Skip to content

Deutsche Welle Weblog Awards: Don’t vote for the talking dog

I just found out via Technorati pingback that my Chinese blog, 在北京找不着北, has been nominated in the “Best Chinese Blog” category in the Deutsche Welle International Weblog Awards. I’m not sure who nominated me, or when — I didn’t get any notification of this — but it’s very flattering indeed. The blog is currently in last place, which I think is probably just about where it belongs: on top of the fact that I am a lousy blogger — I update my Chinese blog once a week at best, I hardly ever have time to respond to commenters, and most heinous of all, I hardly ever read other blogs (this post probably has got more links than anything else I’ve ever written) — there’s the issue of why people even bother reading me. This is made perfectly clear by the summary of my blog, which says: “A foreigner writes about his experiences in excellent Chinese.”

I mean, I don’t flatter myself into thinking that most of the people who read my Chinese blog are doing so out of any real interest in what I have to say. A simple trip through my referrer logs shows that the majority of inbound links are from blogs and bulletin boards saying things like “who’d have thought that a foreigner could learn Chinese?” and “clearly this means that China’s on the rise.” That makes me uncomfortable. It’s nice having people read my blog, and people say a lot of awfully nice things in the comments, but nobody really wants to get popular by being the talking dog. Or at least, I don’t.

Anyway, here are my voting recommendations for the Deutsche Welle awards, at least in the categories and language groups where I’m competent to be any kind of judge:

Best Weblog:
“花花世界 － 鼠尾草 (A Colorful World: Shuweicao’s blog) looks pretty good. The blog seems to consist entirely of food porn, which can only be a good thing. I like food.

Best Podcast:
The Show with Ze Frank is one of these things that I keep meaning to watch regularly, but never do. That’s not a comment on him — I’m just lousy about reading blogs with any kind of regularity, and am generally too lazy to make use of RSS readers or anything else that might normalize my blog reading habits. He’s consistently funny, which can’t be easy on a day to day basis.

Reporters Without Borders Award:
曾金燕博客 (”Zeng Jinyan’s blog” - for some reason they don’t provide a translation) is fully deserving of your support. The inimitable ESWN has a translation of one of her posts here, for non-Sinologues. (Note: for some reason, this blog doesn’t open from the mainland. I can’t imagine why. Use a proxy.)

Blogwurst Award:
I’m not really sure what the hell “Blogwurst” is supposed to mean, but anyway, Zeng Jinyan is nominated here, as well, and New York Hack looks like it could be interesting.

Best Russian Blog:
Not that I speak Russian, but Magazeta left a comment on my Chinese blog at Bullog asking me to support them, and the guy seemed pretty nice, so why not.

Best Chinese Blog:
It looks like Shuweicao, who’s also nominated for the “Best Blog” award, is going to win this one, but I’d encourage people to vote for Lao Luo, the laoda of Bullog.cn, who was kind enough to invite me to Bullog a couple months ago. I’m in there too, but like I said, I don’t want to be a talking dog, and I don’t deserve it anyway.

Blogs that didn’t get nominated:
I don’t put a whole lot of stock in this sort of thing anyway, because there are so many really enjoyable bloggers who never get mentioned. The best thing I’ve read lately is Idle Words, whose author Maciej I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out with recently. Also, for a long time, I’ve really, really dug Rain’s stuff over at Hipstomp, and would encourage everyone who hasn’t read him to go over and check him out.

Posted 28 October 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Brain Farts ‡ Comments (8) °

Reasons I’m glad not to be a farmer in late Ming-dynasty Shaanxi, #603

From Ma Maocai’s 1629 (崇祯二年) memorial report to the Chongzhen Emperor, 《备陈大饥疏》”A Narration of the Great Famine.” Translation mine; original text (courtesy of David) below the cut. Corrections/comments welcome, as my classical Chinese is rusty. (Some corrections made, thanks to the Foolish Old Man of the Granite Studio, whose recent post on Hua Guofeng filled me with delight.)

Your servant’s district is in Yan’an subprefecture, where since last year there has been no rain, and the grass and trees are parched and scorched. In September and October, the people fought amongst themselves to pick and eat the peng grasses that grow between the mountains. Peng grass resembles chaff, and has a bitter and unpleasant taste. Eating it, the people were able only to delay death.

