August 27 - 06

Airports in China. There must be something wrong in an airport when you are allowed to walk through immigration as you drink a 1 liter bottle of beer in front of the officials and at the same time check your luggage in. In China, this seems to be no problem (see photo on the right).

Here's another funny thing that happens in airports and airplanes in China, but before telling you, it must be put in context. Chinese airplanes, especially the small ones used for local short distance flights, are well known for having accidents on a regular basis. A lot of Chinese people have this unspoken fear when boarding planes and usually buy the Airplane Insurance (at a kiosk by the check-in counters) where you pay something like the equivalent to 6 USD and get 100 reimbursed to your family if the plane crashes. I'm probably exaggerating a little, but it's really not far from the truth.

So how can you try to ease the stress and relax the hundreds of thousands of people that get on a plane everyday in China? You play America's Funniest Home Videos (AFV). This has been a fairly recent craze. No matter what airport you're at or which airplane you're getting on, you will be guaranteed decent doses of laughter. But does it work for Chinese?

Western humor and Chinese humor is very different needless to say. While I'm sitting in the waiting room or at my seat on the plane, crying tears of laughter watching all these stupid accidents on AFV, very few of my Chinese neighbors can relate to my joy. Still, it's a kick.

August 24 - 06

MPS. Have you gotten the latest piece of technology? The MPS. My Turkish buddy acro-champion living in Beijing thought of this great invention. You see, us westerners in China have a problem: there is only so much chicken & peanuts we can eat (also known as the famous Kung Pao Chicken). After a while you get tired of rice, the oily food, dumplings, baozi's etc. I think I've said this before, Mc Donald's becomes heaven here in China. When we're mad at the world and particularly at Chinese when unable to tolerate cultural differences (this happens from time to time), there's only one place that can restore our energy levels and transport us back across the Pacific: Mc Donald's.

For this my friend Levent came up with a brilliant idea which Mc Donald's is already selling to foreigners in China. The new MPS: Mc Donald's Positioning System. The device looks like a regular GPS. It makes use of the new Mc-Satellites they have positioned all around the globe. Turn on your new MPS and it will beep (or vibrate) whenever you come into proximity range of a Mc Donald's You can set the range you want it to be sensitive to. You can even start the order through the MPS so that when you get to the Mc Donald's, your delicious food will be ready to be eaten.

Thank you Levent for such a great invention! You shall never be forgotten.

*for you gullible people out there, this IS a joke. There is no such thing as a McSatellite or a McGPS! ;)

August 23 - 06

Pulled over. Riding motorcycles is strictly forbidden in Shenzhen. Nevertheless, I've decided to take my chances and make good use of my foreign face to get away with breaking the law. Many people have warned me about getting pulled over, and perhaps even getting my motorcycle confiscated. Well today, not far from home, as I rode down a main road, I saw a about 10 policemen standing on the side with a few cones getting ready to pull people over. As they spotted me from the distance, I clearly noticed how one of the cops raised his arm indicating me that my fate had come to an end: I was being pulled over for driving a motorcycle without a license plate, without a driver's license, and in a place where motorcycles are simply forbidden.

I slowly pulled over with the biggest smile possible stuck on my face, I needed to be as friendly as possible. In these situations, I've learned that the best is to obviously pretend like I don't speak chinese, but also pretend like I don't speak english. So I saluted them with a warm 'HOLA!'. I turned off my bike, snatched the key out of the ignition and waited to be accused for my insolent behavior. This is what happened next:

Cop #1: Woaaah, a foreigner! Woah, a moto-cross bike!! Woaaaah!!

Cop #2: Woaaah, so cool! I've never seen one of these around here! woaaah so cool!

Cop #3: (as he circled me and walk around the bike) Woaaah, he doesn't even have a license plate! Woaah, so badass!

Cop #4: (looking at his boss, the fatter dude sitting on a plastic chair drinking tea out of a marmalade jar) - Boss, what do we do?

Boss: AAAAGH! Just tell him to go go go!

So what's the lesson here? Chinese cops are the coolest cops on the planet!! hehe.

August 21 - 06

It's all relative. I recently bought a 7-DVD compilation of Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' (if you're not familiar with Carl Sagan, have a blast: www.carlsagan.com) Anyways, it has been a while since I haven't written a single word here, or at least something relevant coming more from me than just a few blogs on paragliding or conspiracy theories on the US government. After watching and investigating much about what Carl Sagan did throughout his lifetime, the truth is, I'm confused.

