Fixing the World’s Problems

I just finished another Biblical Counseling zoom class.

As the class ended, I gazed at my classmates’ faces and I was so proud of them. Here was a cross section of the Christian world — men, women, young, old, with different ethnicities — who have dedicated several hours each month to learn why and how to fix the human condition. It was already past 9:00 pm, the end of the day, for us at the West coast and (worse) it was midnight already for those on the East coast. Talk about dedication! Some of us are already engaged in counseling broken souls — so great is the need. (Of course, all of this is done under the advice of the teachers). So many have lost their way. We talk about addiction, abuse, depression, divorce, psychological fallacies, trauma, death — all from the perspective of the Bible. Most of us are NOT taking this course to make money. Donations are welcome but not expected. CLICK HERE for the website. 

Do you know anyone needing a therapist? I highly recommend the counselors coming from this institution. Thousands of lives have been helped.  If you want to change lives maybe you should enroll. 

I’m tired. I need to rest.
TGIF people!

Raoul

JOKE OF THE WEEK

Thanks to Ramon of La Mirada, CA

PARTING SHOTS

Thanks to Art of Sierra Madre, CA

Thanks to Tom of Pasadena, CA

I found these

The Traveling Boy

My good friend (and jokester) Terry and I came up with these.

The post Left Side Accident appeared first on Traveling Archive.

“…to tell his whole story in the past tense would bore him a great deal
as well as sadden him a little.” – Lost Horizon

“We only sell tea to go,” says the woman at Ten Fu Tea in the Aberdeen Centre shopping mall in Richmond, British Columbia.

Motionless and disappointed, I contemplate leaving but something tells me to stay. Outside in the mall, the low-frequency roar of a water fountain complements the higher-pitched Chinese instruments—erhu and pipa—that I hear emanating from the canned system. Inside Ten Fu, as I start to nose around, I see a wide variety of loose leaf pu’erh, oolong, and black tea. Tiny $150 cast-iron pots occupy the shelves like royalty. Statues, gifts and figurines abound. I order pu’erh in a paper cup, hoping its earthy muse-like tendencies will harmonize the eastern and western spheres of myself.

Asian and Asian Canadians make up about 60 to 70 percent of Richmond’s population, much of which is Hong Kong Chinese. Parts of Richmond remind me of Hong Kong, but without the density and without the skyscrapers. Hundreds of Asian restaurants, eateries, tea shops and hole-in-the-wall joints populate the landscape. Eccentric old side-streets bisect lengthy Los Angeles-style thoroughfares.

Everywhere I roam, Asian-themed shopping centers seem to emerge over and over again. Some are new and shiny, while others evoke more grungy atmospherics. Aberdeen Centre is one of the newer ones. On a previous Richmond visit, in 2004, I got to see the mall when construction was still underway. Now it’s a shiny, angular and well-illuminated place thanks to multicolored glass paneling on the top floor.

All in all, Richmond is a righteous town in which to explore one’s lost eastern half through the muse of tea. I don’t mean “lost” in a negative sense. To paraphrase Ikkyu, the heroic drunken Zen monk of yore: If I don’t have a destination, then I can’t possibly get lost.

The senior-aged woman inside Ten Fu looks horrified by yours truly when I walk in. Maybe she’s not accustomed to a Zappa-looking freak with a Moleskine notebook ordering a dark pu’erh, claiming it connects him to the earth in some strange quasi-yogic psychobabble.

There’s no place for me to camp out with a pot, but somehow she can tell I’m a serious tea drinker, so she fills a plastic steeper with pu’erh leaves and lets me hang out and stare at all the multicolored tins of tea and Buddhist figurines. After a few minutes of my lazy browsing, she motions for me to park myself at a ceremonial mahogany table near the back, where I take a cup of the tea. A laughing Buddha statue sits in front of me, with large auburn mala beads hanging around his neck.

