Posted 10:04 PM by Blah blah

With all of Christine's talk of going to China and what it might be like, we should have seen this girl much earlier! Tina of volatile.org is an Asian-Caucasian girl from Vancouver who just started working in Beijing. Her observations crackle from the start and drew me in:

From "Hanoi Nights"...

We mostly rode during our favourite hours, surrounded by shimmering night landscapes. We rode down row after row of grey and shuttered shop fronts, inhaled wafts of reeking garbage at the side of the roads, and skidded down streets which were slick and glistening after being passed over by the cleaning trucks. There were the migrant workers doing the night shift as we careered by and the man, penis in hand, peeing into the street a long arc of wet splashing in front of the bia hoi stall. Along the alleys, there were women of questionable repute idling in the doorways of red-lit karaoke bars. After the dark unlit tangle of streets in the city, we would burst out onto the dusty and empty outside roads and highways, so wide and dotted with flyways - modernity! - and sickly orange lights. Later, as we sidled back to his apartment, there were the muted murmurs and occasional shouts from late-night carousers drinking beer or slurping noodles at the stand on the pavement across the street.

The beauty of nighttime in Hanoi came from the stark contrast of the in-your-face humanity of the daytime and the eerie, almost total, emptiness of the night. It felt infinitely lonely yet full of possibility, with the knowledge of a pulsing sleeping mass of people hidden behind the shuttered shop fronts. In the dark emptiness of the night, there was a sense of wild freedom, epitomized by the two boys who once screamed past us on their motorbike.

If you can tear your soul out of her vivid travels for a while, also check out her imaginative other sections, like The Kiss Project. Tina is so much fun!

She also post this report she wrote for a class on owners of personal websites, including online journals. She surveyed a bunch of us to get her results.

Chi just put up his new site. He's back. I love his design---artistic, poetic, uncluttered. Check him out!