After November the peng grass was all gone, and people began to strip the bark from trees, among which only the elm’s bark was at all palatable. People made a mash of the bark, which allowed them to postpone slightly their deaths.

By the end of the year, all of the tree bark was gone, and the people began to dig up stones from the ground to eat. The stones were cold and had a repellent, fishy taste, but by eating a few people could fill their bellies. Several days afterward, their abdomens swelled and distended, and they died. Those unwilling to eat stones and die began to turn to brigandry, and those few people who had managed to save a pittance were robbed and left with nothing.

…Most pitiable were those cases like that of Ji, to the west of Ansai, where every day one or two young children would be abandoned. Some sobbed and howled; some cried out for their mothers; some ate their own filth. By the second morning, not a one of the children would remain alive, and there would again be more children abandoned. Most astonishing were those children and single travellers who would vanish without a trace upon leaving the city. Afterwards people were seen outside the city walls, burning human bones for their fires and boiling human flesh, making food from people they had known. Those men who ate men would themselves die within a few days, their eyes swollen and reddened and their bodies burning from within.

And so the dead lay in heaps, the stench filling the air and reaching to the sky. Outside the county city, several pits were dug, each large enough to hold the remains of several hundred people. When your servant went to inspect the situation, three pits had already been filled, with more needed, while several miles outside of town unknowable numbers of people went unburied.

…Some officials, bound by severe government policies, had no choice but to levy heavy taxes, and those few left in Li who had survived the famine had no choice but to flee. From this place they would flee to that place, while the people from that place fled to this place, fleeing to and robbing from one another. These robberies are what occasioned this memorial.

Continue Reading »

Posted 17 October 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Translations ‡ Comments (21) °

brief announcements

1: 全聚德 Quanjude makes a pretty good duck. Had never been there before.

2: 五粮液 Wuliangye is the least-objectionable baijiu I’ve ever been forced to drink. I could actually picture somebody potentially enjoying it. It tastes less like PVC and paint thinner than all other forms of baijiu, and is 104 proof.

3: My little brother, who picked up and became damnably good at the fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin, and piano in hardly any time at all, has now picked up blogging. He is a shy woodland creature, and generally not given to speaking, writing, or otherwise communicating, so go encourage him.

Posted 16 October 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Brain Farts ‡ Comments (4) °

there and back again (1)

I think it was Douglas Adams who said that there’s no language on Earth with the expression “as beautiful as an airport.”

Not all airports are bad, I guess. Belfast Airport used to have a nice little breakfast place. Vancouver Airport seemed OK the one time I was there. Heathrow is awful and soul-crushing, but makes up for that by being full of stores selling expensive shit that you’d never want, so I guess it’s kind of like it meets you half-way. But who am I kidding: airports suck, and Beijing Airport has earned itself special distinction in the field of sucking.
The arrivals hall is designed so that it’s impossible to get a taxi without waiting in line for a half-hour in a taxi pen that smells of secondhand smoke, car exhaust, and despair. Coupled with the airport’s convenient location in the ass-end of nowhere, this leads one to suspect that the entire enterprise was designed according to the specifications of the powerful illegal cab lobby. The architects designing the departures area apparently engaged in serious study of crowd flow dynamics and anti-congestion measures, and then did exactly the opposite of what their research said. The stores buy their stock from the Zhengzhou #3 Cheap Shit Factory, and retail it at a 1500% markup. It’s staffed by well-meaning incompetents and lit with the standard airport and interrogation room fluorescents, the kind that make people look like recently exhumed corpses. One time, a year and a half ago, I woke up badly hung-over at Beijing Airport one morning on my way home to the States and was momentarily convinced that I had died and gone to hell.

The best way of dealing with the hassles attendant to air travel is to queue up a playlist on your MP3 player of the loudest, angriest, most violent music you can find. I figured this out recently: the music must be loud, so that it can play to the exclusion of all external stimuli; the violent part is for helping you deal with things in a healthy manner: you don’t have to choke a bitch, because Ice Cube has already done it for you.
This helped a lot on this year’s trip home. I was on a budget itinerary that took me from Beijing at 8:30 AM to Tokyo, left me at Narita Airport for six hours, and then gave me a stopover in Dallas-Fort Worth before taking me back to Philadelphia. Total travel time, including layovers, was approximately 30 hours, and the early-morning flight out of Beijing spooked me into staying up all night the night before, for fear of oversleeping and missing my plane. I wasn’t able to sleep for more than five minutes on any of the flights, and so by the last leg of the trip, from Dallas to Philadelphia, I had been awake for about 50 hours straight, and was feeling more than a little cracked-out, and when the plane took off from DFW airport, a place that I had decided within five minutes of arrival was the anus of the known universe, and I looked down at the city beneath us, all I could think of was how much it looked like jewels.

