Anyone who knows me well knows that there are six of us in my immediate family: four are human and two are canine.  Casey came into our lives in 1994, and then Chloe in 1996, and these two doggies have been important family members for the majority of my life.  My parents got their first dog, Hildy, before my sister and I were born.  Hildy was adorable, and I wish I could remember more about her.  She died in October 1994 at age 14.  I cried a lot when she died, and I was eager to have a new puppy to cheer up our family.  My mom and I found little Casey at the Humane Society.  We called my dad and told him to come meet this puppy, whose papers said she was a lab mix.  “A lab? She’ll be huge! And you want me to come all the way down there? What a big waste of time,” my dad said.

Always so cozy and always wearing a bandana. That's how I will remember my Casey.

We jokingly quoted that for years, even this summer when we found out that Casey had skin cancer.  It turned out that Casey wasn’t a lab mix; she was a small terrier that perhaps had a great-grandpa lab, my mom said.  Whatever her breed, she was the greatest dog a kid could have ever asked for.  She was my first puppy, and I remember being scared of her as she raced around the backyard to get out that puppy energy.  I called my mom at work one day to ask what was wrong with the puppy.

Casey studying with Natalie and I in high school, but also hoping to get some of our popcorn...

I was 9 years old when we got Casey, which was the perfect age for a girl to get a puppy; she made me lots of friends!  She was the most adorable little puppy, so everyone at school loved her instantly.  As she got a little older, she hung out after school with my friends and I nearly every day.  As I ran around the neighborhood with my friends, I often had Casey at my side.  “Take your sister! And take Casey!” my mom would say as I ran out the door, headed to the park after school.  She let kids pet her and pick her up and dress her up in absurd outfits.  She was incredibly tolerant and gentle.  If she ever really got annoyed with kids, she would simply run to my mom, who would always protect her.

Julie and Casey lounging at the park

Our family wanted a very well-behaved dog, so we signed Casey up for obedience classes with Judy Strickland, a.k.a. The Sgt.  She was a very strict lady, but that’s what works!  Casey not only learned how to sit, shake, lay, stay, come, etc., but she also won the agility prize in her class!  She got a blue ribbon for being able to walk on the balance beam, walk over strange surfaces, and jumping over little hurdles.  I was very proud of her and my sister and I made agility courses in our backyard to help her keep up her skills.

Casey reading with Jon in Kentucky

Because Casey was a real family member, she got to go on a lot of adventures with us.  She went to Kentucky Lake many many times, and she’s also been to Arkansas, Illinois, Tennessee, and probably more places that I just can’t remember now.  I was hoping that she’d make the trip to visit me in Pittsburgh, but it was too late.  Casey became very sick this past week.  She couldn’t eat and could barely walk.  On Wednesday, November 18, my parents decided that she was in too much pain, and that they should put her to sleep.  Although I didn’t see Casey in that terrible condition, I know they made the right decision.  And although I wasn’t there, I can still feel that she is gone.  She was the friend that was always there.  She was full of love and personality.  She had a different bark for every kind of situation, and we understood her language.  Even though we brought another dog into her life, our funny Chloe, Casey still knew she was important.  She slept at my feet for years, and I cried so much when I had to leave her for college.  She always knew what it meant when I had suitcases.  I think no matter how much I try, I can never express how much Casey meant to me.  And I will not fully understand it, either, until I go home for Christmas and experience our family without her.

Casey Marie Barbier Bularzik: October 13, 1994-November 18, 2009.

Halloween in Pittsburgh was everything that I missed about Halloween in real cities.  (Note: DC is not a real city.)  Starting at the beginning of October, people tossed the orange lights and the spiderwebs onto their porches and trees.  They carved pumpkins and hung little ghosts — our neighbor across the street even hung a life-size grim reaper.  So spooky!  As the 31st got closer, the newspapers and stations announced official hours for trick-or-treating.  Hallelujah!  Last year Jon and I didn’t have any hope for trick-or-treaters coming to our door because we lived in a 80-unit apartment building.  But we took a walk around our residential DC neighborhood on Halloween night, and I think we saw a total of five kids dressed up and looking for candy.  Pitiful.

