Hey folks, I'm getting to that part of travels when I'm just kind of wiggy and sick of it all, and ready to pack it in. Still seeing some amazing stuff though, and today's no exception.
Not a huge fan of Luoyang, though not exactly a hater of the city either. My main impression has been a recurring shock on just how many identical looking big cities China has. Luoyang has six million people, tons of department stores, muslim restaurants, traffic filled streets and a complex bus system...which makes it pretty much exactly the same as dozens of other cities in China. There's not a tremendous amount of character, although I hear the old city is quite nice. I wonder if my craving for the unique flavors of American cities is just a general symptom of homesickness blinding my cultural sensitivity, or if I'm right on, and China just has too many medium sized cities that have been built to look exactly the same.
Today, before I stepped into the shower, the hostel owner said, "You have so much hair!" Used to these sort of no-filter statements from the Chinese, I just kind of nodded and said, yes, yes I do. Then the hostel owner proclaimed me the "monkey king" and lifted my shirt to look at all my hair. I was pretty much at a loss for what to do then, and I'm kind of still at a loss.
I'm positively filthy at this point, btw. I've been wearing the same old clothes for two weeks, up to and including old underwear. Today, I had some super greasy baozi that squirted oil all ove me, and napkinless, I was just a huge grease ball all day. The brutal Henan heat has me sweating like a pig. I'm really just disgusting, and it's beginning to wear on me.
The bus ride to the Longmen Caves was pretty long, about an hour and a half, but fairly painless thanks to the very clear directions the hostel owner gave me. The Longmen Caves are really quite something, thousands of caves filled with Buddhist stone carvings dotting a hillside, some dating back to the 400s AD. It's quite a spectacle: some stone Buddhas are two stories high, some are surrounded by thousands of intricate bas-relief Buddhas, and some are distinguished by exquisite, intricate levels of relief. The sad thing is that the majority of the caves are in awful condition, thanks to years of looting by collectors from, um, America, and Chinese vandals from the Tang Dynasty to the Cultural Revolution. I can't imagine what it was like when it was brand new, from the faint tracings of paint on the cave walls, it must have been incredibly spectacular.
Unfortunately, I also got a stalker at the Longmen Caves, which was not fun. Usually, I'm perfectly willing to indulge the Chinese in their general curiosity concerning westerners and the West, but when I'm looking at art, I almost always prefer to be left alone. At the Longmen Caves, I quickly realized that what began as the usual small talk with a Chinese person learning English was becoming a long, boring conversation I couldn't shake. I successfully dodged this guy for the main series of caves, but was stuck with his "tour" in the last few temples on the other side of the river. He tried to engage me on a hilariously broad range of topics in American culture I have virtually no interest in: from the NBA, to Windows XP, to Prison Break, to the Backstreet Boys. He also had the brainwashed Chinese nationalist viewpoint I have little time for: "China must be strong to prevent foreigners from ever taking advantage of the country again" (a somewhat awkward view for me to deal with considering some Buddha heads from Longmen are in the Met). On one hand, I am perfectly willing to admit the wrongs done to China, but very rarely does this litany of wrongs come with the admission that much Chinese misery has very directly resulted from the Chinese fighting themselves. For example, I readily admitted that it was awful what American looters did to the caves, but I also felt obligated to point out that some of the worst vandalism occured during the Cultural Revolution. There is very little open self-reflection or self-criticism on the part of the Chinese. And then, again came the raw hatred of the Japanese. I usually kind of nod along with it when it comes up, because what the Japanese did was awful, and I feel like I have no right to tell the Chinese how to feel. But the extent to which the Chinese government uses this feeling to manipulate the populace really disturbs me: it's a constantly stoked anti-Japanese fervor that can only end badly. This time, I tried softly to convince him that maybe it isn't right to blame the sons for the crimes of the father, using the example of the holocaust and my attitude towards the Germans as a door in, but once again, that oft repeated line: "we can never forgive them". Sometimes, I really feel like China's warped psyche, born out of a deeply wounded national ego, will lead to some very terrible things down the line.
I shook the guy off by jumping the bus and explaining I don't have a cell phone here, and stumbled around Luoyang's downtown, searching for a duck restaurant I never found, and finally just crawled into an empty restaurant, starving. Craving duck, I ordered the first duck thing I saw on the menu. When a plate of cylindrical duck parts came to the table, I just started eating it while at the same time trying to figure out what part of the duck would have this shape. After counting vertebrae, it hit me: I had ordered a plate of duck necks. They tasted fine, and I suppose the neck is no stranger part of the duck to eat than any other. But man, sometimes I miss good ol' General Tso's Chicken.
