200 feet of meat

The scene last night on 银虎池街 (Yinhuchi Jie, "the pool where the lion drinks street") in the heart of the Hui neighborhood in Jinan, Shandong China.
 
This guy had a good three hundred skewers of lamb with garlic and peppers, seasoned with turmeric and cumin, roasting over hot coals (2 RMB each). I am a sucker for lamb kidney on a stick (1 RMB each).

Research time in Jinan, Shandong Province

Taxi driver picking up other fares along the way, piping hot orange juice, a kind stranger offering me a bite of his chicken sandwich on the super-fast train. I am in China.

Time for a new pack?

The Bolinas, a sweet 30-liter daypack.

My boot came untied in the middle of scrambling over a boulder field. It was probably mile 25 of a 60-mile expedition and my right arm was already numb from the weight of the boulder strapped to my back. I went to plant a knee to get to my laces, but with the sudden shift in my center of gravity, I tipped to the left, causing my pack to slide widely to the left, and suddenly I was falling toward a wide crag, the bottom of which I couldn't see. Fortunately, my pack was bulky enough that it wedged itself between me and the abyss, and so I was able to unhitch myself from my 50-pound burden and crawl to safety. It was the one good thing that pack did for me on that trip.

Two lessons I took from this: Tie double knots. Go ultralight.

The fantastic folks at Boreas, a boutique outdoor gear design shop in San Francisco make gorgeous streamlined packs, which are comfortable to wear, built to last, and do just what their told. Their 60-liter Lost Coast and 55-liter Buttermilks packs are perfect for multi-day trips and heavier loads. Backpacker made them both their 2012 Editors' Choice picks.

Best of all, Boreas gave me a pro deal to share with all of you intrepid travelers. Just shoot me an email, and I'll send you a code, which gets you 55% off!

Massage as medicine

Panda does not want any of it.

I went to see my neighborhood Chinese medicine doctor the other day after a bad run-in with some cockles (little bivalves that are currently very hard to come by in Singapore).

The doctor asked me a lot of questions, looked carefully at my tongue and eyes, held my wrist between his thumb and forefinger for a few minutes, and noted the yellow-green pallor of my skin. Diagnosis: I am not getting enough rest (true), under a lot of stress (sure), and my liver and lungs (and everything connected to them in the Chinese medicine sense) haven't had a chance to recover from the food poisoning because of all of the above plus the Cipro I tried initially. He prescribed bed before 11pm (livers apparently rest best between 11pm and 2am) and four herbal medicines in pill and potion form.

He gave my prescription to an elderly lady in a lab coat at the front of the clinic, and I watched as she pulled various roots and seeds from the tiny drawers lining the walls, ground them into powder, and threw them into a little terracotta pot to boil. While I was waiting for my concoction to brew, I wandered around the rest of the clinic and found myself suddenly in a room full of silent babies. They were getting massages.

Some sat upright and others lay on their backs, but one lay on his side like a tiny dictator--hand extended out for servicing by his attendant. The nurse masseuses carefully kneaded their backs, scratched their heads, and rubbed tiny circles into their palms. The babies drooled (more than usual) in ecstasy.

Baby massage seems awfully decadent, but I can say, four days of bitter herbal brew and my tummy is feeling much better.

A way to help this holiday season

I wanted to share something I've been working on called the Lan Cun Education Project. It's a charitable fund to help kids in Lan Cun, a very poor, rural village in China, get a chance at an education.

Every dollar donated will go directly towards building, staffing, and supplying a cafeteria for the Lan Cun Primary School, which teaches kids ages five to eight. The school currently has no cafeteria, which means all the students have to leave school premises midday. With no place to go, many of them head home and can't come back for the second half of the school day. This is because the walk to and from school is not easy--some of these kids walk more than three hours a day over mountainous terrain. And of course, it is often the poorest kids who live farthest away. We plan to provide a safe space and a hot lunch for all the kids at the school for at least three years, after which time the school will be able to take over the hot lunch program.