I chatted a bit with the woman sitting next to me, a largish bottle blonde with intricately painted fingernails who removed a portable DVD player from her bag and sat it on her lap the instant she entered the plane. I asked did those work well, and she replied that hers did, that she’d bought it because she got “tension” on flights. Did that work, I asked. Mostly, she said. She was a boring woman, and it was a boring conversation, but so what; it was in English, and Philadelphia English at that.
I never learned the Philadelphia accent growing up. Part of it was environment, I guess - my dad has a northwestern Irish accent; my mother, though from Philly, has a neutral east-coast accent. I thought the Philadelphia accent, with its nasalized vowels, muted ts, and added syllables (”‘Ja see the Iggles game last night? Aw, it was beeyoodeeful.”) was ugly, grating, not the kind of thing I’d ever want coming out of my mouth. To this day, I can’t even really do a proper imitation of a Philadelphia accent, beyond a few obvious words — “wooder ice.” The thing is that I started missing the sound of it after a while.
After you spend too much time in China, you find yourself talking, as Pete Hessler points out in Oracle Bones, in Special English, which takes its name from a Voice of America program rather than from the Special Bus, but is really the same thing. You e-nun-ci-ate. You use small words to discuss big things. Your sentences shrink to single clauses. You regain all of the consonants that natural speech elides, and you never, ever use words like “hoosegow” or “kiester” or “uxorious.” The speech of the plane’s occupants seemed to be evenly split between slurring Texan drawls and half-swallowed Philadelphian mumbles, and it was beeyoodeeful to listen to.

After a few hours, the plane banked to the left, and the pilot (whose accent may or may not have been Texan, but at any rate was certainly not Philadelphian) told us that we would be arriving in Philadelphia in a half-hour. I looked out the window next to me to try to get a glimpse of the city as it approached, but it was overcast, like the day I left, and I couldn’t see anything below except the odd glimpse through small clearings — until suddenly the plane cleared the clouds and there, glinting up at us in a constellation of yellow light, like fragments of a beer bottle in dirty lamplight, was Philadelphia.

Posted 07 October 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Longer Pieces § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (8) °

Mental health break

I’m heading back to Philly from 9/15 to 9/30. I trust my homies in Illadelph will all be around? Not sure what my phone number will be, but if my folks didn’t lose my old SIM card, it should be 215-880-8629.

Those of you who read Chinese may like 别了费城, “Leaving Philadelphia,” which I have been trying to write in English for almost a year now. Also, my girlfriend and I translated “Herbsttag” by Rainer Marie Rilke. It seemed to fit with the surprisingly autumnal weather we had last weekend, and anyway it’s one of my favorite poems. The Chinese translations I saw by Feng Zhi and Bei Dao didn’t really do it justice; hopefully our attempt is a bit closer to the mark:

秋日

主啊
时已至 夏无殇
刻影仪晷上
扬风在草场

催生果实于藤间
再给它两日南方的天
熟硕得只为
醇醪最后的甘甜

失所者注定流离
孤独者久无所依
便醒着 读着 写着长信
踟蹰在公园的小径上
叶自飘零

“Autumn Day”

Lord, it is time. The summer was too long.
Lay your shadow on the sundials now,
and through the meadow let the winds throng.

Ask the last fruits to ripen on the vine;
give them further two more summer days
to bring about perfection and to raise
the final sweetness in the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will establish none,
whoever lives alone now will live on long alone,
will waken, read, and write long letters,
wander up and down the barren paths
the parks expose when the leaves are blown.

