It’s not a real trip to China without leftover ‘Look at all the weird shit!’ photos

This was on a 600-year-old wall, but anytime is good for a reminder, really

The graphic forgot to specify that trash should be set on fire after being discarded

And they say the Chinese don’t recycle

If China had a Jeff Foxworthy, he would be making jokes about this

L’Oreal is getting really aggressive with their slogans these days

We have army surplus stores, they have police surplus stores

This is like having an All-Saudi Bacon Lovers Association

More Chinese pooper-scooping of American cultural detritus

All the ads have white people in them

How did the Louvre customer service manual get in here?

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We went to a Heritage Site called Pingyao

And caught the early bus at Suffer O’Clock

And thought of Dickens, 5,000 miles to the left

And were pretty sure that that tower in the background was a prison

And resembled Norway upstairs, Iowa down

And ran into the litter the missionaries left behind

And played with reflections in the teahouse window

And were jealous of Soeren’s gymnast arms

And downloaded Soeren’s pictures, cuz he took all the good ones

And ate street-level dubiousness

And regretted this almost instantly

And think that a guy texting next to a vegetable pile sums up China pretty well these days

And saw a variety show that was awesome because we were kinda drunk

And read and latte’d in the mornings til Soeren woke up

And love these little dudes!

And made low-rent jokes about donkey-meat

And could smell the coal-burning fireplaces all day, everywhere

And thought that 600 years have been remarkably kind to the city inside the walls

And remembered those documentaries about gold-plated Dubai bathrooms. And wept.

And gaped at the weird, smokey Chinese landscape

And were not in the mood for the hard sleeper back to Beijing

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Back once again with the ill behavior

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The last three times I've taken trips spanning more than six time zones, I've ended up getting sick like two days later. I know that jetlag, cramped quarters, Sani-Wipes and adventure films with the word 'hijack' removed are generally bad for your health, but I appear to have a particularly effete constitution in this regard. I spent the entire time in China with a Leonard Cohen throat, park-bench pedophile eyes and sinuses jammed like a Beijing afternoon.

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These were ignorable enough, but 24 hours before my flight home, after a night of rural drinking, my symptoms decided to band together and make a 'No on Prop 8!'-style post-emptive assault. They started in the stomach and marched to the rest of my autocratic, coal-burning body, taking capacities and dignities as they went along. My system responded with a Burmese Monk crackdown, shutting off all auxillary function and ceasing any social services related to digestion, wakefulness or erect-walking thought.

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Between 2 pm Saturday and 4 pm Monday I didn't eat, spoke exclusively in Palin-tameter and accepted the concepts of 'sitting down' and 'being awake' as mutually exclusive. I genuinely don't remember my entry interview in Paris, though the stamp in my passport indicates it occurred.

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I'm better now that I'm back in Copenhagen, but I need to do some serious Web MD-ing to make sure this doesn't happen again next time. Everyone chirps 'vitamin C!' but I've been taking that urine-dye for years and it doesn't seem to make any difference. There's probably some really great Chinese medicine for this, come to think of it, but I was too busy squinting and spasming while I was there to look.

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China’s next top dissident

In Beijing, I biked out to a place called 798

It’s an entire industrial neighborhood where all the buildings have been converted

Into massive art spaces and hipster-sized cafes

Every conversation is profound when it takes place next to faux-dustrial boilers

I was surprised at how political the art was

And what you seem to be allowed to say in China these days

This dude’s teeth, for example, could be their own Da Vinci Code

Does the meaning of these sculptures simply escape the authorities?

Maybe they think these are just sexy, not subversive

Or maybe they’re too busy in the hella Danish-ass cafes to notice

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O’er the ramparts

Sunrise

Dictation

Narnia-stalgia

Knuckles

Pant…

Genghis

Aspirin

Lunchtime

Again?

‘Habitants!

‘Sisyphus?’

Done

‘Gorged

Disbelief

Bedammed

Lushmore

Naptime

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Who dat hutong?

Beijing is mostly wide boulevards and towering residentoliths

There are still some interior neighborhoods, called hutongs, left in the city center, though

These are the areas that got erased to make room for swimming and archery last summer

The surviving, non-Olympic hutongs have a Great Barrier Reef kind of finity to them.

Many of them have temples in the middle, surrounded by temporary housing, health clinics or shops

Cooking smells and cumulo-chemicals float in the silence

People were chatty, and complemented Soeren on his Mandarin. ‘Hello!’ and ‘Bye-bye!’ was all I got.

We felt bad about appropriating their lifestyles for blogular and social-networking purposes.

And we definitely shouldn’t have taken a picture of this dude’s underwear.

But these neighborhoods probably won’t exist in 10 years. Or 5. So I’m glad I took these.

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The Occidental tourist

We roughed it with Chinese coffee

We miss skylines

We went to an event at the Danish Embassy. Because we are canape-whores.

We lamented that cameras cannot capture the turpentine smell of Beijing’s moats and canals

We worried about our cardiovascular health

We ate with our hands

We summitted something called ‘The Fragrant Mountain’

We stopped smiling in pictures

We took the lazy-chair to the top of the mountain

We documented fall’s last throes

We tried to get to temples outside of the tourist-area, but they were blocked

We noticed that Chinese tourists never get off the official path

We did not remotely wonder where China’s pollution problem comes from

We did obligatory tourist things

We were too cheap to buy tickets to the proper temple, so we took pictures from outside

We went training at one of those outdoor calisthenics-parks

We wondered if the temples were originally designed to include ticket offices

We’re glad we visited the Forbidden City on a weekday, so we didn’t have to Photoshop out tourists

We got a bit templed-out by the end, to be honest

We liked the way the sunrise lit the willow trees

We watched the rich neighborhoods from the poor neighborhoods

We stopped our bikes at unexplainable boats

We ate dog

We took pictures of the dawn’s early light

We stood proudly in the sunset

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