How much wood would a good Chuck chuck?

I met Chuck Palahniuk yesterday. Well, I say met, but really all I did was shake the guy's hand and grin too much and get his signature on my copy of Snuff and annoy him.

My new friend Alberto was ultra excited when I told him I was going to the Edinburgh Book Festival to see Chuck Palahniuk. And then he was crushed when I told him all the tickets were sold out. He said he loves the guy's books and thinks he's incredibly sexy. Me too, I said.

I built up this image in my head, as you do with celebrities. From the 4 photographs I've seen, and the 4 novels I've read, I had this idea that Chuck was this kinda beefy, tattooed, all-American-but-
perverted (I mean that in the nicest possible way) kind of guy, that rode around on a motorbike collecting stranger-than-fiction stories from the deepest, darkest parts of the US. I suppose I attached a Henry Rollins type character to him.

So maybe you can imagine my excitement when Alberto told me he was gay! You mean, this incredibly talented, imaginative writer, who kinda reminds me of a big, muscled, intelligently political heavy metal singer, is actually fair game? I mean, I know he writes about homosexuality quite a bit in his books, but I also knew he was obsessive with his research, and simply a very good writer. But gay?! How fabulous!! I squealed.

So I came up with this plan, that when I got him to sign my book, I'd say, only three-quarters jokingly, "...yeah, make it out to Phil, could ya Chuck... and your number, just underneath there..." and I'd shoot him a smoldering look, shrug my shirt ever so slightly to reveal a bit more shoulder, and lean in over the table, smirking in that flirtatious way that I have, that probably makes me look like a stalker.

Ridiculous, foolish, adolescent dreams, I know, but those are pretty much the only dreams I have.

It turns out, Mr Palahniuk is a rather sweet, engaging man, who looks like he works in a Christian Science bookstore. I still think he's an amazing writer, and a lovely guy, but my libidinous fantasies involving a hot and sweaty reading and book signing, a blokey, beery night on Rose St, followed by a trashed hotel room and a bit of light spanking dissolved when he made his way elegantly into the spotlight at the Main Theatre at Charlotte Square Gardens. Sorry if you're reading, Chuck. (Yeah right, Ed.)

That's celebrity, isn't it. It's having too many people think that you're this giant, this super-everything, this fulfillment of all their perfect, Platonic ideals, only to have them embarrassingly admit the next day, on their blogs and to their friends, that you're just like everybody else. It's having people think they know you, and should be your friend, cos they've seen some interview and bought all your stuff. It's no wonder half of them become train wrecks.

He said something nice about celebrity, last night. He said for him, there are only two states of being; isolation, and community, and since he didn't want to end his life thinking how great it was when he was alone, he chose community. Celebrity was just one way of being with other people. "I don't know what the hell to say to you, so here are some stories I've got." It sounded like something you'd hear on Oprah, and the audience awwwws and claps, but I get the feeling with Chuck, he's genuine. I mean, he's genuine in his books, and he seems genuine in person. He was genuine enough to get annoyed when me, trying so hard to be noticed in the long, long line of book signees, I asked him to customise my blow up doll.

After telling a great story about some friends of his, he started throwing male and female blow up dolls into the audience. Signed blow up dolls. I caught one and was suitably thrilled. The first person up to blow up a boy and the first to blow up a girl would win a DVD. I had no idea what the DVD was, but I wanted to be the one he remembered. I wanted to be the one everyone remembered. I wanted to be a star. I blew up mine pretty fast, but came second, so I sat down, slightly deflated (har har) but still very impressed with my souvenir. I sat him on my leg, and settled down for the rest of the show.

Afterwards I stood in the book signing queue, chatted to a few nice people, and thought of all the different ways I could be different, and stand out. I dressed my blow up doll in my jacket, and came up with a name for him: Randy Colt, a good, solid porn star name. But then I thought, he doesn't really look like a Randy Colt, so instead I named him Eunice the Eunuch, on account of the fact that he has no genitalia. Or really anything vaguely sexual about him at all (if you discount the ridiculous printed-on hairy chest). He's about the size of a 12 year old boy, which was made even more disturbing by the fact that there actually was a 12 year old boy at the book signing, dancing with another male blow up doll. I don't know.