Well, if you haven't noticed, I'm totally exhausted. I enter the 36 chambers of the Shaolin temple tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes. I'm feeling a bit homesick, and miss all you guys. I'll check in tomorrow, take care.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
4/29: Xi'an, Luoyang
Good day today. At least I was in a good mood, although it might not strike the reader as a particularly good day.
I woke up just a bit late (which really just means 9:30 - I'm on old people time this semester), got showered, checked out, left my stuff in the hostel's baggage room, and had a pleasant cup of coffee in the hostel's restaurant. Then I headed over to Xi'an's forest of stelae museum, which is housed in Xi'an's old Confucian temple. I'm really glad I did this today, as it soothed my museum craving. Say what you will about the rigidity of the Western Canon, at least it's not literally carved in stone, like the Chinese canon. The Forest of Stelae museum is home to the Tang dynasty official versions of the Confucian canon, as well as some beautiful examples of calligraphy (the chinese character for longevity done in one sweeping stroke!) and a very interesting tablet of Nestorian scripture, with Aramaic (what looked to me like aramaic, anyways) and Chinese carved on the same tablet. It also had some truly magnificent sculpture: Han tomb carvings and giant Tang dynasty horses and lions. It's good to see truly exceptional art, and it reminded me that I should check out the Yunnan Provincial Museum in Kunming before I go.
After that, I went for a stroll on the city walls. There's not much to see because Xi'an's air is so bad and the walls aren't much higher than Xi'an's buildings, but it's still quite a spectacle. The walls are really well preserved, and the combination of the very modern city with a full set of stone walls is really mind boggling. I walked up and down the walls, contemplating things, and then crossed an extremely dangerous street, collected my stuff and grabbed a cab to the train station.
Or I should say that I attempted to grab a cab to the train station. After a few minutes of unsuccessful hailing, an old man who spoke some english ushered me, his "american friend", onto a motorcycle that had a cab welded on the back. I kept saying, as we rushed to the airport, that this was insanely stupid, holding my luggage on to the car for dear life. The driver drove on the sidewalk, in the bike lane, in opposite lanes, whatever suited him at the moment. It was kind of like being in the car from the credit sequence of the "Naked Gun" movies. But I laughed the whole way, and we got there safe and sound, not to mention on time for the train.
This was by far my worst experience riding the trains in China. My ticket said I was supposed to be a window seat, but so much for that, I was hanging off the aisles, and the train seats on hard seat trains are slightly slanted inward for whatever reason, making you hunch forward in your seat. So it's virtually impossible to sleep unless you have a window or at least a middle seat. I also tried to turn on my iPod, only to find it out of commission for some reason. So I couldn't sleep, couldn't listen to music, and basically could only read and hope and pray that I wouldn't get sick. On top of that, there was no air conditioning, and for some reason, the train conductors were trying to sell us all tchochkes. The most tiring thing about China by far is the constant hustle. There is just nowhere you can go where people won't try to sell you something, and be irritating and insistent about it.
Getting from the train to the hostel was another adventure. Luckily, the hostel owner met me at the train station with a clear "die-lan". I thought he was going to give me a ride back to the hostel, but instead, we got on a city bus, which was weird, but I figured, ok, I'll roll with it. I made some conversation with him in Mandarin. He's a really great guy, really friendly, and excited that I had some American coins to add to his collection. The bus ride kept going and going, and though I was still well disposed, I was getting a bit alarmed. We finally got off in the middle of nowhere. He treated me to some street food, since I told him he hadn't ate, and then we started walking down a dark alley to the "hostel". At this point, I'm figuring what the chances are that he'll rob and kill me, and keeping track of escape routes. Eventually, we get to the "hostel". Except the "hostel" is not a hostel. It's basically just his apartment, and I'm staying in one bedroom. I don't even think it's legal. But it's not too bad, he's a great guy, he gave me free coffee and I have internet and a computer in my room. So I'm looking forward to tomorrow, at least it'll be interesting. I'll check in tomorrow!
I woke up just a bit late (which really just means 9:30 - I'm on old people time this semester), got showered, checked out, left my stuff in the hostel's baggage room, and had a pleasant cup of coffee in the hostel's restaurant. Then I headed over to Xi'an's forest of stelae museum, which is housed in Xi'an's old Confucian temple. I'm really glad I did this today, as it soothed my museum craving. Say what you will about the rigidity of the Western Canon, at least it's not literally carved in stone, like the Chinese canon. The Forest of Stelae museum is home to the Tang dynasty official versions of the Confucian canon, as well as some beautiful examples of calligraphy (the chinese character for longevity done in one sweeping stroke!) and a very interesting tablet of Nestorian scripture, with Aramaic (what looked to me like aramaic, anyways) and Chinese carved on the same tablet. It also had some truly magnificent sculpture: Han tomb carvings and giant Tang dynasty horses and lions. It's good to see truly exceptional art, and it reminded me that I should check out the Yunnan Provincial Museum in Kunming before I go.
