they are merging. Drivers passing in the left lane keep their left blinkers on while passing the vehicles on the right, even if they were already in the left lane. Nobody seems to yield. Lanes are suggestions, rather than rules. As is traffic flow and direction—it's not uncommon to see cars intentionally going the wrong way down a divided road to make a turn.

Oh, and seatbelts aren't really worn.

When I wasn't busy having heart attacks in the back seat, I realized that there is actually an order to the way people are driving, even if it doesn't match the signs on the road. Drivers seem to really be aware of other cars and pedestrians. Not only was I not involved in any accidents (thank goodness!), but I didn't witness any either. And most of the cars seemed to be in really good shape, implying that few of the other drivers were involved in accidents as well.

It seems like crazy driving, but it's really just a different driving environment than I am used to. One that I may not be adapted to, but these drivers certainly are!

(Okay, I didn't actually drive in China, I just sat in the back seat several times. Once in the front seat. I don't think I'm ready for China driving.)

China, developing

China is an interesting place. I fully recommend a visit for anyone who wants to discover somewhere quite unlike anywhere else they might have previously been. Even if you're from China, the country is so big and diverse that there is undoubtedly somewhere that is new to you.

Part of what makes China such an interesting place is that it is not easily classifiable as 'developed' or 'developing'. Clearly, China is a world power. They make pretty much everything that we find on our store shelves in Western nations. China's 2012 GDP was US$12.4 trillion (compared to the US' $15.6 trillion, which is the only country with a higher GDP than China, according to both the IMF and the World Bank). And in case you're curious, the exchange rate for the Chinese yuan to the US dollar is roughly the same as the Swedish crown to the US dollar.

While I've been here, I feel like I have been existing in the 'developed' aspect of China. We're in a very fancy hotel and I'm looking out the window at lit up high-rises. We've been chauffered to many of the places we've been going (I should note that we are here for a wedding, and our 'chauffeurs' are generally family members of the friends who are getting married), and in nice, new cars. I have pretty speedy wi-fi just about everywhere we go (except, ironically, in this hotel room, although I can go down to the lobby to connect). Everyone's on their smartphones all the time, even the monks on the Tibetan plateau.

But technically China is a 'developing' country. 150 million of the country's approximately 1.35 billion people live at less than US $1 per day, and the country has a growing income disparity with a Gini coefficient of 44.7 (the US has only slightly worse income inequality with a Gini coefficient of 47.7). Much of the infrastructure has only recently been built; there is so much new construction in the cities that China sometimes appears to be a land of cranes—but I don't mean the birds. As we drove through my friend's hometown in Shandong province (south of Beijing), he described to us how large areas that are now built up were cornfields only 5 years ago. But because things are being built up so quickly, some of the roads still don't have names. That, in addition to the fact that things are also being knocked down to accomodate new buildings, means that addresses don't stay the same from day to day, and thusmail delivery is difficult and not always all that reliable. Aside from the new roads, it's not always easy to get from place to place either, as transportation infrastructure construction is not keeping up with the build-up of the cities themselves. So we were able to take the bullet train (at 300 kph!) from Beijing to Shandong province, we then had to drive an hour into my friend's hometown. Airports are in the same situation; to fly to Lanzhou in north-central China, we would have to fly/train to Beijing and transfer there, or drive a couple hours to an airport in another province. (We did the latter, if you were wondering.)

It seems very strange to classify China as a 'developing' country, in the same way that we call Vanuatu a developing country. China has far more resources and in very many ways is far more advanced than Vanuatu. But so much of China's progress is very recent. Much of the country just feels 'new', where there is a feeling of established-ness in most developed countries. This seeming contradiction is part of what establishes China as one of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), which are all classified as 'developing', but also as newly emerging economies. These countries are expected to rise above the current G7 by 2050, making them some of the most economically powerful countries in the world. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens within these 'developing' nations as the become certified world powers.

*Note: Statistics came from Wikipedia.com and its respective citations.

Fancy new title! And some other updates.

You may have noticed that I changed the name of my blog. And the URL. My goal is to confuse everyone. I hope I have succeeded.

Just kidding. I really changed it because the previous title and URL were very specific to my travels to Vanuatu and the South Pacific. But I go other places, and I wanted by blog to reflect that. Especially because I am currently on a rather epic month-long trip about China (with a few stops in Europe).

I chose the new title of this blog, "Recollections of Sitting", based on a quote that says “Most of my treasured memories of travel are recollections of sitting.” There is a lot of truth to that! Yes, most of the time when we think of travel, we think of the things we do when we reach our destination. But often the journey to that destination is an experience in and of itself. And how often do those journeys—and even the short journeys from one place to another once we have reached our destination—involve little more action than sitting in a plane, a train, a car, a ferry?

- - - - -

Four days into my current trip, I am finding my choice of titles to be a very accurate one, indeed. At present, I am sitting in the 6th airport of the trip, having logged nearly 24 hours of flight time, and about 3 hours (and counting!) of flight delays. That is a lot of sitting.

But it has not been uninteresting! For one, it has involved some tight connections, a cancelled and rebooked flight reservation (done without my knowledge!) which got us put on standby, and flying through 2 airports I've never been to! Not to mention some new stamps on my passport!

I will grant that most of my trip so far has been the process of traveling, but these experiences of sitting, of waiting for the next thing to happen, of anticipating the next stop, of the journey itself, these are where my stories are.

I will be sharing these stories with you, dear readers, as my trip goes on. There will be a delay before the next update, however, as I will be in Mainland China, and Google is censored there (blogspot is a Google site). I look forward to having plenty of stories to share with you when I return!

Off to go find my flight for 4 more hours of sitting! ;)