Sunday, November 29, 2009

Alex, the Happy Happy animals of Beijing Zoo and other such nonsense

22nd

Predictably Crazy Aussie doesnt feature in todays episode, we eventually seen him around 5 or 6 walking with one shoe and a bag full of vomit stained clothes to the laundrette, in the mean time myself and CC have uploaded the vidoes from the night before onto youtube. He is also highly excited about a new arrival at the hotel above the hostel to whom he was speaking earlier. His name is Alex, born in the Ukraine, grew up in a German POW camp lived most of his life in America, he is a 76 year veteran of the Korean war and either the man whos life “the most interesting man in the world” was based upon or is suffering from a highly advanced case of Munchausen syndrome.

We take Alex for dinner where he entertains us with some of the most debauched stories Ive ever heard in my life. At one point I asked him, given that he was a

paratrooper and machine gunner in the Korean war, if hed actually ever killed anybody, sure he replied, “afterall it was my job. And just between you and me, you might think this is a little obscene, but there is a certain satisfaction in squeezing the trigger and watching somebody do the meat cha-cha. You dont think of them as human”. It was fairly startling to here these stories of out the mouth of a seemingly nice old man. Other stories he told were utterly depraved, I could see he was really delighting in shocking us. We quized him a bit to make sure he wasnt just bullshitting but he seemed to know his stuff. His claim to having a much younger wife I verified a few days later when I met her in the hotel.

Later that evening whilst wandering around the hutong I came upon a strange sight of a Dutch girl hanging out with some of the locals, she seemed to have fully incorporated herself into the community. I got talking to her, she was an interesting individual, I could see similarities in personality between the two of us, a sense of curiosity a searching for new and interesting things. While my curiosity had led me to trying dog meat the day before, hers had brought her to smoking crack cocaine in a drug den in Mexico city, which she admitted, in retrospect probably wasnt the brightest thing shed ever done. I found it funny that she said she could never bring herself to eat dog, crack cocaine ok, dog no thanks.

Being an animal lover I strongly advised her never to visit Beijing Zoo, which I had done at some stage over the last couple of days. I knew it was supposed to be bad so I visited really out of a morbid curiosity and to see just how bad it could be. Yeah it was fairly horrible alright. The favored children of the zoo, the pandas have it ok, the rest of the animals are clearly there just to constitute the world zoo. There are more employees tending to the grass and bushes than looking after them. The bears stand up and beg you to throw food. The big cats are trapped in tiny prison cells, continually pacing and generally going mental. The whole place smells like shit. All the while an errie happy happy gingle plays continuously over loudspeakers with portraits of Mao staring down like some creepy beardless santa claus, giving the whole place a nightmarish fairground feel.

On the way back I meet CC with McHotpants, the poor girl doesnt speak a word of english. CC is clearly delighted by this fact and spends much of the walk back to the Hutong opening degrading her in english, detailing to me his plans to “do her in the ass”, ejaculate on her face as well as making derogatory comments about her general intelligence. Thankfully it appears that she never gave him the opportunity to do any of these things.

[Via http://driftervagabond.wordpress.com]

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