Ha, there I go, aping the great Chuck Palahniuk. He told us to. He said that's how he started writing, just freely copying the styles of the authors he admired. That made me think that maybe I could be a writer after all.

My greatest fear, the thing that repeatedly stops me from doing anything, is that people will think that I'm a fake, a copy of someone good. In all aspects of my life, I'm always trying to distinguish myself from everyone else. I'm always trying to win the admiration of others by doing something that they would never have had the courage or imagination to do themselves. The problem is I never try all that hard. It explains why I went to China instead of Thailand, Berlin instead of London, Edinburgh instead of London. It's why I start out all excited about a new project that I'm working on, only to find that two hours later I'm telling myself to give up, because it's been done before, and better. I start writing a fantastic, epic novel about...something ... and after a few pages I can't think of anything except myself.

I can't make art about anything except myself. That's why it's easy(er) for me to write a blog than to do something really creative.

So anyway, I get to the front of the line, after two hours of needing to pee, and I'm all giddy and nervous, and I've borrowed a marker from one of the staff, and I'm so excited about my very original idea, and I say "Thanks for a great reading, and for your amazing books, and for my new friend Eunice..."

The damn woman who was helping him asked me who I wanted Chuck to dedicate his autograph to, and I said Phil and Eunice. And Eunice is the name of the blow up doll. Because he's a Eunuch. And then I mentally bang my palm on my forehead, because my big punch line, the thing that was going to make Mr Chuck Palahniuk grin and be my friend, has been wasted on his assistant. Still I console myself with the fact that in a survey of popular baby names in the US, Eunice is almost always a girl's name, while 0.15% of the time, it's used for boys! How awesome is that!

How sad is it that I googled that?

And I say, "Thanks for everything Chuck and I wonder if I could ask you a favour I know you're tired and you've got shitloads more books to sign but I wonder if maybe you could customise my blow up doll..."

And he says, quite evenly, but I can tell he is annoyed, "But I already did, I signed it, see?" pointing at the doll's disturbingly smooth genital area.

I mean, it wasn't enough that the guy hand signed about 50 blow up dolls and threw them to his adoring fans. It wasn't enough that he is signing my copy of Snuff, by hand, with a thousand more coming up behind me, and including a dodgy polaroid that he must have taken himself of a massive all girl blow up doll orgy (red-eye dog included). No, I had to be different, and get my doll customised as well. No wonder he sounded testy.

And I get uneasy but I tell myself to hell with it and say, "yeah, I know, but if you don't mind, you know, like drawing something on it..."

"Like what?"

"Um, like a mustache or something?" Bang goes the palm on the forehead, again.

So he does. Like a trooper, he draws a mustache and a little goatee and a strange little line on his forehead that I guess is like a dashing one-eyebrow raise. Eunice now looks like a sexy 'continental' villain from a Fifties cartoon.

And I gush and say thank you a million times and walk out, looking for the girls who were before me in the queue. They've disappeared.

I was a kind of celebrity last night, after all. I did definitely stick out from the crowd, at least, as I made my way down George st on a Saturday night, while bemused, amused, frightened drunk people tried to process the sight of a man with a blown up male blow up doll proudly tucked under his arm, strolling jauntily home.

Egyptology

To help me get Egyptian prices, as opposed to over-inflated tourist prices, I've been lying. I say that my parents are living in Alexandria and I am studying English in Australia so I can become a writer. Yes, sadly, it is necessary to create elaborate stories about your nationality if you want cheap stuff.

I sat down and chatted with a very lovely Muslim guy named Muhammed today. He runs a shisha and galabeya shop in El Souk st in Aswan. He started off trying to sell me something, and then when he saw that I could speak Arabic he asked me to come sit and talk with him. I usually fob off such requests, but today I relented. He seemed nice.