This Project was thoroughly vetted by Give2Asia, a well-respected non-profit organization that supports public interest work in Asia, and is fully supported by the school's teachers and administration.

If you'd like to donate, you can click on the Donate button above or visit lancunproject.org. You can also mail a check to the address below.

WHY LAN CUN?My dad was born in Lan Cun. He told us a lot of stories about what it was like to grow up there in the middle of mountains of southern China. The region was so isolated that his father, my grandfather, was the only teacher in the region. He taught school for a month or two in one village before moving on to the next. It often took him weeks to hike over the mountains, wade through flooded fields, and wait for raging rivers to subside, before he returned home to see and teach his own children. The route was unspeakably difficult, and he died on one of those journeys home. Today, Lan Cun doesn't rely on traveling teachers, it has its own school, but even so, getting an education remains a difficult path. The families in this village are "extremely poor" by World Bank standards, surviving on less than a dollar a day. Our Project seeks to help give the kids of Lan Cun a better chance at an education and ultimately a better life.

WHAT YOUR DONATION PAYS FOR
A donation of $20 pays for one child to have a hot lunch in the cafeteria for three years. If we reach our goal of $15,000, we will impact more than 800 kids and teachers by 2014. After that, the facilities and hot lunch program can be maintained with just a fraction of this amount by the school itself.

You can read more about the Project, including how we worked with the school for a year to develop this idea, our budget plan, how 100 percent of your donation will go to the kids, how we will oversee the results, and our sponsorship by Give2Asia, at lancunproject.org.

HOW TO DONATE
You can donate online at lancunproject.org, or you can also mail a check (please write Lan Cun Education Project on it) directly to this address:

Lan Cun Education Project
Give2Asia
465 California Street, 9th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94104

Some suggested donation amounts:

• $20 pays for one student to have a hot lunch in the new cafeteria for three years.
• $160 covers the cost of lunch in the cafeteria for the students in each class who walk more than three hours a day through treacherous terrain to get between home and school.
• $320 covers the students in each class who miss the second half of the school day.
• $1000 covers the cost of an entire class, which thanks to you, can now spend less time getting to school and more time in it--learning.

At the mall

I needed a SIM card, so I headed over to Mustafa Center, which I discovered is a 24-hour, multi-level warehouse store that rolls the thrill of shopping and the risk of dying in a stampede in one.

I pressed my way through shoes (1st), gold products (B1), and stuffed animals (B2) to the SIM card counter (way back of B2). Amit was standing there, and I showed him my phone, which I had bought in Rwanda and wasn't sure was in the same frequency zone as Singapore.

"Wanda?" he asked puzzled. I explained it was a country next to Sudan in Africa and watched as his eyes grew to the size of pingpong balls. "The place where many people are killed," he said. He shook his head, "A very bad country."

I paused to think about how to respond but not long enough because I blurted, "No, no! Every country has gone through a similar thing. Everywhere at some point, people have killed each other, even here in Singapore."

He did the thing I've noticed people do here when slightly embarrassed, which is to act as though the inappropriate thing that just happened, entirely didn't, the way maybe a crazy American grandmother might do. He told me I needed to get an adapter to plug in my phone and charge it before we could check the SIM card. I wove my way to House Appliances (front of B2), dug through bins for the adapter, waited in line behind a couple buying Jenga, a man buying AXE medicated lotion, and a teen buying a furry jacket with tiger stripes, and then headed back to Amit. He was stepping towards the direction of the exit. "Nine thirty, time for me to go home," he said. "Next guy comes at ten thirty. You wait for him if you need to call Wanda tonight."

PSA

On TV, an adorable little girl drawing a picture of depressive-looking mother and little brother figures--sprinkling both with little blue circles to indicate abundant tears. With a grim expression, the little girl then draws three white lines on the paper. A very serious man voice says, "These are the reason her daddy is in jail. Don't smoke illegal cigarettes."