(William Gass)


Herbsttag

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

Posted 14 September 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Brain Farts ‡ Comments (13) °

Hú Shì: Don’t You Forget

Have been thinking about poetry lately. Am working on translating Rilke’s Herbsttag (Autumn Day / 秋日), one of my favorite poems, into Chinese — there are two existing translations by Feng Zhi and Bei Dao, but I don’t like either of them. In the meantime, I happened across this remarkable 胡适 poem (in, I’ll admit, the Wikipedia entry on him — I was killing time), and it made for a quick translation into English, so here I go:

Don’t You Forget

My boy
Twenty years I’ve taught you to love your country,
But what’s to love about it!

Don’t you forget:
It was the soldiers of our country
That drove your third aunt to kill herself,
Drove Ah-Xin to do the same,
Drove your wife to her death,
Shot Gao Sheng dead!

Don’t you forget:
Who it was cut your finger off,
Who it was beat your old man to a pulp like this!
Who it was burned this village –
– The fire’ll reach here any minute;
Run! Don’t die with me!
– Come back!

Don’t you forget:
How as your old man lay dying he wanted only for the country to fall,
Fall to the Cossacks,
Fall to the Prussians,
Anything
Nothing could be as bad as — this!

你莫忘记

我的儿
我二十年教你爱国，
这国如何爱得！

你莫忘记：
这是我们国家的大兵，
逼死了你三姨，
逼死了阿馨，
逼死了你妻子，
枪毙了高升！

你莫忘记：
是谁砍掉了你的手指，
是谁把你的老子打成了这个样子！
是谁烧了这一村，
哎哟！火就要烧到这里了，
你跑罢！莫要同我一起死！
回来！

你莫忘记：
你老子临死时只指望快快亡国：
亡给『哥萨克』，
亡给『普鲁士』
都可以
人总该不至——如此！

Note:  逼死  can refer to driving someone to commit suicide or harrying someone to their death. I switched up the translations between “Ah-Xin” and “your wife” for no particularly good reason.

Posted 13 September 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Translations ‡ Comments (4) °

Celebrity through smack-talking

I’m sure this will disappoint Prince Roy, whom I’d promised not to write about the whole stupid, boring, pointless Chinabounder thing (people unfamiliar with the whole affair should consider themselves lucky, but can click on that link if they feel like killing some brain cells), but my Chinese newspaper column this week is all about the Chinese blogosphere, and so I couldn’t very well not write about it.
This seems to be my most popular piece yet; within 20 minutes of it giong up on my blog at Bullog.cn, I got an SMS from Luo Yonghao (罗永浩, better known as 老罗 as in 老罗语录) saying “牛逼!” (”Badass!”) It’s also up on my own Chinese blog, but there are fewer comments there; the comments on Bullog tend to be more fun. Here’s a quick and dirty translation. Forgive any translatese; I did it quickly because, hey, I already wrote this once. Sinologues will probably prefer to read it in Chinese, where it is funnier.

After my blog got added to Bullog the other week, I got a record number of visitors, numbers that made my head spin, numbers that - frankly - I wouldn’t mind getting more of. So I’m thinking, how do I expand my scope to guarantee myself more readers? I began a careful consideration of the question, making a thorough study of the big shots of the Chinese blogosphere, and arrived at the conclusion that if you want to make it big in the blogoqiu, you just need to remember two words: talk smack! Talk all the smack you want about whoever you want, whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want, but as long as you bitch your bitchiest and keep the smack flowing, you’re guaranteed readers.

Then let the smack-talking begin! Who do I bitch about first? Well — talking smack on celebrities is of course the easiest; bang something out about Fan Bingbing’s nosejob, Zhou Xun’s chin surgery, Li Yuchun’s cleverly concealed penis; call Tom Cruise a lunatic, Liu Dehua a fag, Jiang Wen too macho; ask why the entire Chinese film industry has thus far failed to produce anything even resembling a good movie; whatever. Posts like that are easy to write — they don’t take any kind of thought at all, just the desire to mow down everyone and everything in your path. I, being lazy and not posessed of very much free time, decided that this would be the right kind of blog for me, and began, anticipating my future online celebrity, sat down to write. Then I found out that Song Zude had gotten there before me.