The vast majority of Egyptians are amazingly warm, welcoming people. They will sit and chat with anyone, offer them tea or food, even welcome them into their houses. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them who are also very poor, and try and remedy their situation by trying to cash in on the (comparitively) rich, ignorant tourist. Thus warm and welcoming become aggressive and annoying. Sometimes even criminal.

Because I told him the story about me being a student of Egyptian heritage, Muhammed sat and chatted with me, and gave up on the selling. He asked me about Australia, and talked (wistfully?) about how socially free we were. In Egypt (and most Islamic countries) men and women are very closely watched by their family and other Egyptians. In other words, no sex before marriage. No hanging out with the opposite sex before marriage. No talking about sex before, during or after marriage. So Australia must seem like some kind of amazing free-lovin' sexual paradise (or reincarnation of Sodom, depending on who you ask). I had a very similar discussion with this cute soldier on the train from Cairo to Luxor. He believed that in the West, the lines that defined acceptable behaviour had been pushed too far. He also had this idea that gay people had gotten bored with women and decided to experiment. I patiently explained that gay people (like friends of friends of mine) were not like that at all, and that they were gay because there was something inside them from the very beginning that made them who they were. He seemed to understand, or at least think about it.

Cairomania

I sit on a balcony six storeys above a (relatively) quiet street in Heliopolis, an inner suburb of Cairo. Heliopolis, in Greek, means "City of the Sun", but this morning the sun is mercifully hiding behind a big wet blanket of cloud. For the past three days I've been beaten into a listless stupor by a dry, oppressive heat which has made it difficult to engage fully in this very strange yet very familiar experience called Egypt.

My father was born in the village of Manoufeya, Battanoun, and has four brothers and five sisters. Almost all of them live in Egypt. It's a bit of a change from Australia, where I only see my mother's parents and her brother, and one of my dad's sisters.

My grandmother, my father's mother, is more than 80 years old and lives in Tanta, a city halfway between Cairo and Alexandria. She's also very sick after falling twice in her apartment in Cairo about two months ago. She had a stroke, so she cannot talk, only make repeated dadada sounds, which makes it incredibly difficult for our family to understand what she needs. It's also just recently transpired that she broke her arm at some point. No one, not her doctors, nor her physiotherapist, knew about this broken arm, despite her agonised cries everytime her arm was moved, despite our family's pleas to have it looked at, despite the x-ray she had done. It was only after another doctor came in to have a look was it confirmed that her arm was indeed in need of setting. This sort of thing, happens all the time in Egypt. No one is held accountable.

I thought the traffic in China was bad, but at least everyone drove in a vaguely predictable fashion, and somehow the whole complex mess flowed beautifully. In Egypt, people indicate right when they want to go left, double park on main roads, stop to have a chat and block streets, drive on the wrong side of the road needlessly, blow their horns incessantly, and generally act as though pedestrians are merely inconvenient speed humps. And I won't start on the pedestrians...

Five times a day, starting at some ridiculous hour, broadcast across the city through countless powerful speakers, comes the Muslim call to prayer. It usually starts with the famous Allah hu'akbar which means "God is great" and proceeds to deep, resonant chanting which I can't understand. For me, it's kind of nice, as it gives the city a peaceful, mystical air which it desperately needs. However, for the 30% of the country, including my family, who are Coptic Orthodox Christians, this incessant droning takes a heavy toll on the soul. My sister calls Muslims mosquitos, because they go to mosques, are highly irritating, and there's an awful lot of them. She finds it incredibly insulting that they feel they can shout their religion so loudly and openly without regard for the non-Muslims. But I can't really go much deeper into the complexities of Muslim-Christian relationships in this country because a lot of what I know is fed to me by my family, who aren't exactly the most unbiased source of information. I met some lovely Muslim boys at the Egyptian Museum who are studying to be tour guides, one of whom gave me his number and asked me to call him if I needed anything at all while I was in Cairo. I wouldn't mind spending some quality time with him in the spirit of Islamic brotherhood, if you know what I mean.

Oh god, I'm going to burn in Hell.

