I've been a bad bad blogger

It's been far too long to stick to the narrative format I've been following so I'm going to go back to the whole random anecdote thing:

The Chinese male dress code is a combination of a t-shirt (button up or otherwise) rolled up under the armpits to bare the belly, combined with slacks worn as high as possible (think Urkel but worse). The most important accessory is a cigarette smoked at all times while conscious (even while eating). Women don't smoke in public, it's considered un-ladylike.

The parks north of the Forbidden City are cooler than the Forbidden City itself.

I can now play Chinese Chess and challenge anyone who wants to play/learn to play to a game. I bought a set for 1/5th of the original asking price. Haggling is fun and the Chinese love it.

I was bumped up to business class on my Beijing->Seoul flight. I rather enjoyed the experience and perhaps drank a bit too much considering it was a morning flight.

Korea has very very good food. Ahrum's (my friend in Seoul) family are tremendously cool and her mom cooks better than anyone I know.

I bought a Royal Canadian Legion hat at a street stall in Seoul. It's blue and yellow. I like it a lot.

We went to the DMZ and saw North Korea officially completing my tour of the border regions of all three Axis of Evil countries (although I never actually managed to get close enough to look directly into Iraq as I was able to do with the other two).

Malaysia is stickily warm but not particuarly harder to deal with than Beijing was. The worst I felt it was when I think I ended up with heat exhaustion after playing badminton for three hours.

I spent last week on the "showcase islands of Malaysia" (as put by Lonely Planet S E Asia on a Shoestring). I swam with sharks and turtles and clown fish and octopi and all kinds of other kaleidoscopically colourful fish. Met some very nice Welshmen/women. Got sunburnt (for the second time in the last decade+... I generally have a very sun repellant complexion). My back is still a bit flakey (it's a bit like Oprah now, having gone down from its Madonna-like heights of flakeyness on the weekend). I don't enjoy the sensation but the snorkeling was totally worth it.

Joanna's family are terrific too. They're both english teachers and we've been having these highly entertaining conversations accented with uproarious guffaws together every chance one of us manages to relate the political/social/economic/ethnic situation in Malaysia to some post-renaissance European philosophical/literary notion (her dad is Oxford to the extreme).

Malaysia is fucked right now. The Malay majority are milking the highly productive Chinese and Indian minorities for everything they've got. As a result there's a massive outflow of skilled labour and investment is drying up because of all the bs regulations aimed at giving Malays a leg up (hiring quotas, differing standards to achieve the same certification, etc...). It reminds me of Atlas Shrugged. Joanna's friend was arrested randomly. He works for an opposition party.

Harry Potter, finishing reading about you has rent my soul, but don't worry, I won't even think about making a hoarcrux.