So much for talking smack on celebrities. Plan B: many of the most popular blogs in the US are devoted to talking smack on the government, like DailyKos, Atrios, and other left-wing forums. I Googled and found that for some reason, there were hardly any blogs like that in China; Google turned up a few links, but for some reason none of them would open. Now this got me excited: I could be opening up a whole new market!
But then that evening, I was using a public toilet near my house and saw Comrade Hu Jintao’s groundbreaking ‘Eight Glories and Eight Disgraces’ on the wall, and saw banners calling on everybody to lend their support in constructing a (groundbreaking) “Harmonious Society,” and couldn’t help but think that this kind of blog would be disharmonious and disgraceful. Besides that, I checked a few newspapers and online reports and couldn’t find any bad news. Why waste my time talking smack on a government that doesn’t have anything wrong with it?

Then I thought, maybe I could get famous by making egao spoofs like Hu Ge. I know, SARFT said that spoofs and other online videos were “unhealthy,” but I’ve got the results of the physical that I had to take before getting a visa last year to prove the opposite! (Though I must say, it gave me a warm feeling to see that SARFT cares about my health so much. The US government would never do that.) The only problem is that I don’t have a camera and I’m too broke to buy one.

I was running out of get-famous-quick ideas when the whole ChinaBounder thing hit. One look at CB and Zhang Jiehai’s hit counters convinced me that this was the way to go: talking smack on celebrities didn’t work out; muckracking on the government fell through; sneering at Chen Kaige wasn’t an option, so by god, I would bitch about myself!
First I’d open a blog somewhere as Associate Professor Li Dasanr of Beijing #2 Coal Institute. Then I’d find this “Brendan” and start tearing into him, and call on my readers to sweep this foreign trash out of China in the name of the Chinese race. (Even better if it actually worked: I’d love to visit home; I just don’t have the money for a ticket.) I’m not sure exactly what the good professor would be bitching about, but I’m sure there are plenty of options:

  • Hurting the feelings of the Chinese People. I don’t want to get people all riled up, but I have to admit that I have, in public spaces, said many times that China only has 4999 years of history and that Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thoughts” is not that good a poem. Oh, and there was the time at the ███ mausoleum when I ██████, then grabbed the body and started ████, vigorously ███████, while yelling “Reclaim the Mainland for the Kuomintang!” (This didn’t actually happen, but who’s to say it logically couldn’t have?)
  • Violating Chinese law. I confess: from time to time, I use pirate software, watch pirated DVDs, and even take illegal taxis and mototrikes, all illegal actions harmful to the public interest. Also, I couldn’t find translation work for a while, so I went around stealing manhole covers to sell for scrap.
  • Violating the One China principle. I’ve got a lousy memory, OK, and I always forget to say “Chinese” before “Taiwan.” I know, heinous. Especially since I live in Chinese Beijing.

I don’t know if it’ll work out in the end. Forget it if it doesn’t; I’m tired of this already.

Posted 10 September 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Longer Pieces § Translations ‡ Comments (8) °

I, for one, welcome our new Justicetron 3000 overlords

My RSS feeder popped up an AFP headline a few minutes ago: “Software does judge’s job in China.” No way, I thought, and clicked through to the article, which was totally conveying the impression of yes way:

BEIJING (AFP) - Judges are not usually at risk of losing their jobs to modern technology but that may be changing in China, where new software is handing down sentences automatically.

The Zichuan District Court in east China’s Shandong province has installed programs on judges’ computers that provide advice on the proper verdicts in criminal cases, the state-run China Daily reported.

The move appears to be aimed at ensuring standardized decisions and addressing common complaints that China’s judges are ill-trained, corrupt and make arbitrary rulings.

“We aim to establish a regular sentence pattern for criminal trials to avoid different penalties for the same crimes,” said Wang Hongmei, chief judge at the court.

Many judges in China have not received a college education and lack sufficient training in law, although the government has made efforts in recent years to raise the professional standard.

In the Shandong experiment, judges simply enter the relevant details of the crimes plus mitigating circumstances — and the program immediately comes up with an appropriate verdict, according to the paper.

But the penalty calculator will not have the final say. Judges will retain the power to hand down their own sentences, depending on circumstances they deem particular to a case.

This sounded way too weird and arbitrary even for China’s court system, so I looked for a Chinese article to see what the deal was. According to a very cursory (i.e., two-second) glance at “量刑软件”会不会“腐败,” (”Can sentencing software be ‘corrupted?’”) it turns out that the wussies are only granting the cold, soulless machines dominion over the sentencing process.
That is to say that the computer will consider the factors of the case and make a recommendation for the sentence/fine amount, thus making that part of the process less arbitrary, but the actual verdict in the case will still be as arbitrary as ever.