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo is astounding, but unfortunately you can't take photos. Like Cairo itself, it's noisy, overcrowded and disorganised (there are still yet to be unpacked crates scattered amongst the exhibits), but the sheer quantity and significance of things on display blew my mind. They have the famous gold and lapis burial mask of King Tutankhamen, sitting quietly in a small room off to one side, and a collection devoted to my favourite pharaoh, the very unpopular King Akhenaten, who tried to get everyone to worship one god, the sun, instead of hundreds. They also have a mummy room, which I loved. Entry to the Museum cost me two Egyptian pounds, and the mummy room an extra ten pounds, which all together equates to roughly A$3. For foreign tourists, entry is 50 Pounds for the Museum, and another 90 for the mummy room.

The Egyptians, in general, look at foreign tourists as fat, juicy cash cows waiting to be milked, and the Egyptian Government openly encourages this view. It is actually legal for establishments, be they museums, internet cafes, hotels or market stalls, to charge tourists 10 to 50 times the price for ordinary citizens. This sort of thing did happen occasionally in China, admittedly, but here it is rampant and state-sanctioned. It is only because I look Egyptian and speak Arabic (albeit not very well) that I've escaped a royal scalping. It also means that I've not been harrassed by beggars and sellers while I've been here, but I'm not sure how aggressive or plentiful they are.

The first part of my Egyptian adventure is going to be heavily family-oriented. Sightseeing (and hopefully more photography) is for later, when hopefully I'll be able to wrench myself free of their concerned, over-protective grasp. I haven't even gone to the pyramids yet! My father and others are saying I shouldn't go to Luxor and Aswan, where the vast majority of temples and collossi are, because it's too hot. I say "bah!" and hope that I can organise a trip down there soon. History is calling me, and the Museum only makes me want to run to it more urgently.

It's my birthday today.

Promise

I am never, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER going to fly with a hangover again.

Shanghaiied

Today is my second last day in Shanghai. Tomorrow I fly out to Beijing. I'm feeling vaguely confident now that I know what to look for, and I've learnt a couple more words. His Hotness Prince Daryl of Birmingham says the Leo Hostel, just off Tiananmen Square, is the bomb.

Shanghai has been good to me, despite some difficulties. Considering how disorganised I am, I should be huddled in a corner, rocking myself to sleep. That's not to say it's been all plain sailing. One of the most frustrating thing for me has been not being able to come to grips with the bus system, which has resulted in me walking everywhere in between the train and metro stations. Shanghai is fucking huge, and the distances between streets have made exploring this place a daily battle. Just imagine the area of Sydney bounded by Paddington and Glebe, stretched to fill the entire Sydney metropolitan area. You can drive for more than an hour before you get out of downtown Shanghai.

In practical terms, this meant that last night, when I was trying to find a decent place to drink and meet people, I almost gave up on several occasions. I would walk for half an hour, pull out my incredibly large and obtrusive map, walk for another 20 minutes, get lost, find the place I was looking for, and then realise it sucked. And on top of that, there were frequent stretches along the way infested with beggars, street sellers and hustlers all trying to get money out of me. It was only the overriding desire for some decent human company that kept me going.

I spent 3 hours wandering the area known as the French Concession, where most of the bars and clubs are. There are a shitload of them. The problem is , on a Thursday night, they're either empty or tacky or depressing or hip hop. I know, I was probably judging them unfairly, but everytime I thought I'd give a crappy looking bar a go, I was proven right.

Right at the end of my night, when hope was almost extinguished, I was walking towards the California Bar, on the fringes of Fuxing Park. If it was as bad as I expected, I was going to go home.

I saw the mother and her three year old daughter sitting on the curb, and I saw the Yuan signs in their eyes as I approached in my swanky western clothes. My heart sunk, for the five hundredth time, as I prepared to ignore them. The little girl ran towards me and said "Hello, hello, money, money!" very excitedly, smiling. Up to this point, I had followed quite rigidly the advice given by Inge, a German friend I made at the Captain Hostel on my second day. She warned me against giving money to beggars, and to be especially wary of children and old people, because they had guilt on their side. I had coldly refused countless old people shaking their cups at me, stared past those with stumps for limbs, and shook my head vigorously at pretty girls selling all manner of handmade things. But for some reason, this little girl, and her poor mother, made me pull out my wallet and give her a handful of coins. She and her mother said thankyou many times. I was about to walk away but instead I turned and pulled out my camera. The mother nodded and held her daughter close for the photo.