So we were determined to do it right this year in Pittsburgh, jack-o-lantern and candy and all.  Kids came to our door and said “trick-or-treat!” and although that was adorable, it made me very confused about my childhood.  In St. Louis, we didn’t get candy unless we told a joke!  Knock knock. Who’s there? Boo. Boo who? Why are you crying? Is St. Louis really the only place this happens?  Please, if you are reading this and you are from anywhere other than St. Louis, tell me what you did as a kid to earn candy on Halloween!

on my porch with the lil' jack-o-lantern

I just wanted to wear my pink wig this year!

i am a piece of bubble gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe. barbora is a bumble bee. both of us have awesome headgear.

And Jon just wanted to wear his hat from China…

jon is white trash, so i guess i am stuck to him?

Happy Halloween!  My favorite holiday.  Maybe this is going to be my holiday thing: Charlie Brown videos!  It’s just hard to think of anything but Charlie Brown when I think of my favorite holiday clips.  So here you go, Charlie Brown’s Halloween!

Courtesy (although a little late) of my personal photographer, Jon:

Riot police blocking the major streets at the end of my block in Bloomfield

One of the many broken windows in the neighborhood. Thanks, anarchists.

This dude was tackled for walking across the street, probably just trying to get to the other side. (That's a small joke. Kind of.)

There are lots of really disturbing photos from the G20, especially those of police arresting students.  There were even cases where police took pictures of themselves WITH the kneeling arrested students.  Sound familiar?

FRABJOUS: wonderful, elegant, superb, or delicious

Origin:  1872, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (one of my favorites!!!) perhaps as a combination of FABULOUS and JOYOUS.  The word is featured in a poem of nonsense language within the book:

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Reading this poem is like reading something in a language that you aren’t quite fluent enough to really understand.  Wonderful!

I actually wrote this a couple weeks ago, and then was waiting for Jon to send me photos he took at the G20, which he still hasn’t done.  Oh well!  Here we go:

I’ve been living in Pittsburgh for a few weeks now, and I was just getting used to the slower, more peaceful pace of life here.  That is, until, DUN DUN DUN…the G20.  All of a sudden, I am thrown back into the world I knew in DC: barricades, motorcades, police sirens and huge white tents.  On campus Thursday, there were conversations about Michelle Obama sightings and Russian and Japanese leaders.  That was all pretty familiar to me, until Jon and I decided to follow some of the riot police…

It was convenient to follow them, really.  We heard from friends that the action was going down not downtown, not near campus, but in our neighborhood, Bloomfield.  So following riot police was just part of walking back to our apartment.  The first sign of damage we saw was a broken window at a bank.  Then we came upon the Boston Market restaurant, where I walk by every day.  Every window in the place had been smashed with bricks and rocks.  Farther down the street, another bank, a McDonald’s and a BMW dealer had windows broken, too.

The people who did this belong to the anarchist group that seem to show up at every protest, everywhere, no matter the issue.  Their posters showed that they don’t believe in government or banks.  Ok, so that explains why they smashed bank windows.  But fast food joints?  In a working-class, residential neighborhood?  No one involved in the G20 goes to Bloomfield.  So how does breaking windows of restaurants in Bloomfield send a message to members of the G20?  That destruction happened on Thursday; on Friday, they broke windows of local businesses, including the breakfast joint where Obama ate during his campaign.  So this was not a protest against the corporate world; it was just an excuse to go break stuff.

There are two sides to this dance; there are the violent protesters, and then there are the violent police.  The problem is when non-violent protesters get punished by the violent police.  The police take any threat as serious.  And that’s what I witnessed on Thursday in Bloomfield.  The people who threw the rocks had been arrested and hauled away.  But people were still gathered around, because, like I said, this is a quiet residential area.  And if weird stuff is goin’ down, people want to see it.  But any gathering of people is threatening to a bunch of police in riot gear who just fought brick-wielding anarchists.

The first disturbing thing we saw was a cyclist get shoved against a car by police.  The biker was just riding through the street, just like the cars.  But s/he must have said something to the police, because all of a sudden s/he was pushed hard against a car and handcuffed.  A friend of the cyclist was there and able to take the bike as the police hauled away her friend.  Then the police started marching toward the crowd (Jon and I stayed as close as we could to the TV news truck; I feel comfortable near media) and telling us to disperse.  The crowd was on the sidewalks of both sides of the street, and a guy ran from one side of the street to the other.  The police must have taken that as a threat, because before he got to the other side, he was tackled to the ground and handcuffed.  Another man, a few minutes later, was handcuffed for yelling at the police to let the guy go.