Doesn't it seem to you that the world is going bezerk lately? I'm not implying it's been completely stable throughout history, but it just seems that recently everything is going wrong. More Tsunamis in Indonesia. The south of China has been hit by at least 5 typhoons in the past two and half months completely destroying small villages and towns, killing hundreds. North Korea's nuclear problem. Japanese, South Koreans and Chinese fighting over tiny islands. Hezbollah and Israeli conflicts, huge cities deserted, thousands of deaths. The very recent bomb threats at the London airport. Bomb threats on trains in Germany. Katrina and all of its siblings erasing lives and housing on the southern coast of the US. All this and much more if you follow news.

Or am I completely wrong? Has the world always been like this and it's only now, as the years pass and I open my eyes a little more everyday, that I have started to absorb what's out there and realize what place we have, not in our society, not in our country or world, no only in time, but in this Cosmos. The word cosmos comes from greek, which means 'everything'. In a way, cosmos is also order, cosmos is the opposite of chaos. So, what are we, human beings, doing in this cosmos? For this it is important to put things into perspective and I will try to illustrate it just as Carl Sagan did for me:

First of all, take a few moments to picture in your head a year calendar: January through December, 12 months, 365 days. Got that in your head?

Okay, now imagine that on January 1st, 00:00:00am at the very first second the Big Bang took place (the beginning). Then picture December 31st, 23:59:59.999999 as the present: today. In the middle is all the stuff that happened in between in order to get us where we are right now. So how long have us humans been around when looking at the 'Cosmic Calendar'? Want to take a guess? 3 months of the cosmic calendar? 1 month? does 2 days seem to little? Try 15 seconds. Everything we know about humankind, all the dates you've memorized in history class, pyramids, gladiators, ancient wars, first writings, etc, only falls into the last 15 seconds of our cosmic calendar. It only started happening on December 31st, 23:59:45.

Still not very clear? Here's a better way to look at it:

December

*diagram by Carl Sagan in his making of Cosmos

If you managed to fit that into your head, which I think is a very clear and amazing way to compress the vast universe of time into a simple concept for us to understand, then you have by now realized that we are only but a grain of sand sitting in a large cosmic ocean.

Now think, in the cosmic calendar, dinosaurs lasted about 5 entire days!! Then they were wiped off through natural selection (some say an asteroid or comet hit the earth submerging it into a dark cloud which prevented them from surviving. Other life forms did survive though). Us humans have been around for 15 seconds, what has been guaranteed for us on the earth? With all the problems our species is going through, it's hard to believe we'll be a successful kind. Most likely, the way I see it, we'll be wiped out in another few seconds of the 'cosmic calendar'. Hey, if we make it to a minute I would be surprised.

So again I ask myself, what are we doing here? Doesn't it seem a little surreal? I know we've all asked ourselves these questions and that this is not some kind of breakthrough I'm trying to illustrate. These thoughts however, usually don't go past laying in bed, looking at the ceiling wondering the why's and how's of our surroundings, then waking up the next morning and we keep going on with our lives. Some people have spent their entire lives using this consciousness that separates us from other species trying to figure out where we come from, and although they have come with very interesting facts, we're still at the starting line in the grand scheme of things.

Metaphysically speaking, what are we supposed to do in a place completely impalpable as is the world we live in? This is when I started asking myself what I wanted to do with my life, or even better, how do you know whether or not you've done something with it? Is it really about contributing to 'society' and the world that surrounds us? Is it really about us making a difference? A difference in what? We wont last longer on earth than some lizards did millions of years ago. Dinosaurs, whom we presume never used cars, computers, airplanes, rockets, nor ate Kentucky Fried Chicken, etc., seemed to be doing pretty well until they got hit by a huge asteroid. So where's their contribution? And where's ours? Helping people less or more fortunate than us? Helping a dying environment that we are destroying ourselves? What is happening now with the human race is clearly a process of natural selection from my point of view. Maybe our brains grew too big through the process of evolution and we became so intelligent that the earth is simply going to exterminate us because that's not who's supposed to live here.

Hedonic: n. devoted to pleasure. I distinctly remember when I first learned this word many years ago, it really had an impact on me and I started thinking differently: humans for the most part are always looking for pleasure in life. There are several ways of doing this from my point of view, some are directly self-inflicted upon, such as eating a delicious pistachio flavored ice cream and another way is doing it indirectly such as providing help and changing the lives of others. Some of you might be thinking 'this guy's a bastard, he thinks people only help others in order to feel self-satisfaction'. Well, although in your conscious mind that might not be the reason, I do think that each and one of us, in a way, performs these acts in order for ourselves to feel better about ourselves, thus creating pleasure. It's all about pleasure.

