in Malaysia and Singapore: not very hot from a very fine ground in a pot that brews all day, deadly bitter, poured carefully over a thick layer of cream and sugar that you stir into it.

in Belgium: from a stovetop machina, with ice cream.

in the Netherlands: like the French, but with Stroopwaffeln instead of sugar.

in New Orleans: with chicory and a beignet.

in China: any damn way you can imagine it. Usually bitter and poorly-brewed with lots of sugar. Why aren't you drinking tea, you masochist?

in Boston: at Dunkin Donuts.

in Bali: from a powdery grind spooned into a dry cup, over which is poured hot-not-boiling water. Milk is optional. Leave the mud at the bottom of the cup.

in Austin ca. 1994: Americano.

in Hungary: like Italians: a wet espresso served in a demitasse with a little sugar.

in Taiwan: at Starbuck's.

in Nebraska: percolated or drip, one teaspoon of canned grounds per cup.

in Berlin: with many many cigarettes.

in Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas: Folger's automatic drip, strong and dark, if you're lucky it's from this afternoon's pot and not this morning's. You better put cream in it.

in Twin Peaks: black as midnight on a moonless night.

In the last year I generated a hypothesis about global attitudes toward shit:

“A person’s aversion to fecal matter is inversely proportional to their cultural distance from England.”

Most of Asia smells much of the time like shit. Even spick-and-span Singapore. I don’t know how many times I’m sitting with a group of expats and a few locals at an outdoor eatery when a rich aroma of shit wafts in from the [ sea | gutter | lagoon | river ]. The Anglo-Saxons — stereotypically the Brits — take this almost as a personal affront: “How dare this rural city in a developing country smell like shit! Don’t they know there are English speakers living here?” Aussies, Kiwis, Canucks and Americans grit their teeth and pinch their noses. Continentals and Asians are utterly nonplussed. “Of course it smells like shit. Doesn’t the entire world?”

It’s interesting that the stereotypical Peace Corps project is digging a well. NGO fieldworkers often use western-style toilets as a barometer of a project’s boondoggleness. That is, if an organization is installing privies or flush toilets in a teeny village, you can be pretty sure they don’t know what they’re doing. Because there are so many other things that the villagers would rather have than plumbing. Such as mobile phones, electricity, satellite TV, and Internet access. Probably in that order. Thus vast slums in which everyone craps in the gutter while chatting on their mobiles. When my grandparents modernized the farm in the 1930s, I bet they added telephone then electricity and then indoor plumbing.

In terms of relative value, you gain much more from a mobile phone or even satellite TV than sewage treatment. A cel phone is cheap, reliable, disposable, and provides enormous social and business benefits. Sewage treatment is expensive, centralized, and requires massive maintenance, without which it rapidly becomes worse than the non-system (ditch-crapping) it replaces. And its benefits are diffuse and abstract. Yeah, I’m less likely to get cholera at some unspecified point in the future, but with the mobile phone I can talk to my mom in the home village right now. If you only have a little money to spend on self-improvement, where will you put it: pool it with everyone else in the slum and get sewage treatment sometime next year, or buy yourself a mobile phone now?

This is one reason the Information Revolution is not going away, Peak Oil be damned. The corollary is that, in the long view, information work is much easier to outsource than manufacturing, and more likely to stay outsourced.

Other fun Asian sewage facts:

• Asian sewage smells different from American sewage. More cabbagy and ammoniac, less eggy.
• The solid bits in sewage turn liquid really quickly. When I was first confronted with open sewers I expected them to be full of chunks but, what the hey, it’s all liquid? And not actually brown but kind of an algal black?
• Asian plumbers don’t use gooseneck gas traps. Ever! This is because they don’t vent the exhaust to the roof (as in America). Squat toilets, urinals, and the open drain in our bathroom are pretty much open pipes to the city sewer. In our bathroom we fight this odor by pouring a little bleach down the drain.
• It’s pretty safe to eat fish caught near sewage outlets. Cook the hell out of them first, though. Fish caught near industrial waste outlets? Not so much.

My brother and mother have been visiting this past week. I took them to the usual Xiamen tourist sites: Gulangyu Island, Nanputuo Temple, Zhongshan Road. There’s pictures of all the Xiamen stuff on the Flickr Stream. I won’t say too much except this was the most of Xiamen I’d seen, well, ever, including Sunlight Rock on Gulangyu and eating lunch with the monks at Nanputuo. Which was a definite highlight not only of their visit, but of my year in China.

At the end of the week we visited Beijing, and again did as much Beijing as you can do in three days: Temple of Heaven, Tian’anmen Square, Forbidden City, Great Wall. Again I refer you to Beijing pics on the Flickr stream.

This trip represented the only travel I’ve done in Mainland China outside of Xiamen’s immediate environs. Beijing was nice as a contrast to Xiamen — the food was worse, the Mandarin was better, and the air of an unbelievably poor quality. When Karl and I visited Tian’anmen we almost could not see across it (half a kilometer). I will no longer put “Cleanest City in China” in air quotes when discussing Xiamen. (Except this one time, I guess.)

Most remarkable (to me) was how easily I can navigate a strange Chinese city (and Beijing is not easy.) I speak more than just survival Mandarin and my limited literacy is surprisingly useful. But even without my new linguistic bag of tricks, my attitude toward travel has become a lot more charitable. All the hassle stuff (taxis, hotels, public transit, asking directions) — I am much more confortable with this stuff than I was a year ago. I suppose I like it better, too, but probably only in the way that I like doing my taxes better now than I did when I was 25.