She slides me a bowl of pumpkin seed candy, fantastic mega-sugary stuff, and then moves away to help other customers, all Chinese. I assume I’ve won her over. She no longer looks horrified.

I can only guess what’s happening. Since a majority of westerners roll in and order something like the stock Jasmine tea in a box—the generic uncreative stuff—maybe she assumes I’m a different kind of customer, that is, one who at least knows pu’erh, one who has a preference. As my wannabe Zappa-turned-Kerouac self sits there scribbling in my notebook and scarfing the pumpkin seed candy, there’s nothing for her, or me, to be confused about. By now, the pu’erh has elicited serenity of the utmost sort.

Dharma and the Mysterious Third Ingredient

Directly across Cambie Street from Aberdeen Centre, the Vancouver International Buddhist Progress Society occupies the sixth floor of the Radisson Hotel building—the only such scenario on earth. There’s a temple, a bookstore, classrooms, a jewelry and souvenir store, plus a tea shop. Upon my arrival, I’m the only one in the tea shop. Everything seems the same beige color: the tables, chairs, walls, everything. Soft piano jazz emanates from the speakers above me.

An older Chinese lady toils away behind the counter and looks utterly horrified when I walk up. I guess I still don’t look like a tea drinker. She hands me a laminated menu and I scan the offerings. Pointing to ginger longan tea, I say, “This one.” She speaks no English, but she acquiesces and motions for me to sit anywhere in the shop, which is still empty.

I slither into a table at the front corner as she gets on the phone to call someone. I understand no Chinese, but I can tell she’s phoning for help. Within a minute, a young woman comes over from the temple area down the hall and informs me that the tea shop doesn’t take cash. I have to get a meal ticket. And my pot of tea is seven dollars. No problem, I say, getting up.

After walking over to the temple area, I see a few ladies behind a check-in table, wearing what look like red flight attendant uniforms. I give them the cash and they issue me a small laminated ticket. The temple is closed off at the moment, so nothing’s going on. I migrate back into the tea shop and give the woman my ticket. She apologizes in Chinese for the trouble, managing the word, ‘sorry’ in the middle somewhere.

The tea arrives ten minutes later. A see-through glass pot reveals strange unidentifiable meaty-looking mélange in the infuser. Turns out it’s ginger, longan and something else I can’t identify. In fact, it’s hard to tell the ginger from the longan.

The tea is amazing. A sweet fruit-like symphony of taste seems to sand down the edges of the ginger notes. Gorgeous. Sad to say, I feel ashamed to admit I don’t know what a longan is. I should.

I ask the woman about the ingredients and she can’t answer. But she manages to say, ‘ginger,’ ‘longan’ and one other ingredient, in Chinese. For that third ingredient, she apparently only knows the Chinese word. After looking at the pulpy experiment enshrouded inside the tea infuser, I am obsessed to learn about this third ingredient. Some kind of fruit, but I can’t tell.

The woman can sense my intrigue, so she dashes out of the shop and returns a moment later with the janitor, a short elderly Chinese man wearing shop overalls. He had been pushing a wheeled garbage can down the hall.

“Do you need help?” He asks.

“I just want to know what’s in this,” I reply, pointing to the infuser. All three of us then laugh. Ginger, longan and some other Chinese thing? I ask.

“I don’t know how to say that in English,” the janitor says.

I ask the janitor to write it down in Chinese, which he graciously does. I then blast it all over Facebook so my Chinese friends can translate. Turns out it’s a dried red date, or something similar.

The mysterious third ingredient. I probably could have figured it out, but I just like saying that phrase: “The mysterious third ingredient.” It has a ring to it. I can’t tell if I’m in a Graham Greene story or a cold war-era John Le Carre novel. But I am serene in the mystery.

When I get up to leave 45 minutes later, I am still the only one in the shop. The woman says thank you in English. I attempt to say xie xie but fail miserably.