Looking at everything I witnessed, I just find it so unnecessary.  There was no need for anarchist groups to destroy local businesses, just like there was no need for police to get violent with non-violent hecklers.  At least today there was an example of real protest; thousands of people marched peacefully from the university to downtown, carrying real messages about war and the economy.  One of the speakers at the march smartly said, “We’re confronting G-20 policies, not police.”

I’ve lived in Pittsburgh for a month now, so it’s about time I share some pictures of my new surroundings.  Here are some shots of the University of Pittsburgh on a pretty day, and a few photos of our apartment (which is still a work in progress!)

big yellow sculpture outside the School of Education building

Cathedral of Learning and a sculpture of mythological creatures

row of trees leading to the Carnegie Library

part of the living room with my desk and one of the two fireplaces

other half of the living room with lots of windows

my favorite...the lime green kitchen!!!

The American media cannot help but write about Chinese control over their citizens with at touch of humor.  The New York Times does it quite well today, with their article about China’s preparations for a massive parade on October 1.  That date marks the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic.  But China cannot just have a parade with children waving flags and Shriners driving mini-cars.  No, they need 5,000 soldiers marching in unison, in height-order, while chanting socialist phrases and only blinking once every 40 seconds.  Along with 10,000 police and 800,000 “security volunteers.”  Man, I miss China.

Here’s the article.

And here’s my favorite part of it:

Flying kites and model airplanes in Beijing has also been temporarily banned, to the distress of kite enthusiasts.  “Originally, they were all very excited about the holiday,” said Ming Ming, manager of the Sijimantian Kites Cultural Exchange Center, which sells kites and organizes competitions. “Now, they are stuck at home. People are feeling a little annoyed.”  He is not sure what they will do instead. “Most of the people who are interested in kites aren’t really interested in much else,” he said.

Anyone who spends more than an hour with me will find out that I love my hometown.  I adore it.  Most St. Louisans do, and that’s why they never leave.  Or they go off to faraway places, only to return.  Growing up in St. Louis, I had no idea how good I had it.  I thought every city had huge parks with rolling green hills, baseball stadiums overflowing with fans, skylines draped with massive monuments, people who said hello as you walked down the street, ice cream and donut shops with passionate devotees, and museums with school buses hanging off the top.

But they don’t.  I’ve been to a lot of cities.  There are many that I still need to see in this country, but I can confidently say I have been to all of the “great American cities.”  I’ve been to a lot of “great” world cities, too.  And I compare every one of them with St. Louis.  At this point in my travel-obsessed life, I say there is nothing that you cannot get in St. Louis.  Some would bring up public transportation, to which I would say that #1: St. Louis is an amazing biking city, and #2: St. Louis covers a HUGE amount of land, so expanding the light rail to reach everyone in the metro area (569 square miles) is equivalent to doing so in Los Angeles (498 square miles).  Anything that is important to you in a city, I can promise you will find it in St. Louis.  Except the beach or mountains.  Let’s not get cute.

So after my four-month vacation, I landed back in St. Louis at the end of May, ready to sweat through the summer and pine away for my days in more exciting cities.  But St. Louis had other things in mind.  Not only was it the mildest summer on record, but we had a series of rockin’ thunderstorms all summer long.  Living on the east coast for the past six years, I forgot what amazing shows in the sky we get in the midwest.  In fact, the night before Jon and I drove from St. Louis to Pittsburgh, a monstrous storm blasted our eardrums all night.   I told Jon the thunder was furious at him for planning to take me away.

Instead of a summer spent dreaming about Thailand and Denmark, I filled my time with as much St. Louis as possible, and still left at the end of the three months not getting to do everything I had hoped.  Everything was better and brighter than ever — the neighborhoods, the parks, the diversity, the nightlife, the architecture — if you want to watch a city grow and change, it’s the place to be.

I spent wonderful time with my family, especially my sister who is now studying abroad in the Balkans (check her out on http://balkanbedouin.wordpress.com/).  One night she and I went to see Guster play for free on the riverfront under the Arch.  The lead singer proclaimed it the coolest venue he’s ever played at.  Sure, maybe he’s said that to other cities before, but did he then make up raps about them?  My google search says no.

