backpacking

Just got back from India.

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Not really in the mood to upload them to this site, but you can find photos @ instagram.com/travelingknox

It was quite an interesting experience. Exactly what I expected. The food was good, the roads were hectic and monuments were ancient. People were friendly but the customer service sucked (funny how they’ve outsourced our customer service there). I saw wild cows and dogs on the road, and found out new dehli was predominately hindu and muslim, not as many buddhists nor Gautama statues as I anticipated.

The tipping culture reminded me that of the U.S which threw me off since I haven’t been in a tipping culture in over 5 years and haven’t been back to the U.S in 2, so having to dig in my pocket to fork over 15% was a little annoying but luckily it was just rupees and the conversion rate is crazy. Speaking of conversion, you’ll of course go shopping and get haggled, have people following you around asking for money (they put extra effort into tourists of course) and you’ll find out that you can bargain prices of items down to damn near 60%, which makes you skeptical of every negotiation you have.

All in all, nothing I haven’t dealt with, and I recommend everyone at least visit once in their life.

Three day weekend? Not in China.

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There’s a lot of holidays in China, some traditional, some national. The traditional ones tend to be the most important, I would rank Chinese New Years the most important, it typically lasts about a week. Other holidays are much shorter such as Autumn Festival (think Thanksgiving) which is usually 3 days. The shorter holidays will start on Thursday, but unlike the U.S., you don’t come into work on Monday, but rather, you have to come into work on Sunday to make up the day you missed due to the holiday. OUCH. That sucks. Be thankful for your 3 day holiday this thanksgiving.

edit: National Holiday is 7 days, the same as Chinese New Years.

On a different note, this Autumn Festival Claire and I took a tour around Qingdao and some small villages on the outskirts of the city, Qingdao is really a beautiful city no wonder I’ve been living here so long. It was nice to see the villages with favela like mountain views of the ocean, it was very green and tranquil in those parts but I couldn’t help but notice that in between there was a lot of construction and big buildings being built in between. What once lied in that area? Will the villages clinging to the cliffs be next? Who knows. I got a chance to record and take some nice video of the tour, I’ll start editing them tomorrow and hopefully have a vlog up later this week it’s been a year since I’ve made a video, even made a couple of sound tracks for it. Let’s see how it goes.

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I haven’t written a blog in months, lets talk about taking a taxi as a black person.

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I was going through my timeline and realized my front page looked like a soundcloud. I should probably stop doing that or at least mix it up a bit more. This is, after all, a blog about china.

Today’s topic will be about taking a taxi as a black person. Now I really don’t like getting into china and ‘racism’ because I don’t like to call what they do here racism. Its ignorance. They just don’t know and are afraid of the unknown. They go by stereotypes they see on tv and make vast assumptions, its not their fault, its a country with 1.4 billion people and they’re all yellow, even the internet is chinese *cough cough*.

Uber has been god sent, I no longer have to deal with this but about a week ago I was reminded of what I had to go through when I first moved here. If you’re waiting for a taxi, especially during rush hour or near a chinese person, the odds are you will be passed up. I don’t know why this is, it’s not like they don’t pick you up at night (shouldn’t they be more afraid at night?), it’s not like if you’re alone during the day and on an empty small street they don’t pick you up, they do, in fact its much easier to catch a cab when it would be the most dangerous time to pick up a threat lol, but a busy street next to a chinese person, especially a girl, forget about it you will be passed up  8 out of 10 times. I’ve learned to adapt however, typically I tell the chinese person I’m next too I have next dibs, so when they  inevitably drive past me and to said person 3 yards away, that person knows I have next and they just allow me to get in, some will even open the door for you :). Problem solved. Anyways, I no longer have to do this, uber to save the day, Murica coming in and regulating without even knowing it. 🙂

Updates

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I haven’t been blogging much. Basically my birthday just past and on the same day I ‘damaged’ my camera for the third time, I swear the lens is weak as piss because I’ve had to go to the notorious computer city for the third time now. I’m still alive and well, but recently I’ve been doing a lot of freelance work and making beats on my spare time trying to finish up this instrumental mixtape (clips down below). But other than that, life has been good, Qingdao is getting colder and I’ll probably be more indoors this winter making music and playing PS4 with the dozen or so games I haven’t been able to play lately. Seriously, I’m aging, and I have the love of my life, the club scene and wildin’ out has faded from my life, and quite frankly I’m glad. Everything is falling into place exactly as I wanted it.

