The Asian Weirdo (me)

Funny bus story for you. Anita and I ride the same bus route every day, and there's this asian dude that often catches the same bus as us. He sort of reminds us of John Cho (Harold from the Harold and Kumar movies), so we've always assumed he was Korean. Well today, after work, I was standing next to him on the bus home, and he had his tunes turned up so that I could almost hear the music from his earbuds. I thought I recognized the opening bars from the theme song to this obscure Chinese fantasy soap opera series from the 80's that absolutely NO ONE other than Anita and I remember from our youth. I LOVED the show, and the theme song. So naturally, I needed to confirm if in fact he was listening to this song, when I started leaning my head in a bit closer... and then even a bit closer, just to be really sure. At some point, I must have crossed the threshold of social acceptability, and he backed off with that "WTF ARE YOU DOING, WEIRDO" look on his face as I invaded his personal space. :)

Of course, I figured it would be more acceptable to just come across as a weirdo than try to explain, "Hey random guy on bus, is that song that's playing just loud enough for me to maybe recognize, the theme some from super obscure 80's Hong Kong fantasy soap opera?" So now I'm always going to be weird awkward man in his books forever more. I'm fine with that. At least I confirmed that he WAS in fact listening to that Chinese theme song, and when I texted Anita to let her know, her response was, "I thought he was Korean?!"

Anyways, we didn't get out to the mountains this weekend, so instead of summit photos, I thought I'd share some photos from our visit to China a couple years ago where we thru hiked a couple sections of the Great Wall. We started at Gubeikou, a largely unrestored section of the wall, and hiked for about 4 hours connecting up to the Jinshanling section that is restored to look like the imposing castle rampart style you immediately imagine when someone says 'Great Wall of China.'

These sections of the wall were a bit further away from Beijing than some of the more tourist visited spots, so we had miles of the wall to ourselves.