When the summer was all over, I didn’t want to leave.  I cried until I couldn’t see the Arch in the rear-view mirror anymore.  And I’ve already picked out my flight for Christmas.

The Arch in the background, looking from the new downtown sculpture garden

An all-star Arch stands in front of the Old Courthouse on the day of the all-star game.

Although I have not been writing a lot this summer, I am doing a lot of stuff.  I have five jobs (yes, five, I am not exaggerating) and I have an entertaining family, all in a city that I adore.  On one afternoon outing with the family, we stopped in a new bookstore next to my old high school.  My sister picked up a book to show me, because it was about China, and I was starting to annoy her about how much I talked about China.  I flipped open the book to a random page and started reading.  The author was explaining how Chinese people see themselves as the center of the world, just like we Americans do. “Great!” I thought. “A guy who wrote a book about my exact thoughts!”  I made a mental note to get the book from the library, since libraries are a fun new part of my frugal lifestyle.

A few weeks later I got my hands on the book: Lost on Planet China, by J. Maarten Troost.  Before I started reading, I read a few reviews of the book on Goodreads.com, a website I like to check once in a while.  Most of the reviews raved about how funny this guy was.  A few people wrote that this book convinced them not to visit China.  Warning signals went off in my brain.  Then I talked to a friend who was reading the book, and she said that it also made her reconsider any travel plans to China.  Uh oh.  Time to read this thing.

The situation is this: A guy leaves his family in California for a seven-month jaunt around China to see what it’s all about, and most importantly to write a book.  He travels through many cities I visited: Beijing, Tai An, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.  Plus he got into Tibet and other western regions that I didn’t reach.  The book is a 380-page account of his experiences, woven in with a bit of history, and capped off with strong judgments and sweeping assumptions.  The first word that comes to mind when I think of Lost on Planet China is “boring.”  The subtitle of the book is The strange and true story of one man’s attempt to understand the world’s most mystifying nation. And while I agree that China is mystifying, I do not agree that Maarten’s story is strange.  In fact, for every “strange” tale that he told, I could one-up him with one of my own much more interesting tales.  And that is with my only being in China for one month, compared to his seven months.  I don’t think I did anything dramatically different than him in China, but somehow he came out with the book deal.

But beyond my assertion that my book about China would sell a lot more copies than his, I am concerned about the accusations and assumptions in this book.  The two rules of writing are to be interesting and accurate.  He blew the interesting part by having sub-par stories, but he reaches new levels of ignorance when it comes to accuracy.  All of his claims play into the fear Westerners have of places like China, which is completely contradictory to his goal of “understanding” the nation.  For example:

• Maarten whines about the dangers of crossing streets in Beijing as a pedestrian.  While Chinese drivers are indeed fast and furious, the pedestrian rarely faces danger.  Anyone who is walking in Beijing for one minute realizes that all those bridges and tunnels above and below the streets are for pedestrians.  He should go spend some time in Vietnam or Cambodia, where there aren’t even traffic signals, much less pedestrian bridges.
• One of the biggest stereotypes about China is the spitting.  Maarten mentions dodging puddles of spit and ducking out of the way of flying spit multiple times in his book.  It’s true that spitting is a cultural bad habit in China.  But with the arrival of both the 2008 Olympics and the scares of SARS and bird flu, the public crackdown on spitting has been huge.  Sure, you will see people spitting in China; it will almost certainly be a man and he will almost always be old.  But the habit is dying, and it has reduced a lot since Maarten wrote his book.
• Here’s a fun one!  Babies in China don’t have diapers; they have slits in their pants, and their parents just take them into the bathroom and hold them over the toilet.  Now I know there are a million questions running through your head about this one, and I regret not asking my Chinese friends about the logistics of this system.  But while I see this as a fun cultural difference, Maarten saw it as a health hazard.  He claims to have seen kids pooping and peeing on the streets wherever he went.  I never saw a kid do that and never saw piles of poop suggesting that it happened.
• We all know that water is unsafe to drink in most of the world.  Travelers also know that bottled water can be unsafe if the seal has already been broken.  But Maartin suggested in his book something much more terrifying: that 50 percent of bottled water is contaminated.  Whoa.  First of all, what does contaminated mean?  Is he talking about bottles that were being resold and resealed?  Second of all, how did my friends and I drink multiple bottles of water a day and never get sick?  I searched and searched for any documentation about contaminated bottled water in China, and I found none.  Instead, I found an article about high school kids drinking contaminated bottled water…in California.
• China has a billion people (literally) and sometimes the crowds are awful (Forbidden City) and that can get overwhelming.  A solid guarantee for being overwhelmed is traveling during Chinese holidays and festivals.  Maarten traveled during Golden Week, a time when all Chinese get the week off.  Because of obvious complications with crowding, the government ended this holiday in 2007.  If you know in advance where you are going and when, avoiding crowds in China is possible, just like other major tourist destinations around the world.
• J. Maarten Troost is a writer, so I understand when he wants to use colorful phrases like “beseeched by beggars and hounded by pimps.”  But when I realized he was talking about China, I was horrified.  Granted, since I am a woman I was not approached by men asking if I would like a night with a hot Chinese girl.  But Maarten’s references to beggars and shady characters are just baffling.  Compared to my experiences in Washington DC, New York City, Paris, Barcelona, and countless other world-class cities, begging in China was nearly non-existent.  I was never approached by anyone, especially not children.
• One aspect of non-Western travel that people either love or hate is haggling.  After a month in Southeast Asia, I was already used to haggling by the time I got to China.  It was much easier in China, actually, because there were not as many Western tourists, so the shopkeepers weren’t really used to ripping people off.  Maarten reportedly was ripped off all the time, by food-sellers, taxi drivers, and hotels.  This really irks me, because I was robbed and cheated so many times in Southeast Asia by drivers; when I got to China, taxis put on the meter.  Not only did they give us a fair price by locals’ standards, but when we would try to tip drivers for being extra helpful, they would refuse the money!
• Maarten writes about everyday Chinese people as if they are tricky and cold-hearted, as well.  I could not disagree more.  No where else on earth have I met more strangers willing to help me.  Every day in China I was blown away by a random act of kindness.  Maarten mentions a few instances of people sharing food with him or having friendly conversations, but they are presented as an exception as opposed to the norm.  He tries to make you really scared of Chinese people.
• Here comes the big one: pollution.  Yes, China is polluted, especially Beijing.  Yes, people wear masks (in the summer) and people have reactions like coughing, itchy eyes, etc.  However, Maarten uses terrifying vocabulary to describe the pollution; “apocolyptic” was his favorite term.  While I cannot dispute that China is one of the most polluted places on earth, I can play a fun game to dispute his claims of “swirling clouds” of orange toxins throughout the country.  The game is called “Find the Swirling Orange Toxins in my Photos of Beijing.”  Go:

OK, try to find the swirling orange clouds in the terrifying Beijing sky!!!

Why are they smiling?! Can't they see the orange clouds!?

Wait. That is not China, is it? This has been photoshopped, right?

The point of all this is not to say that I am 100 percent right and Mr. Troost is 100 percent wrong.  I do not think that he is guilty of fabrication, only of exaggeration.  But that is a big problem and a disservice to his audience.  Most of his audience for this book has never been to China.  Maybe they were thinking about going, so they picked up this book to get some insight.  After reading this, I don’t even want to go to the country he is describing!  But his experience was not my experience.  And your experience will not be his experience.  He was writing a book, and the more shocking and sweeping statements he could make, the more likely people were going to think he was smart.

I do strongly agree with him on one thing: China is extremely mystifying and mind-blowingly complicated.  You will read and see things in China that will shock your system.  You can either reject or embrace it.  There are huge aspects of China that I find disturbing, from human rights to pollution to personal freedom.  But China is changing faster than any nation in history, and I am confident that these things will change in my lifetime.  While I was traveling through China, I was reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.  It’s that classic about the awful conditions of the meat packing factories in turn-of-the-century Chicago.  So many of the issues in that book are relevant to China today: overcrowding of big cities, unchecked pollution, low standards of quality, inhumane working conditions, corruption and extreme gaps in wealth…the list goes on and on.  As Americans, we have been through these exact same challenges.  All nations have serious issues to deal with; the way we will all succeed is by working together, not pushing each other away.  And I am afraid this book pushes us away.  If you open this book, you may be closing your mind.