This takes me to selfishness which in some way is related to the unrelenting search for pleasure. Many writers and philosophers have clearly come to the conclusion that solitude and a certain level of selfishness is the only way to truly get to know ourselves better. Have you ever spent a month on your own having little contact with other people? You'll be surprised of the things you will start thinking about. In the same train of thought, should we then rely on this selfishness to attain pleasure? Are selfish acts all that bad? Can the purpose of our life simply be to be happy with ourselves trying to reach pleasure? Or do we really have to make our contribution to society? I do understand that if our ancestors and great thinkers throughout history had this theory, then I probably wouldn't be sitting in China typing on a computer posting on a website which can be viewed worldwide. So should I base my actions solely on the fact that I have to do the same than others did in the past so that this 'short and defective' species that are human beings can keep going through the years working on their own extinction? Like I said, we're not dinosaurs because our brains developed in a way no other species had the chance to. The consequence is that we thought too much and are therefore being eliminated by the natural selection process. Could this really be possible?

Much of this inquiring arose from a question somebody recently posed to me: what do you see yourself doing in 10 years? what's your plan in life? - Wow. I mean, I have asked myself this question before, and I wouldn't say I'm completely lost in life with no bearing at all, but I never really like to plan like that and have never seen anything wrong with it. As a result, I did not have a concrete response for this person. Then the person insisted that I could not turn around in 10 or 15 years and say 'what have I done? nothing'. So my question is, what do I have to do so that I have done something ? Right now I'm living in China, starting a business which I am positive will be successful in a year or two and in the meantime I work on my personal quest for pleasure. I want to make sure I grow certain independence so that I can still do the things I love to do. I am terrified by monotony and a sedentary lifestyle. Is there something wrong with that? Or do I have to do something for others in order to be accepted by society as someone who has accomplished something?

I guess that I'm just getting to that point in life where I'm deeply thinking not really about things I should do in life, but the real reasons behind these accomplishments that should be made. Yes, many people are successful. They say 'I started a company, created employment, fed hundreds of families'. So where does this success come from? Did it come from the food that went into those people's mouths? Or simply the feeling of self-satisfaction and pleasure the person had when creating these opportunities for others? What's the fuel that drives us and maintains day after day? Whom are we doing this for? Should there be a reason?

Some of the thoughts I have just written here may seem a bit cynical, but again, it's all questioning I'm doing. Thinking out loud and sharing my thoughts with you. There are way too many things we still ignore, sometimes it's fun to just sit down, think, and try to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Some people are obviously more fortunate than others as to the way they were brought into this world, but there's no harm in doing some out-of-the-box thinking, looking at this planet from far away, from a place where we can't see the fine points that pollute our species.

August 19, 20 - 06

Educational/Paragliding weekend. What started as a flying weekend when one of the Chinese pilots offered me a ride in his SUV to go with them to a small village 60km north of Guangzhou (which ends up being like 180km north of Shenzhen), ended up twisting itself into some sort of cultural submersion program. This weekend I learned how different people from Beijing and Shenzhen are. Geez, I'd like to be able to get into further details and be more explicit as to what I observed and learned, but I'm afraid it could create some turmoil amongst my fellow Chinese readers.

On Saturday, weather was crappy. The mountain's take-off site stood up at a height of about 650m above the LZ (landing zone). The flying there was entirely thermal, no dynamic wind whatsoever. The weather was not very promising, too foggy which did not allow the sun to pierce through the dense air and heat up the surface enough to create thermals. Result: we all fell like pianos and landed in less than 15min.

Sunday, weather was a little better, but thermals still not strong enough to stay up. One guy took off at the right moment and managed to climb up to 1,250m. The rest of us, who took off a few minutes later, were stuck scraping the rocky walls which seemed to be our only hope to find the faintest thermal. The flight only lasted about 30 minutes.

The village we left from (Shenzhen)	The village we got to (Qingyuan)	Another way to carry things	A river where we took a bath
Local kids	HH's daughter and a local kid	Take-off	Baba take gets ready...
...still Baba...	...baba jumps...	...baba leans forward...	...see baba fly!
	HH's daughter watches her dad.

August 03 - 06

This must be seen. Watch first. Documentary on 9/11 by Dylan Avery.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Some may think it's all a bunch of lies and false testimonies. I don't know, most of these conclusions seem to be obtainable through simple common sense thinking when reviewing certain facts and footage. Dylan Avery, the director of this documentary, sure put a lot of things into perspective. I lived in DC and was actually by the US Capitol when the alleged plane hit the Pentagon. I spoke to people I know who worked at a marine less than 500 meters away from the Pentagon. You would be surprised to hear what they said.

More info: loosechange911.com