Go West, My Wayward Son

If Richmond constitutes an intrinsic place to salvage the lost Eastern half of myself, then Victoria just across the water on Vancouver Island presents an opportunity to salvage the lost Western half. And when those two eventually meet and fuse together, the result is Shangri-la, as we will see.

For starters, I’m at the end of the tea bar at Silk Road Tea, just outside Victoria’s Chinatown, looking at a wall of oolong, black, white, green and herbal teas. Tourists enter the shop straight off the bus seemingly every five seconds. Gifts and tea supplies occupy shelves everywhere. As I spend an hour with a pot of earthly-dark brown pu’erh, I scope out numerous designer tea steepers, infusers, mugs, timers, strainers and displays of exotic glassware, ceramic and cast-iron tea sets. The tourists and nuclear families seem startled and horrified at some loudmouth like me sitting at the end of a tea bar, carrying on about tea as the muse of creativity, fusing the mental with the physical.

The barista dude is an expert. He waxes poetic on all things tea, not just for me, but to anyone who comes in. The pu’erh is connecting me to the earth, so his commentary is refreshing. Not very many people walk in and order pu’erh, he tells me. They usually want the floral stuff.

In my best sober Jack Kerouac English, I say to the barista dude: “You know, I just need to find some esoteric Chinese place with lizards crawling across the fibrous wooden floor, tons of ginseng root hanging on twine, fucked up herbs in every tin cylinder, and a cast iron pot of earthy pu’erh, blacker than the ace of spades, bark-tasting, the kind that shatters the space-time continuum and reconnects me to Tang Dynasty hermits. And then the solitude will be enhanced even more. Know any places like that around here?”

He can’t recommend any, but he appears sympathetic. In any event, Silk Road is unique among tea shops. Each tea has a title and a subtitle. Alchemist’s Brew is “Tea of Transformation.” Herbal Chai is “Cosmic Consciousness.” Sublime is the “Monk’s Elixir.” That last one calms me down, considerably so.

Love and Wisdom

Victoria’s Chinatown is not that big, just a few blocks, but it’s the oldest one in Canada. After leaving Silk Road, I go through the Gates of Harmonious Interest right to Venus Sophia where I find the Prince of Darkness. That is not hyperbole. That’s exactly what unfolds.

The Gates of Harmonious Interest are 40-feet high. The structure is a landmark built in Victoria’s sister city, Suzhou, and presented to Victoria in 1981, partly to memorialize the 61 Chinese-Canadians who fought and died in World War Two. The monument symbolizes a combination of opposites, yin and yang, or to be more precise—unity in duality. Male and female lions grace each side of the entrance. Singh means lion, so I feel at home. Just down this particular street, Fisgard, I discover the goddesses of love and wisdom.

Venus Sophia is a tea shop and vegetarian eatery filled with eclectic furniture, paintings, vintage bicycles on the walls, Indian travel books and tea supplies. A golden pu’erh beckons me and I slide into a corner table after ordering a pot.

Victoria is definitively British, but from the view of my western half, this place, Venus Sophia, this soothing little sanctuary in Chinatown, this gorgeously oddball tea shop, puts me on a course toward finally harmonizing the inner polarities. For a moment, I feel a sense of belonging. No more of this Nehru-style, “mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere,” stuff.

Venus Sophia even sells Oso Negro coffee from not too far away. A blend called Prince of Darkness stares right at me from the shelf. Unfortunately, a complimentary blend, Princess of Darkness, is sold out. There’s none left. Somehow, I find this to be symbolic of my whole journey, in some strange Jungian, animus-and-anima sense.

Kipling’s Empress Muse

The Canadian capital of high tea, Victoria’s Fairmont Empress, was the first property to establish the concept of British-style high tea society anywhere in North America. I also learn, via some impossible cosmic transmission of tea sommelier knowledge, that Rudyard Kipling considered this hotel to be his muse. He drank tea here about the time it first opened, in 1908.