The Great Internet Crackdown continues apace. Flickr is now a casuality. Specifically, we can’t view photos on Flickr, although pages load and I can upload images just fine. Blogger remains totally blocked, requiring a round trip through a proxy to view or post. So add “repression” to the list of excuses why my posting has been/will continue to slack for the next few weeks. (Said list would also include “too busy at work” and “packing to leave” and “endless dog-related bureaucracy to get Bismarck out of here” and “interviewing for jobs back in Portland.”)

After viewing the sordid history of China in its capital I am feeling much less charitable towards China, the Nation (and seeing it afresh through my family’s eyes kind of dims China, the People, as well, although I still have a lot of affection in this regard). Yet Another Reason why I’ll be glad to be back in Oregon.

Apropos of nothing, I made a chart that shows, for any given year since I graduated from college, the number of W-2s I filed, and the number of addresses I called “home.” Of course, these are incomplete metrics of how often I hop jobs or shift house. The job metric omits freelance jobs that don’t provide W-2s, but over-represents temp agency jobs that no one would consider terribly permanent. And how I define “home” is notoriously vague. Do I count places at which I’ve received mail? This would include, for example, several “c/o General Delivery” addresses I had while doing fieldwork. For the purposes of this exercise, I decided to define “home” as any address at which I received a bank statement. So most of my abodes while performing fieldwork are not represented. On the other hand, this metric over-represents my parents’ addresses, where I had my bank statements forwarded during periods of high mobility (e.g. while living out of my backpack or moving to China).

Plotting a trend — even an exercise as simple as this — reveals patterns. Overall, I average about 2.4 jobs and 2.3 addresses per year. The inverse of the mean (1/µ) suggests a periodicity of about 0.4 for both metrics — in other words, I change jobs or addresses every 0.4 years (or 5 months). The logarithmic trend lines reveal a clear pattern to hold jobs longer as I age, and a less-clear pattern to shift addresses less frequently. In other words, my early job-hopping skews the job-hopping metric, but I can reliably be counted upon to shift addresses every five months.

The archaeologist in me sees three discontinuities. In particular, I notice two “stable years” (1996 and 2004) in which I had only one job and lived in only one address. I also have one “ultra-unstable” year (1999) where I top out both metrics. If this chart were a seriation of pottery shards from an archaeological site, I would expect that those three sample units are providing especially unusual information. So what happened in 1996, 1999, and 2004?

In 1996, I was in the second year of grad school. I had a fellowship that I carried for both years of school, and which grew out of and back into my job as a Collections Assistant at the Oregon State Museum of Anthropology. It was a great job and I was good at it. I also had an affordable, nice-enough apartment close to campus. So 1996 actually represents two years of stability: from the time I moved to Oregon (August, 1995) to start school, until I left school and moved to Montana for my first field directorship (August, 1997). The stability here was real: my life was mostly unchanged during the period beginning in 1995 and ending in 1997.

In 1999, I left my last archaeology job in Southern California and changed careers into web design. This was also the height of the DotCom boom. The job-hopping represents my gaining traction in my new career: two of my W-2 were for temp agencies that year. The address-shifting represents both the move from SoCal (back) to Oregon, as well as an abortive move to Seattle. There were also intra-city moves in Redlands and Portland.

2004 was the first year after I met Jenny (my favorite person). We were living in a rented house in Multnomah Village (my favorite home of my adult life), and I was working as an Art Director at Curiosity (my favorite job ever). We lived in that house for two years (July, 2003 to June, 2005). I had the Curiosity job for almost three (July, 2002 to April, 2005).

All this seems like a lot of change. But the apparent job-hopping, and to a lesser extent the house-shifting, are artifacts of my chosen careers. Both archaeology and web design are project-based work. Moreover archaeology is seasonal and site-dependent. When the project ends, everyone gets laid off, and you move (geographically) to the next available project. This happened to me with five archaeology jobs (one in 1993, three in 1994, and one in 1999). I kind of developed a nose for impending layoffs, and managed to duck out of some of my design jobs just before the company declared bankruptcy (which happened once in 1999, and three times in 2001).

After 1999, however, my profession doesn’t explain my address changes, because I pretty much lived entirely in Oregon. From 1999 to 2002, however, I was living through my unhappy first marriage, which produced a lot of moving-in and moving-out. I can attribute three address changes in that period to two separations and a divorce.

2007 looks to be an on-trend year. Jenny and I will be back in Oregon soon and I’ll be looking to add another job to my resumé. Frankly, though, I’m getting sorely tired of these shenanigans. My life has suffered from a surfeit of adventure, professional and personal. Despite which, as I’ve come to realize this past year, I am not a particularly adventurous person. If pressed, I’d say my favorite years (in the past fourteen) were, unsurprisingly, 1996 and 2004. (Although 1994 might rate as well, for very different reasons.) My least favorite would certainly be 2002, which was kind of the karmic hangover for 1999–2000.

I sometimes liken myself to a hobbit. I really long for the comforts of familiarity and the dignity of labor. I don’t care much for fancy trinkets or fast living. In another age I’d have made a pretty good farmer. But every so often I get an itch, and I tear my life apart scratching it. Today I’m hoping our adventure in China proves to be the last.