Andy H.

At the Cambie B-line stop today there was a man shouting in to the new skytrain station, probably, I thought, at the transit cops checking people's fare there. "There is no law in December!" he shouted. Was it a prophecy? It's not December yet, but I'll post my novels anyway.

CJ Cherryh, Precursor
CJ Cherryh, Defender
Elizabeth Bear, All the Windwracked Stars
CJ Cherryh, Explorer

I like the way that the focal and heroic action of the Foreigner series is diplomatic negotiation rather than violent conflict.

There was a talkative, raspy-voiced homeless woman on another of my buses to whom the other passengers seemed more hostile than is normal in that situation. That character is usually male in my experience, so I wonder if it was a gender thing? (Another hypothesis: the Olympics are exacerbating class tension. (Is it still legal to say that on the internet? TOPICAL HUMOUR.) But that's been going on for a while.) At any rate, I felt bad for her. There were these three teenagers in particular (though it wasn't just them) who started loudly making jokes about her presumed drug habit; they also spent a while imitating a broad Indian accent, which I think was unrelated. Stay classy, male teenagers.

Those Koodo gingerbread person ads progressed really quickly to autocannibalism! It's kind of the obvious place to go, but I wasn't really sure they would.

I got distracted while I was composing this, so then it became December after all.

P.S. I turned 26! A while ago, I mean. Now I must continue writing one million papers.

Coming home from UBC, I took the 99 to Broadway [edit: Broadway and Granville, that is] and then the 17 downtown (which isn't as weird as it might seem, since the 99 is fast enough that I caught a significantly earlier 17 than I would have if I'd taken it from school in the first place). On the 17 I sat next to a slim black woman in her forties; on her other side, sitting forward, instead of sideways like us, because he was at the very back of the bus, was a young asian man with 80s rock star hair, and on our way downtown the two of them had a conversation. These are only excerpts, as filtered through my imperfect recollection.

He was from China; he had been here in Vancouver about a month. She had been here for seventeen years, but he didn't hear her say so, because he was carrying on one of his own thoughts from before at the same time. He had recently graduated from high school, and was here, apparently, preparing to go to UBC.

"Do you like your country?" she asked. "What?" "Do you... Do you like China? Is China good?" "Oh. Yes!" "Ha ha, that's good. Are you -- " "China is cool!"

"How long have you been here?" he said, because he had not heard her before. "Oh, a long time," she said. "Twenty years?" "No, no. Seventeen years!" "Ahh. Where are you from?" "Ethiopia." "Ethi...?" "Ethiopia. East Africa. You know, Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt..." "Ahh. Ethiopia. Like, in the Olympics!" "Yes, yes, that's right." "Africa." "Yes. Not West Africa, though! That's, that's Africa. Afro-America. No. I am from East Africa."

She was happy to be living here; she thought that he would like it, too. "It is nice here. Very, very beautiful. Friendly. Peace, peace, lots of peace." "The prisons are nice," he said. Prisons? Was he making fun of her? "Eh?" "The prisons are nice." But she took it in stride. "Yes, yes. Peace everywhere. It is good. Not so much of that war and fighting. In East Africa, Ethiopia sometimes, phwoo, oh my God!"

"Do you believe in Jesus?" "No," he said. "No? What do you believe in?" "I am... Not religious." "No? Oh my God, oh my God!" she laughed. "So you are just like, woo!" and she made an expansive gesture with her arms, as though indicating a person scattering in all directions. "Yes, that is me." "Here, here, I have something for you." She opened her purse, and removed some little cards with religious scenes printed on them. He took a couple. "Ah. Jesus," he said, cautiously identifying the main figure in the picture. "Yes. These are for you. Keep them with you. The story on the back of that one is very nice. It's good. Keep them in your purse."

"I like Korean food," she said. "You like Korean food?" he repeated. "Yes, I like Korean food, and Japan food. Chinese food, I have never tried that. No one ever takes me to it! But many of my friends are Korean." "I really like Japanese food," he said. "You do? I like it, too. I would like to try Chinese food. I hear that it is very hot. I like that." "Yes, I like Japanese food. But I love my country!"

This keyboard is wrestling me for control; the button that turns on the katakana is very easy to hit in place of the space bar. Also, I cannot find the apostrophe, so I suppose that I will have to avoid contractions or possessives.

I have been in Kyoto, which for years has been at the top of my list of places to visit that I never yet had, for two full days now. I want to talk about that, but it is difficult to figure out how. There is so much that is just experience; I cannot break it down into words yet. It is, as prophesized, very likely the most beautiful place I have ever been.