After that, I went for a stroll on the city walls. There's not much to see because Xi'an's air is so bad and the walls aren't much higher than Xi'an's buildings, but it's still quite a spectacle. The walls are really well preserved, and the combination of the very modern city with a full set of stone walls is really mind boggling. I walked up and down the walls, contemplating things, and then crossed an extremely dangerous street, collected my stuff and grabbed a cab to the train station.
Or I should say that I attempted to grab a cab to the train station. After a few minutes of unsuccessful hailing, an old man who spoke some english ushered me, his "american friend", onto a motorcycle that had a cab welded on the back. I kept saying, as we rushed to the airport, that this was insanely stupid, holding my luggage on to the car for dear life. The driver drove on the sidewalk, in the bike lane, in opposite lanes, whatever suited him at the moment. It was kind of like being in the car from the credit sequence of the "Naked Gun" movies. But I laughed the whole way, and we got there safe and sound, not to mention on time for the train.
This was by far my worst experience riding the trains in China. My ticket said I was supposed to be a window seat, but so much for that, I was hanging off the aisles, and the train seats on hard seat trains are slightly slanted inward for whatever reason, making you hunch forward in your seat. So it's virtually impossible to sleep unless you have a window or at least a middle seat. I also tried to turn on my iPod, only to find it out of commission for some reason. So I couldn't sleep, couldn't listen to music, and basically could only read and hope and pray that I wouldn't get sick. On top of that, there was no air conditioning, and for some reason, the train conductors were trying to sell us all tchochkes. The most tiring thing about China by far is the constant hustle. There is just nowhere you can go where people won't try to sell you something, and be irritating and insistent about it.
Getting from the train to the hostel was another adventure. Luckily, the hostel owner met me at the train station with a clear "die-lan". I thought he was going to give me a ride back to the hostel, but instead, we got on a city bus, which was weird, but I figured, ok, I'll roll with it. I made some conversation with him in Mandarin. He's a really great guy, really friendly, and excited that I had some American coins to add to his collection. The bus ride kept going and going, and though I was still well disposed, I was getting a bit alarmed. We finally got off in the middle of nowhere. He treated me to some street food, since I told him he hadn't ate, and then we started walking down a dark alley to the "hostel". At this point, I'm figuring what the chances are that he'll rob and kill me, and keeping track of escape routes. Eventually, we get to the "hostel". Except the "hostel" is not a hostel. It's basically just his apartment, and I'm staying in one bedroom. I don't even think it's legal. But it's not too bad, he's a great guy, he gave me free coffee and I have internet and a computer in my room. So I'm looking forward to tomorrow, at least it'll be interesting. I'll check in tomorrow!
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
4/26-4/28: Xi'an
I'm in sort of a low mood right now, even though Xi'an has some amazing sights (and also some not-so-amazing sights) that I'll write about in a second. First, the normal pressures and anxieties of travelling. I get antsy sitting at home (NYC, St. Louis or Kunming, depending on context and my mood at the moment), and as soon as I hit the road, all I want to do is curl up with street dumplings and pizza and watch VH1 with DB. It is weird how I'm starting to miss Yunnan and Yunnan food out here in Shaanxi. Also, Xi'an is a murderous, muggy hot that seems to suck the life out of me completely. That, or a general lack of caffeine is bringing me down.
The bigger concern right now is that my laptop is not working at all. I had a regular viking saga getting the damn thing repaired and sent to me here, and now, all of the sudden (literally as I was using it in Xi'an), it's flipped out on me and won't start at all. The indicator light turns on, the fan/drive makes one of the most sickly noises I've ever heard a computer make, and the computer just never starts. I've tried all sorts of computer won't start tricks, from the sophisticated (resetting the PRAM) to the desperate (shaking it), and no luck. Right now, I'm just praying that it'll magically fix itself somehow when I get to Luoyang. Otherwise, when I get to Kunming, I'll first try and connect it to another power adaptor (oh man, if it were the power adaptor, that would be so the best...), and then take a look inside. Best case scenario, it's the power adaptor, medium case, it's a fan malfunction, worst case scenario, it's damaged RAM or eeek, the main logic board. If it's the worst case scenario, I'm really in for it: I can't imagine what it would be like to try to get hardware repaired/replaced in China, and I'm not about to try, so if there's anything that requires more than compressed air and a q-tip to repair, I'm out a computer for over a month. I've been thinking of what an incredible pain in the butt not having a computer will make my life for the next month, and it's been bringing me kind of down. In the meantime, it means no more posts with pictures :-(.