Still, this is an important step forward for China’s judicial system, and I look forward to the day when all trials can be judged purely by computer:

“The court will now hear the case of –”
- GUILTY
“I object!”
- VOID
“This is a violation of my constitutional rights!”
- UNRECOGNIZED INPUT: ‘CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS’
“I’m going to appeal this! I’ll take it to Amnesty International!”
- FATAL ERROR.

Posted 07 September 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Brain Farts ‡ Comments (5) °

Fun (for certain values of fun)

We’re doing a series of reports at work on the 30th anniversary of you-know-who’s death. (My suggested title: “MZD: 30 years later, his death is still a good thing.”) I’m doing translation for the reports, even though the English text will never be used except for keyword-searching purposes. In principle, i should probably slack off, since all I really need to do for any given report is a 15-line summary, but I tend to end up translating the whole thing anyway, since I work fast and haven’t really got much else to do.

Anyway, today I ran up against an academic paper whose title posed an interesting challenge. (Or so I thought at the time — the bar for “interesting” is set pretty low here.) The Chinese title is 轻诺延安 寡信北京 Qīngnuò Yán’ān, Guǎxìn Běijīng. Background info: Yán’ān is an area of Shaanxi province where the Chinese Communists ended up at the end of the Long March. It symbolizes a utopian period (or at least a less-bad period) in modern Chinese history, a time when people actually believed in the rhetoric they were spouting. 轻诺寡信 qīngnuò-guǎxìn is a four-character idiom meaning, literally, “lignt-promises-impoverish-trust,” i.e., to diminish one’s credibility by going back on one’s word. Neither 轻诺 nor 寡信 exists as an expression outside the idiom (so far as I know), though both would be understandable in a written context.

Anyway, I decided that I’d try to come up with something in English that had a similar feel. I ended up settling on “Betraying Yan’an, Besmirching Beijing,” but I’m sure I could’ve done better than that if I’d had more time. Anyone have any other translations for it?

Posted 06 September 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Brain Farts ‡ Comments (9) °

Laguna Llacasapa

After last week’s translation of “Embarrassing Ailments,” I figured I might as well post “Laguna Llacasapa,” a little ditty (previously posted on a now-defunct group blog) that my best friend Jon and I came up with over a few pitchers of beer last summer in Philadelphia. There’s a story behind it, which is this:

Google Earth had just come out, and so we installed it and had some fun zooming around to various locations and checking out the satellite photos. We navigated to Lake Titicaca, as one does, and then spent some time checking out the various islands, inlets, and circumferential towns. I was particularly delighted by the euphonious name of Laguna Llacasapa, and after giggling for a bit, zooming out, noting that the region in which Lake Titicaca (and Laguna Llacasapa) fall is called the Puno altiplano, and giggling some more, I decided that it all called for a song:

Laguna Llacasapa

(On the shores of Titicaca,
in the Puno altiplano of Peru)

I’ve been to Machu Picchu
Where the natives used to eat you1 –
Though nowadays they treat you like a king.
But of all the esoterica
To be found in South America,
Lake Titicaca’s still my favorite thing.
I didn’t like Caracas
So I hopped on my alpacas,
And headed for a little place I knew:
Laguna Llacasapa,
On the shores of Titicaca,
In the Puno altiplano of Peru.

A pilgrimage to Mecca
Or a visit to Tribeca
To Llacasapa’s beaches can’t compare,
For there’s not a holy city
That can e’er outshine the Titi-
-Caca region’s special magic, anywhere.
Not for me, the ivory towers
Of the major global powers.
I far prefer these equatorial climes.
New York has hot baristas,
But Peru has Sandinistas
(Who are really Nicaraguan, but it rhymes.)

My vocabulary’s tragic;
To describe the Puno’s magic
I can never find the proper adjec-tive.
But it’s here that I’ll retire,
Come whatever may transpire,
For there’s nowhere else on Earth I’d rather live.
Titicaca’s limpid water
Stretches toward Bolivia’s border
Underneath an azure sky; it’s quite a view.
Here at Laguna Llacasapa
On the shores of Titicaca
In the Puno altiplano of Peru.

1 (Possibly untrue.)

Posted 04 September 2006 † Brendan O'Kane § Brain Farts ‡ Comments (4) °