Og love Amazon.

Og here. Og come to work in morning, look in cave where Og mail get put. Og have small brown thing in mail cave. Og look closer - Og have package from Amazon.com. Og place order last week. Amazon split order up, send half early, half late. This early half.

Og now have TREASURE PLANET SOUNDTRACK.

Og not impressed BB Mak song, but James Horner score good. And John Rz- R- Og like first song on soundtrack even though Og not able say last name person from Goo Goo Dolls who sing first song. Og thinking go through soundtrack for Iron Dog main character - Og have two soundtrack CD for him - find place put first Treasure Planet song. Too good not to use.

Treasure Planet come out DVD and video April 29. Og thinking good thing ask for birthday.

Just caught myself bouncing up and down.

And do you know why? I'll tell you why. It is because, on a hunch, I tapped 'Hostelling International' into Google. I found the organization's main web site at http://www.iyhf.org. I was remembering my trips to Canada fondly - the hostels in British Columbia were quite nice, whether they featured the Magic Triangle or not - and thought perhaps there might be something of that nature available in China. I truly mean no offense to the hotels in the Frommer Travel Guides, since they're evidently places of some quality and good value, but ... well, I'll explain later. Anyway, I went to http://www.iyhf.org.

Link on the home page: Focus on China. Hosteling is not all that common in China but a number of places have been built in some of the cities, sez the page. Not in Hong Kong or Wuhan - where I have penpals - but quite a few in Beijing, where I have got to visit 'cos there's enough museums and historical stuff there to make even my head go 'splodey. They're located all over the city, one near the airport, one in the town center. The Zhaolong International one is an annex of a five star hotel. There are rooms with two beds, rooms with four beds, and rooms with six beds...

... all of which cost six dollars American a night.

Let me repeat that. $6.00. As in, I could stay for a month and pay no more than I would to spend two nights in the Parsippany Sheraton. Yes, I'd have to share a room with strangers, but so what? I did it in Canada. And do you know why I did it in Canada?

Because I hate hotels. The rooms are too big. I have always had a very small room; my largest room came when I was in freshman year of college, at a time when I had a Schroedinger's roommate. (She was technically there if you looked on the office records, but since I never actually saw any evidence of her being there, she existed in an indeterminate state that would have been collapsed by the observation of an outside entity.) I didn't mind that too much, but that was because I lived there. That space was mine and I could claim it. A hotel's different. You aren't going to be there long, and there's going to be someone else there soon, and when you leave you come back only to find that the room's been reset to its original state. It isn't your space and it never will be, so when you lock the room door at night and finally turn off the TV there is no way of avoiding it: you're not in your territory. It's big, empty, and quiet; it's unnerving. Even when you're there for three weeks straight.

Hostels are different. There's people. They're interested in roughly the same things you are: travel and sleep. At least, in my experience they were. The hostels themselves are interesting, not mass-manufactured egg crates for humans. And they don't carry the same vague feeling of 'I should probably be doing more for my money than just sleeping and storing my things' that hotels do; when I spend $60, $80, or whatever per day on something I feel a bit odd about not getting more out of it than a bed and cable TV. I have very little use for my hotel room except as a safe place to sleep and a place to store my clothes. If I want to meet someone or entertain them or be entertained by them, there are places for that. Why bother if I can get the same level of shelter from the elements at a price I can afford? Sharing a room with strangers who just want to sleep is a small thing, hardly worth mentioning. $6 American a night is less than you'd spend on food here.

Well, anyway, that's why I was bouncing up and down and squee-ing. Cheap place to stay in a decent part of town. Now if I can find some tour or something that'll get me to Wuhan and HK, I'll be golden. I want to visit my penpals as well as all the rest, but for now, things just got a lot easier to deal with.

*choke*

Was looking for information on train travel to Wuhan. HK and Beijing v. easily accessible by air or train, but most tour agencies don't talk about Wuhan. Turns out the place is like Detroit, only economically much better off and environmentally scary - during the summer they call it one of China's "Three Furnaces" because it gets THAT DAMN HOT. Anyway, a train line runs from Beijing to HK and back again, with stops in several cities including Wuhan. Price for the whole train ride is around $190. I shall have to ask Sunshine Tours (they're located in the Empire State Building) what the price would be to do the on-again-off-again thing, but this is at least reassuring. I really don't fancy the idea of domestic air in a country where my understanding of the written language is less than splendid. ("Um... sir... the lady at the airport told me to get on this plane, but... I could be really wrong, but this looks like Mongolia.") At least with trains you have a chance of figuring things out over time, or getting off at the next stop if there is a problem.

Further research into Wuhan itself revealed that there are other cities in the area considered much more appropriate for tourists. It's just that Wuhan is terribly central and right smack on the Yangtze, plus the whole industrial powerhouse thing. (Think Detroit at its height. Now give it the population of modern-day New York City.) Lots of business stuff, but not all that much tourism. I found a site that was willing to give me the lowdown on the place and started scanning through the attractions. I was nodding at the bit about pavilions with great river views and Buddhist temples, and then I saw this line:

"Surprisingly enough, there are some pleasant little streets and backwaters to be discovered around here and the area around Zhanghan Lu (good for shopping) was apparently the spot where Bladerunner was filmed."

!!

Memo to self: get cardboard cutout of Harrison Ford before trip... *ahem* Anyway. I did find one other thing about the city that made me choke. There was a link in the 'sights' navigation bar that seemed odd, because all it said was 'Chibi'. Y'all know me, you know cadhla; if you're like me and you know her, then your natural thought is 'what does a big-ass industrial Chinese city have to do with weird Japanese art styles?'. Turns out that's not what it means - thank God. Not at all. No, it's this, instead:

"If you don't know the history of Chibi (Red Cliff), the place won't look much more than a village to you..."

I got as far as the words "Red Cliff" before I choked. Red Cliff, or Red Bluffs if you ever read Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe 2, is the site of the single most climactic battle in all of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I'm not sure exactly how to compare it to stuff in Western epic literature, as it hasn't exactly the mythic significance of Arthur's battle at Mount Badon- I suppose the use of intelligence, trickery, Taoist magic, and a handful of skilled warriors against an enormous if not exactly well-finessed fleet makes it the equivalent of the battle of Helm's Deep, only no Rohirrim or swishy elves and the explosives would have been used from the fortress against the Uruk-hai instead of the other way around.

Dude. I have to go. Even if it is only a moderately attractive city and Chibi (mostly just a village now, but there's a monument outside town) is eighty km away. ctrips.com says it's a 2.5 hour train ride to Chibi. I can live with that. I'll bring a camera, I'll bring a sketch pad, I'll scare my penpal.

... Christ, I really AM Carrot, aren't I? Some of the most gorgeous scenery in the country lies in other cities along this river, and what gets me excited? The place of historical significance in a work of ancient literature. I wonder if they've got an interesting bit of iron bollard.

Oh, and ctrips.com reports that most of the accommodations in the city of Wuhan are upscale, because it's business travelers. Cheap hotels don't like renting to foreigners. The universities, on the other hand, rent dorm beds to foreign students. I'm looking at a rate between $3 and $16 American (30 RMB to 140 RMB) a night, with the current exchange rate.

I am so easy to please sometimes.