Our temple schedule has been very intense. We visited something like six yesterday, and passed countless more as we walked between them. By the end of the day, our eyes were glazed and our legs sore (I personally was also dehydrated). Today we did less, and did more bussing than walking, but my legs were already primed to soreness. I did see the famous rock garden at Ryoanji, which surprised me by being beautiful, not in an abstract or intellectual way but in a very accessibly visceral one. It really does look like islands.

There are a lot of Japan-things, most of which are what you would expect. They have a mascot for everything, down to the garbage cans, which display proudly on the sides a pair of egg people whose greatest joy is apparently to sweep up litter. Schoolchildren, especially girls, wave and shout, Harro! and, See you! (I cannot find the quotation marks, either.) The vast majority of written or spoken warnings and advisories I cannot understand. English shows up in strange and whimsical ways, often grammatical, or almost so, but clearly constructed from the outside. When I hear it, I fall naturally back into my pattern of unconscious comprehension, before recalling with a shock that it is not normal here.

Last night a bunch of us went out for dinner at a restaurant with a vast menu full of tiny pictures that we could not really interpret. (Everyone but me was also going out drinking, but, surprisingly, I did not mind this. I have discovered that if I like someone, there is a good chance that I will enjoy their company even drunk. They get clumsier and inappropriately loud, and laugh at stupid things, and repeat their jokes in case you did not hear, so it is kind of like they all turn into me.) Some of our number had rudimentary or even complex Japanese, but this did not much help; we got into a series of strange and remarkable misunderstandings, which included accidentally ordering three dishes and spending about five minutes cycling through the same dialogue as we tried to indicate that crab was okay. They kept trading out for serving staff who were slightly better adept at English (after the first lady, who tried, just like anyone else dealing with a foreigner, shouting slowly at us in her native tongue); finally we ended up with a guy who asked where we were from.

Vancouver? He had been there. I like (he said) winter sports, and then he turned and did this strange illustrative bum-wiggle, and left. This, for me, was the last straw, and I laughed confused and helplessly for a very long time.

There were more misadventures, before the meal was over, but now I need to get off because a lot of people are waiting, and I have been on way too long. I will try to write more later.

There was this fellow sitting on the bus this morning, perhaps in his late twenties, short-haired, sharp-faced, in a rumpled suit; I'm not very good at gauging these things by accent and complexion, but I think that he was somehow middle eastern. At one point he took out a large wad of money, and as he began to sort through it, a loonie fell to the ground. He picked it up, dropped it again, and leaned to pick it up again. At this point I guess I turned away for a while; somehow it followed that he managed to come to be sitting on the loonie, and unable to find it, until a woman sitting across from him helpfully pointed out that he might find it if he stood up.

He did so, and then, perhaps by way of embarrassed explanation, he tried to start a conversation with the woman. Unfortunately, she clearly found his accent impenetrable. The exchange went something like this:

"I am not from British Columbia. I am visitor here."

"Mm?"

"I am visitor to your city. [Something else that I couldn't quite make out]"

"What?"

"I am from capital of Canada. House of Commons, you understand that?"

"What?"

"House of Commons!"

And he scowled and turned pointedly away from her, just as though he were the one who had just been subjected to an obnoxious tourist. After a minute or two of sitting like that, twisted toward the front of the bus, he (checked his pockets suspiciously to make sure he had all his change and) went up and asked the bus driver if the latter could "let him off" at Burrard and Georgia (I think he also said something about an 'embassy', but I'm not sure what). The bus driver assured him that this would be in keeping with the general practise. Then the fellow came back up the aisle and paused to announce to all of us, in an expansive way,

"I am from capital of Canada! House of Commons!"

It was about this point that I began naturally to suspect that the man was actually some sort of fantastically inept spy, who had chosen for his cover story citizenship of a city whose name he actually didn't know. I listened with fascination as he proceeded to the back doors and began to talk loudly on his cell phone, but all I could gather was that he was talking about a plane trip he planned soon to take. Astonished murmurs regarding the fellow swelled between my fellow passengers; eventually, we reached Burrard, and he got off as promised.

The next stop was mine; as I got up to go to the door, I could have sworn I saw the woman he'd been talking to speaking, quietly, into her iPod. So I guess she was also a spy. I'll bet her side is winning.

The buses may or may not be shut down tomorrow, though at least one of my classes will be going ahead despite the prospective teachers' strike. I guess we'll see if I can go in.