Sunday, March 13, 2011



A village right out of the highlands of Northern Laos, a few minutes after the huge lurching sleeper bed bus I was riding in nearly careened off the hairpin cliffside road carved into the mountainsides into the verdant, ferny ravines hundreds of feet below (this was nothing new to me though---Mexico, Colombia, and Central Northern China came to mind) (I was in the far back bunk with six other people, including what sounded to be a Fujian father, mother, grandma, and toddler, and an old man from Anhui, who would not stop spouting Chinese revisonistico-mishistorical propaganda and asking questions about America (I could understand a good amount of his Mandarin, but I am far more used to the Northeastern Dialect Dongbeihua having lived in Shenyang for a year and "Manzhoulihua" having lived in Manzhouli for a year) and gurgling phlegm from his chest, hocking great gelatinous globs of shining amoebous yellow out the window of the speeding bumpety beast of our passage.