On the way home in the taxi, for the first time in a year, I cried silently. The cold, hard, angry shell I'd built against this city finally cracked. I cried for the poverty stricken, freezing away their hope on the streets, for those living in tiny decrepit apartments, jostling in the tide of traffic on their flimsy bicycles, breathing in the shitty smog-filled air, just working and working so hard to try and make a life for their families and themselves.

I cried for me, because I couldn't talk to these people, and because up until that point I hadn't really wanted to. I wanted to have a holiday, goddam it. I wanted to party. I didn't want to embrace the whole culture, just the nice, clean, westernised bits.

Super Sexy Shanghai Singer Sex You Up? Good time?

I've got a bit of a hangover this morning, but damn do I have a smile on my face. Reason number one: the sun is shining! This is the first time I've seen the sun since I arrived here 4 days ago. It makes Shanghai seem a little friendlier. Secondly, I had a brilliant night which more than compensates for the headache and furry mouth.

At about 10 last night, I was just about ready to sleep, after a long and exciting day walking through some interesting areas of Shanghai. I was struggling with my first journal entry, and my Famous Chinese Tsingtao beer, which tastes a bit like boiled dog piss. Luckily however, Bryan my bunkmate walked in and invited me up to the bar to have a quick beer with a couple of English blokes. The bar was nice, and Andrew and Daryl proved to be scintillating company. Andrew's a very likeable Dental Technician from Nottingham, and Daryl is damn tasty labourer type, with this unbelievable Birmingham accent that makes me grin stupidly. So we finished a round while Andrew regaled us with tales of his time in Dali, in Yunnan Province, where the police turn a blind eye to a flourishing drug culture, wild ganja grows in the streets, and everyone is so relaxed. 2000m above sea level, Andrew found himself in a pecualiar situation while partying with the locals. He was dancing with a man and a woman, and the man starts forcefully taking Andrew's hands and putting them all over the woman's body. Andrew gets the distinct impression she's a prostitute and the man is her pimp. So he asks the man directly if the girl's a hooker, to which he replies " This is my wife. I think you should leave now."

We moved around the corner to a pub that Andrew had previously been to and enjoyed. However, it being Monday night, the Fest Brewery was almost empty. Still we had a great chat, and I learned that Andrew was heading off to Mongolia and Russia, while Daryl was flying to Cairns and working his way down the East Coast. We shared a couple of litre glasses (I kid you not) of very tasty dark beer, which rinsed away that awful Tsingtao shit.

We tired of the Fest, eventually, and headed out into the street and went looking for another pub. It was about five degrees; I'm getting trained for Europe already. Along the way, we were accosted by a tall, slightly effeminate guy from Hong Kong called George. He said hello, and unfortunately thanks to previous experience I was immediately on my guard. There's quite a few people in Shanghai who are friendly purely to get something out of you. (That being said, I've met 10 times as many who are friendly and helpful because they want to be.) George invited us to a bar and it already sounded like that famous Shanghai scam where a nice person takes you to a bar/restaurant, orders expensive food/drink, and then leaves you with the bill. I mentioned this to Andrew and he says everything will be fine as long as we pay for what we want before we get it. He also said that the police are 100% on the side of foreigners in China, so if George tried anything nasty he would be punished severely by the law. So I relaxed a little and listened to George chatter away about a variety of topics, including what fruits corresponded to what naughty bits of the human anatomy. It seemed like he was trying to hit on Andrew and/or Daryl (I couldn't really blame him) but the boys just took it in their stride. I relaxed some more.

