Hey peeps. I’m off to China tomorrow. The details of my trip were outlined previously.

Blogging will be non-existent whilst I eat delicious food and absorb culture over in my ancestral homeland.

I will back in Perth on Sept 24th with hopefully lotsa stories and photos.

On Sunday, I will be flying off to KL and then off to China for a 4-week holiday. The trip will include 4 days in Beijing, 12 days touring several cities that were part of The Silk Road, 6 days in Shanghai and a couple of days in KL book-ending the trip.

The cities that I will be going to as part of the The Silk Road tour will include three cities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region: Urumqi, Kashgar and Turpan. Xinjiang as you would know is where some of the Uyghur minority has been fighting for an independent state for a very long time. And Urumqi is where they had riots just before the Beijing Olympics, and also last year when racial tensions between the Han Chinese and Uyghur spilled over and caused the deaths of over 200 people. And it was still tense there in July during the one-year anniversary of last year’s riots.

BBC News – China police on alert for Xinjiang riot anniversary‎.

So I’m a little bit apprehensive about going to these places. On the other hand, these cities are culturally significant as melting pots of Chinese, Turkic and Muslim cultures. The food I’m imagining to be awesome. I’m thinking Kashgar and Turpan may be less tense because the Han Chinese are the minority, rather than the other way around in Urumqi. Yeah either way, it will be interesting and I will try to stay safe.

At the start of The Silk Road will be Xian – a city more than 3000 years old, where they found the terracotta warriors. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that I will stand over the edge, spend 5 minutes looking down into the big hole where the thousands of terracotta warriors stand and go, “Ok, what’s next?” Hahah. It’s not that I don’t think I would be impressed – it’s gonna be mind-blowing, but I’ve seen them so many times in documentaries already. Maybe once I go and smell the stale dusty air in that place, I would be awestruck.

As if all of the above is not enough already, there will be the Olympic buildings, The Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and the stupendous skyline and East-West fusion of architecture in Shanghai.

Oh, food. Have I mentioned food? Goes without saying right? Can’t wait.

Heheh, if only …

(Youtube)

Customer: Hi, I can’t get into my email.
Me: Ok, let me know check your details. What’s your email address?
Customer: xxx@xxx
Me: Ok, and what’s the password that you think you are using?
Customer: xxxxxx
Me: Yup, that is the correct password.
Customer: I’m typing that in but I still can’t get in.
Me: Try typing it again, make sure that you don’t have your caps-lock on.
Customer: Yes, I know that. I’m not an idiot.
Me: It’s an easy mistake to make that’s all.
Customer: I haven’t changed my settings in Outlook. Why would it suddenly start asking for my password anyway?
Me: You may have inadvertently typed it in wrong once and after that it would keep on prompting you for the right one.
Customer: That’s not possible. Have you changed my password?
Me: Erm no. We have just confirmed that that didn’t happen.
Customer: I have typed it in so many times. Are you sure you guys never changed it?
Me: Yes I’m pretty sure. Our logs show no changes for a very long time.
Customer: Hmm, I don’t believe that. I’m gonna try typing it in once more.
Me: *internal sigh* Ok. Let me know how you go.
Customer: Oh. It works now. I’m in.
Me: Oh, that’s good. Glad to have helped.
Customer: Thank you!

That’s 10 minutes of my life that I’m never gonna get back. And by the way, customers are not always right.

I don’t know if this is happening to you but it certainly is happening with me. As I grow older, although the things that I want in life is still sometimes vague and hard to define, what I do not want becomes that much clearer. The list of things that I’m willing to put up with becomes an ever smaller one and in a nutshell, I just can’t be fucked sometimes.

Meeting new people all the time was very important to me. Being a single guy, this was the only way to ever meet someone to date. You throw yourself out there and by the law of percentages, you hope you will get lucky. You try new things, go to different places and date outside of your comfort zone.

This is probably a bad thing but as time goes on, I’m becoming more set in my ways. I have friends that I click with, and whom I do not have to change or adjust my behaviour for, and it’s very simple and comfortable. It makes me happy. So it makes me question why bother with anything else?

Previously I would drag myself out to a social event even if I was tired or if I had to wake up early for work the next day, when I believed that the sacrifice was worth it, and that it was a necessity. Now? Not so much.

Of course, this probably means that it becomes that much harder for me to meet anyone outside of my social circle because I’m not venturing outside of it. But I deem myself a complete person as of now, and I’m not gonna question why I’m happy by myself or whether I should care. I just am.

(Youtube)

Overheard in the office today:

Female: Why don’t you ask him if he’s on the rag?
Male: Hahah! Erm yeah, as a woman, you should know that the last thing to ask a person who’s on the rag is, “Are you on the rag?”

The other day we were at a family do and I sat next to a bunch of Christians. I knew they were church goers from hearing them talk but they didn’t know that I wasn’t a Christian. I introduced myself and because they thought that I was their age (20s, haha) we started talking about uni, what we studied and what I’m working as.

A few courses of lunch later, the one next to me suddenly asked, “Do you go to church?” I said, “No, I’m a Buddhist.”

“Oh, so you go to a temple then?” she said. I said, “No, I don’t pray per se but I subscribe to most of the Buddha’s teachings. It’s logical to me.”

Normally, this is where I would expect the conversation to stop. Yeah I’ll go to hell for being a non-believer but just let me be!

She persisted anyway. “Do you know much about Christianity? Have you read the Bible?” I said, “I have and there are a lot of good stuff in the Bible which is true for all the major religions. But I don’t believe in some of the other stuff and that is why I can’t be a Christian.”

“Oh, like what?”, all of them asked almost instinctively.

“For example, the original sin. I don’t believe that babies can be born with sin, and I don’t believe that it is right for unbaptised babies to go to hell or limbo, if those places exist. I don’t believe a benevolent God would let good people suffer. I don’t believe in the one God or any God, I don’t believe in Adam and Eve, and where are the dinosaurs?”

I added that last bit to try to lighten up the conversation a little because I saw their faces scrunched up. Heh. Anyway, two of the Christians then took turns to tell me babies have sin because of what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden, that God’s will may not seem logical to us but that’s because we are mere humans and we are not meant to understand all of it. Oh, and that there are dinosaurs in the Bible but they are called different things.

Exasperated, and also because I just want to continue eating my lunch in peace, I said, “I admire your faith in a God that behaves illogically, a faith which I don’t have. And if we were indeed created by Him, then I’m exercising the free will that he’s given us in not believing in Him. I mean, what’s the point of free will if we are not allowed to exercise it, right?”

I smiled, stuffed my mouth with a piece of sweet and sour pork and then chewed very slowly.

(matildaben @ flickr)

As I made my way across the office lobby and walked into the lift this morning, I absentmindedly pressed on the floor button. I pressed and pressed but it didn’t light up. I was thinking, “wtf?!”

So I pressed again, this time looking hard at the button. And then I realised I had been pressing on the “G” button. Hahaha! Lucky I was alone in the lift.

Maybe subconsciously, I was already thinking about going home when I only just got to work.