In fact, Kipling visited Vancouver Island a few times. Fortunately or unfortunately, he didn’t have to deal with convoys of tour buses all day long, or incessant amounts of whale watching rubberneckers from across the planet, but he raved about the island in various letters and other writings. He praised Victoria as a fine Devon-style country land where retired civil folk from the good old British Empire could sit around and productively loaf. Photos of Kipling, among various royal family members, highlight quite a few walls, in and about the property.

The tea room, a mammoth space, (for a tea room, that is), serves 500,000 cups of tea each year. I am grateful for the Devil’s Chocolate and Pistachio Battenberg, the Rose Petal Shortbread, and the Cognac Port Pâte on Sun-dreid Tomato Bread, all while I consume the Empress special blend of Assam, Kenyan black, Kenyan green, Sri Lankan Dimbula and Keemun. The special blend is a copper-colored symphony of notes and flavors, although my orchestration chops are long gone, so I can’t describe the different ranges of the instruments and how they complement each other in this fabulous blend of tea.

Since I am the only Zappa-looking dude in the whole place, which is filled with tourists and nuclear families, I sense a tad of uncomfortable stares, especially from the old blue-hairs. But I am dressed at least as good as most of them, oddly enough.

The Muse as Connection Machine in Shangri-la

Finally, the two halves meet and I feel integrated. Two lion-like statues on West Georgia Street in downtown Vancouver are my signals, my signposts, declaring that I have found Shangri-la. Everything comes into perspective, here, amid towering skyscrapers, glass, foliage, dismal skies, shopping, lattes, high finance, urban parks, plus outdoorsy-jacket-and-shorts-wearing cyclists in the pouring rain, and all the things that characterize Vancouver, one of my favorite cities on earth. And the Shangri-la Hotel is now the city’s tallest building.

Throughout the hotel, certain rooms and spaces are named after characters and scenarios from Lost Horizon, the book that gave us the word, Shangri-la. The hotel brand started in Singapore, the lion city, hence the two lions out in front. Again, my surname means lion so everything comes into perspective.

The Shangri-la brand already fuses east and west, even if it seems dumb and cliché to say it that way. Heck, these days, Vancouver feels just as much a part of Asia as it is a part of North America, really. Which is why I love it so much.

In Shangri-la, I feel more at home here than anywhere. No more disenfranchised Nehru stuff. I am serene, at least during the afternoon tea. As a result, I don’t even have to look for an excuse anymore. Everything about the Shangri-la, including the tea service, fuses native with exotic, intimacy with distance, east with west, yin with yang, serenity with chaos. That is the whole idea, from top to bottom, inside and out, around and between. I think the ancient alchemists were right when it comes to merging opposites and transcending duality. One becomes a more integrated person, as a result.

In the Shangri-la, Xi Shi is the bar where the tea service is presented. I am grateful to experience the Szechuan Peppercorn Creme Brulee, the Mango Cream with Sago and Pomelo, plus a Black Sesame Macaron atop a tiered platter next to my Single Estate Oolong from the Fujian province of China.

As I take in the last drop, realizing that each and every sip of tea is indeed a journey, like the aphorism goes, I notice the in-house guitar player is playing and singing a serene jazzy version of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” Way down past the lobby, I can just barely see the traffic outside on Georgia Street, but I hear none of it. I feel very, very Zen inside this place. There is no need to explore this land any further. I am done.

I end up leaving the hotel, and British Columbia, with my own hardback copy of Lost Horizon, a special version published by Shangri-la hotels, for which I am yet again very grateful. A piece of velum lies inside the front cover, regaling me with a quick history of the entire Shangri-la brand. I’ve read parts of the book before, but this copy is unique.

With the Single Estate Oolong still warming my system, I skip to my favorite passage in the book, where the belligerent Christian missionary woman is completely baffled by the monk’s life:

“What do the lamas do?” she continued.

“They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom.”