We walked for ages and we were all getting a little edgy. And then suddenly we arrived at a place with Massage written in big English letters out the front. Daryl, Bryan and I reeled at that, and almost turned to go, but then we realised the massage place was on the 6th floor, while George assured us the bar was on the 3rd floor. So we agreed to go up, and while Andrew seemed super-keen, the rest of us kept protesting that all we wanted was a beer. He reminded us that as long as we don't take anything we don't pay for, we'd be fine. In fact, he was convinced that we could actually use this situation to our advantage, and get treated like royalty without "putting out" so to speak. I was skeptical, but it occured to me that this was my First Big Adventure, so godammit, I was going to be adventurous.

We went up and it was immediately obvious this was a hooker bar. There were several scantily clad ladies lounging around and giggling as we entered the opulent glass-filled foyer. George ushered us into our private room, which, he kept repeating, was free, and I wondered why we needed a private room.

It turned out that this was a Karaoke bar, and it seemed George was hoping we'd get drunk and rowdy enough that we'd order a couple of ladies at premium rates. Little did he know that I would need quite a lot of persuading. Since we were now cluey to George's game, we were able to relax some more, and after fiddling for ages with the giant screen Karaoke machine, we managed to put on an English song. Despite Bryan claiming that he hated Karaoke, he dived in with gusto and sung a few before George asked to join in. He belted out some Mandarin classics, with original film clips that rivalled those awful Karaoke-specific film clips we all know and love. Especially entertaining was the way he ended the last line of every verse with a high-pitched yelp. It was obvious he was enjoying himself. I jumped in and did a couple of duets with Bryan and Daryl, finishing off with a rousing version of Love Shack, that perennial favourite, that I'm sure brought a tear to my comrades' eyes. Then George put on some Beijing Opera (yes, Beijing Opera Karaoke) and proceeded to wow us with his deft switching between the male and female parts.

I feel like Shanghai has finally welcomed me with open arms.

Starting with the poking

Ok, so I've finally decided I'm ready to start my journal. Actually I've left it too long. So many things have happened already that I don't know where to start. But that was my excuse at the end of the first day, so I've just got to start. The internet at Captain Hostel, where I'm staying, is so freaking expensive: 20 Yuan, or about A$3 an hour. Lonely Planet claims there are places where you can get an hour for 3 Yuan (of Internet access, you dirty bugger). I've yet to find any of these places, as they frequently change location or shutdown completely.

My first International Airport was Kuala Lumpur. It was 6am, and we couldn't leave the airport, so I just wandered around for a bit and found a small jungle enclosed in glass in the centre of the Airport. I asked the nice Malaysian girl at the Information desk if we could get into the garden, and she laughed. "Only for looking," she said. So I had to be content with the striking but emotionally bereft interior of apparently the best airport in the world, according to a group of people who probably never use airports, because they all have their own private jets. I really didn't get what was so great about it; two of the internet terminals lacked a usable mouse, and the information screens were hard to read. The superfast train that arrived in the airport itself was pretty cool though.

The idea that I was in another country was about as tangible as the idea that there is probably life on other planets. Arriving at Shanghai Pudong Airport was surreal. It was surrounded by farmland and at 2 pm in the afternoon there was a thick, soupy mist that made the whole thing look unreal. I was struck by some of the airport buildings, which where all white and shaped like lips, almost sensual. Walking towards Immigration, I stared at the strange shapes floating outside the massive windows and felt detached from my body. I had a sense of foreboding based on my simplistic view that Chinese officials would be cold and cruel. But really, they were just impatient, and even the large LED screen warning of Avian Bird Flu could not crush my relief at finally making it through Immigration after waiting anxiously in line for half an hour.

On the bus from Shanghai Airport into the city my heart filled with joy. I really was in another country. The bus driver beeped and swerved and although I felt mildly concerned my mind was frantically processing the unbelievable landscape that was rushing past my field of view. There were painfully delicate trees with their trunks painted white (to keep them warm in winter, apparently) and there were piles of refuse and debris from demolished buildings, and there were cars and bikes and people everywhere, and there were huge billboards proclaiming all sorts of proclamations. But the most amazing thing was the colour of this new world. Millions of subtle pastel shades, floating in the mist. It was all a bit new for a boy whose world up until then had been painted brashly with brilliant blue and gold.