That doesn’t mean no fuckery though, you’re subscribed to me, you know there’s always fuckery. So last weekend (here we go), I wake up with a toothache. Now typically I use champagne to numb whatever dumb shit is happening to my teeth because to be honest I have teeth problems (they’re not crooked or rotting, just aches here and there) due to my love of (sour) candy, I can’t help it, it’s an addiction since I was a teen. But anyways I wake up like whoa whoa what is this????? side of my face felt like a big girl sat on it and it was half flat…that’s around the time I knew hmmmmm maybe I should get this checked out, it kept throbbing more intensely every hour! whoa whoa. By 4pm, I was hauling it to the dentist office, luckily we have one literally a half a block away right next door and they are western educated and speak english. Now, I have  been to this place before they wanted to take a wisdom tooth out and it was fail (I’ll get into this another time) but I had a new dentist named Dr. Irene. I swear, within 5 min of going there she had me in the seat, x-rayed and shot up with novocane, 10 min after, teeth pulled and one root canal, best DR ever! I was feeling great, she pulled a tooth which had already been broken in half from a root canal that was neglected. Kind of strange to see a chunk of bone come out of your mouth, it threw me off.

My jaw is a bit sore and I’m using my secret champagne remedy to numb the area since they don’t have painkillers (thank god), but it’s kept me out of commission these past few days, it’s getting better though, so don’t worry.

I’m doing aright other than that, just living life, going to sort out my camera in a couple of days, and I’m supposed to travel to Korea in a week, hopefully its fixed by then and I can have some cools shots of the DMZ.

Anyways, it’s late and I’m tired, but I just wanted to let yall I am safe and sound, take care folks!

tracks:

While in China, we are content with things being poor quality

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When in Rome China.  One of the things you learn to accept within the first month of living here is that the quality of things are just not up to par with the rest of the world, which is odd since China MAKES everything around the world. Things like rusty gates, rusty lobby doors (damn near every gate/door to enter someones complex is rusty), heck even stainless steel goes rusty, clothes wear down after 6-12 months, cotton starts to turn into thousands of lint balls, colors fade, car and house paint fainting are every day occurrence. Now that I write this I wonder if it’s the quality or just pollution causing all this. HA. Anyways this blog was to talk about how a cool bridge in Henan made international news for being the longest glass bridge in the world. 

Most people in China were excited, but shortly after excitement most people, much like those abroad who had heard about it, questioned it’s quality. “But will it hold up?” “I won’t dare walk on that thing in China”, now me being a foreigner, and completely ignoring the many lessons I have learned, met the comments with optimism “It’ll hold, this is an international attractions, they wouldn’t fumble this, they wouldn’t want to lose face”

WRONG. LOL

I just never learn my lesson, I keep waiting for the day that the tide turns and everything starts to be made in japanese and german quality, yea, no. That bad boy cracked yesterday, and of course now every news circuit has caught wind. Face

lost. Comedy ensues.

bridge cracks, tourists flee in horror

China, we got to do better man, cmon lol.

At what point do we recognize traditional chinese medicine doesn’t work?

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It’s common to hear people avoid a nice cold glass of water because apparently the chinese are under the impression it isn’t good for your system as it lowers your body temp (wtf). Avoiding things like ice cold drinks, pharmaceutical pills and other technologically advanced items which might strike fear in a some grandmothers (remember how she used to think cellphones gave brain cancer and we shouldn’t stand too close to the microwave when it’s on?) is a common trait.  Many chinese, in 2015, still believe these things. It’s common to be served hot water at a restaurant and although that doesn’t bother me as it’s cultural, it somewhat irks me when I order an ice cold glass of water and folks act like I’m going to catch pneumonia, or eating 5 seeds will cure my asthma, no it won’t, and that inhaler won’t give me cancer, in fact it’ll help the asthma within seconds while the seeds won’t do anything. Listen, hot water and tiger nuts haven’t knocked out a cold in 1,000 years. 2 tablespoons of tussin will knock out a cold in less than 8 hours, quit playing games. technology > witchcraft.

At the same time, I could see how a country with loose regulations (FDA? HA!) could make a few folks skeptical. It’s just weird how some are concerned with a pill for a headache might be bad for one’s health, and cold water giving you pneumonia, but no one is saying anything about the various pollution, or how the water appears to rust even  stainless steel. Forget the cold water, you didn’t see the gray haze on the way here?

Now that the one child policy has been relaxed….

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There will be actual brothers and sisters again. Interesting fact, in China, cousins act as a sort of replacement for the lack of brothers and sisters during the one-child policy, prior to the policy the chinese had large families, then there was the implementation thus  you had a lot of siblings with only a single child. This generation grew up with loads of cousins, however, with the one child policy generation, there will be a generation without 1st cousins, their children however will have brothers and sisters again. The one child policy generation sounds like a lonely one without nieces and nephews.