“But that isn’t doing anything.”

“Then, madam, they do nothing.”

“I thought as much.” She found the occasion to sum up. “Well, Mr. Chang, it’s a pleasure being shown all these things, I’m sure, but you won’t convince me that a place like this does any real good. I prefer something more practical.”

“Perhaps you would like to take tea?”

The post Tea From Richmond to Shangri-la, British Columbia appeared first on Traveling Archive.

It is not often that a toilet and a tea ceremony form perfect metaphors for the culture of a country, but so it is in Japan.

The toilet falls into the realm of delightful personal discoveries — albeit all of them in the hotel bathroom of the Kyoto Park Hotel. First, a warm toilet seat along with musical options with a variety of buttons that cleaned more areas with water spray than I have nether region body parts, a portion of the large bathroom mirror that remained perfectly clear even after an exceptionally steamy shower which co-incidentally was the most invigorating I’ve ever had. Plus a sophisticated hair dryer with more settings than I had hair styles. All a testament to Japanese ingenuity — they apparently don’t only make better cars. However, as I was to discover on our hikes through the countryside, these benefits were not always available. In fact, toilets in general were not always available — or stall showers (but more on that later).

A stop at a tea house illustrated another pervasive element of Japanese custom — the precision with which they do everything. Just the preparation of a simple cup of tea can be a time-consuming, labor-intensive, rule-bound ritualized ceremony — the same is true of a cocktail at a bar. Whether you prefer your drink shaken or stirred — and if shaken, the procedure resembles a professional maracas concert — an air of pomp and circumstance surrounds its presentation. You don’t actually stop for a beverage of any sort on the way to the airport!

From Kyoto and its temple overload, we headed into the countryside to follow the paths forged by feudal lords, daimyos and samurais of the 16-18^th centuries. Traversing the Kiso Road section of the Nakasendo Way — the ancient highway that connected Kyoto with the then-town of Edo, now Tokyo — at a rate of 8-10 miles a day, we traveled past post towns that afforded pilgrims refreshment and accommodations, through mountain passes and alongside Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples.

Every day was an adventure. Past so much greenery as to require a new color delineation to accommodate the different shades. Past sacred stone markings, old rice mills and monumental rock structures representing any variety of gods or demons or homages to emperors and other human or spiritual deities. And then the de riqueur waterfalls that crop up through the beautiful forests that provide a kind of tranquil experience equivalent to the many temples enroute.

As we hiked in and out of shrines, restaurants and tea houses, there’s a lot of taking off of shoes and putting on of slippers — and then taking off those slippers and slipping into so to speak, other slippers. Whoever has the slipper concession in Japan provides added dimension to the concept of walking in someone else’s shoes…

The evenings we spent at small travelers’ inns, with fluffy futons floating on the floors serving as our beds. The inns might have been small and simple but the dinners there were not. They most often were banquet-style with multiple courses ranging from traditional (and to my palate, unidentifiable) to more recognizable offerings that usually took the shape of small fish. Despite not being an advocate of Japanese food in general, I still never left the table hungry.

Having luxuriated in the bathrooms in Kyoto, such ablutions take on a slightly different tenor in the countryside. I don’t usually shower and wash my hair before getting into a bath, but at the traveler’s inn in the rural town of O’Tsumago, I found this was the custom. And as I’d learned, customs are one of the primary characteristics of Japanese society. Okay, so maybe shower is somewhat of a misnomer — really, you’re sitting on a low stool next to a series of other low stools and rinsing yourself off with a shower head. And maybe bath is misleading as well. It was actually an assortment of hot pools in a tranquil outdoor setting accessed by multi-levels of stones and surrounded by interspersed boulders ranging in size from large to humongous. And although to me this seemed like a very unusual experience, our guide assured me it was an everyday occurrence. In other words, bathing had become a communal rather than an individual occurrence.

That sense of community carries over to meals to which the inn occupants tend to wear their yukatas, dressing robes provided by the inns, while sitting cross-legged on tatami mats. No dressing for dinner. Saves a lot of space when packing…

Day two took us through more post towns that feel and look as old as they did in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. I sensed the samurais traversing the same stone steps, stopping for tea at the same wooden tea houses, sitting on the same tatami mats. At the Waki-Hajin in Tsamago, where feudal lords used to stay, allegedly the infamous Emperor who moved the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo in 1868 stopped by once. They’re still celebrating that half-hour rest stop by showcasing special seats and implements he may or may not have used. It reminded me of the George Washington Slept Here claims often heard in the U.S.

Our daily meanderings continued, sometimes over trails or through towns and often shrouded by forests, thick and lush, with ever-present rumblings of brooks and rivers and waterfalls accompanying our journey. It was a measured pace with lots of stops for historic perspective and although the uphill climbs often required a wish for even more historical perspective, it sounds harder than it was. Oh alright, so there were one or two sharp inclines but you tend to forget about them shortly thereafter. Sort of like childbirth…

Day three — more ups and downs, more historical towns, more stunning views, more shrines and temples. As much as my eyes tended to glaze over after too many temples, shrines and castles, each is actually so well done that despite myself I found I was both interested in and understanding the many details of the lives of the various emperors, shoguns, samurais, daimyos and oh yes, also the concubines who dominated the history of Japan from the 9^th century through the 20^th. And I was actually beginning to look forward to yet another pair of slippers…

And all the while, continued inter-connectivity with the other men and women on the tour, conversing with different people at different times, the camaraderie certainly welcome as you cross another mountain pass for yet another scenic overlook.

There is no tipping in Japan. I mean you can’t tip even if you want to. Service people just won’t accept it. At one point, we stopped for tea and our guide Kate had collected more money from the group than was needed. The waitress practically chased us down the street to return the equivalent of a $1.50 over payment. Can you imagine THAT happening in the U.S.?

Time to return to the big city. There’s definite culture shock going from the tranquility of the countryside to the sensory overload of Tokyo, the city center doing a very convincing impression of New York’s Times Square.

Despite Tokyo’s hi-rise modernity, the Edo Period (1602-1868) is still alive and well just below the surface. And this is what our guide Paul delights in explaining. Using a collection of wood cuts and old photographs dating from the 1800’s that he’s amassed in a mammoth book, he illustrates how every street corner, bridge, hidden side streets and major boulevards all had their beginning from the time Tokugawa arrived in 1590. Assuming the title of shogun, he unified the country by manipulating the daimyo (the baron class) and the samurais (the warrior class) so that they stopped fighting each other (for the most part) and worked together to make Edo (later renamed Tokyo) the center of Japanese life and culture.

The rich history is not present in the buildings but in the layout of the city, the nooks and crannies underneath. He related his pictures directly to what we were looking at so that we no longer saw what was currently there but what used to be. He brought to life all the far-reaching accomplishments of the Tokugawa family shogunate, the daimyos and samurais who served them, the merchants and the horse traders who lived there. “See this,” he pointed to a historical illustration time and time again. “This is where we are now!”

When I was finally able to pull myself away from the enthrall of the Edo Period, I looked up and was surprised to find a very modern Tokyo all around me. The intriguing and creative architecture of so many striking skyscrapers was in sharp contrast to the wooden dwellings of the daimyos.

Although the two major cities, Tokyo and Kyoto, add breadth and scope to the experience, it is the richness of texture and depth of culture of the Nakasendo Way that makes the journey so meaningful.

As I was going through security at Narita Airport enroute home, somehow having to remove my shoes did not feel as oppressive an activity as it usually does. I felt right at home — until I asked a surprised TSA agent for a pair of slippers. For more information, contact Walk Japan.

The post Walk Japan: Exploring the Head, the Heart and the Soul of a Country appeared first on Traveling Archive.