Anywho, Sunday was primarily a travel day. Flying in China is basically comfortable, although America's airport system is far superior. I took a cab with an amiable driver with hilarious shades who quizzed me on how to say relevant terms to him in English, and got to Shangri-La's airport, which is basically a little puddlejumper airport with one gate obviously constructed in the last ten years. The flight itself was painless (and on a full sized jet, thank God), but then I had to switch to a flight to Xi'an, which meant picking up my checked luggage and checking in all over again. In China, apparently, it's unusual to get to your flight more than an hour in advance, so the woman at the check-in counter in Xi'an actually made me come back to check-in later. I checked in after a lunch at KFC (where they actually had run out of things to drink), and after being manhandled by security, caught my flight and got into Xi'an. Flight really isn't too bad here, although it's just as expensive as in America. I also, however, ran through all my reading material (a New Yorker and a collection of essays by Lu Xun), which started another saga once I got in.
Xi'an is really quite a nice city. The streets are wide and it's not sickeningly overcrowded, and one thing I noticed today: what makes a big difference is that all the streets are tree-lined. Somehow just makes the whole city more livable. It is also quite a jarring shock, coming from the Chinese borderlands, to go to the place that is one of the cradles of traditional Han Chinese culture. Xi'an was the capital of China during two of the most formative dynasties for Han culture: Han and Tang. Everything here just feels typically Chinese, whatever that means. The old core of the city is also still enclosed by a dramatic set of city walls. A small, petty note: for whatever reason, it seems to be a hell of a task to hail a cab in this city, and that makes it sort of hard to get around.
That first day, I got in around six, so I just went straight to my hostel from where the airport bus dropped me off, near the Bell Tower in the center of the city. Walking to the hostel and struggling to get a cab, I saw a cab driver hit a guy on a motorcycle. Nobody seemed to be hurt, but it was quite a spectacle. Also, in Xi'an, motorcycle drivers like to offer their b- seat to you. I actually burst out laughing at the guy who offered it to me as I was standing there with all my luggage. My hostel here is nice, with great water pressure, although it also happens to be over a very popular bar ("the only terra-cotta soldier themed bar in Xi'an"), and gets noisy during the day. I grabbed a meal at a terrible restaurant near my hostel. It's funny how the signs of a bad restaurant are universal. Even if I couldn't understand my neighbors complaints about the service, I'd be able to tell from the way that the waitstaff seemed to be an average age of sixteen, running around chaotically, that the place was no good. First, the waiter spent like an hour explaining the menu, until I finally had to ask him if I could just sit down. Then, they charged me to use utensils (making sure that I didn't bring my own that I could use instead, to be fair). When the dish came, there was so much red pepper and sichuan peppercorn in it that it was downright painful to eat. Also, the Chinese have an annoying habit of using the neckbones of the chicken, which means a lot of bones and no meat. Oh well. That night, my computer broke, and having no reading material and no computer, I practically died of boredom. I watched Chinese TV for a while, then gave up and went to bed.
The next day, I headed out to meet Sarah and Michelle and go out to see the Terracotta Warriors. Getting out there is relatively easy, actually, just hop a bus at the train station and follow the crowd. A shady character at the train station tried to charge us 100 kuai for a private car right in front of the 7 kuai bus, obviously trying to pull one over us foreigners, which made me mad. When I travel with Sarah and Michelle, it's kind of a funny phenomenon, since they are Korean and not obviously foreigners. A lot of times, the Chinese will direct their questions and answers to them, even though I can obviously understand what they are saying. Sometimes, Sarah and Michelle get treated poorly because people think they're Chinese until they speak. The Chinese complex about foreigners is really sick: both an undying admiration of them and a barely concealed resentment, and it can be real unpleasant to be around.
Our first stop was the Huaqing hot springs, where Tang dynasty femme fatale Yang Guifei (think a Chinese Marie Antoinette) famously bathed and where Chiang Kai-Shek was kidnapped by his own XO and forced to agree to a second unified front with the CCP against the Japanese. Michelle was disappointed because the hotsprings were not wild, open pools surrounded by rocks and trees, but rather channeled into a series of bathhouses. I, on the other hand, having never been to a hot spring, was pretty stupidly amazed by the fact that the water was naturally hot. I also liked seeing some of the Tang-era pools, some still filled with water and some shaped into lovely designs. After that, we took a cable car up to Mount Li, which overlooks the city. The view would be great, if Xi'an werent choked with so much smog that the overlook is practically pointless. Since we weren't into any of the sights at the top, we took the cable car right down again and hopped back on the bus.
Our next stop was the site of the tomb of Qin Huangdi, the first historical emperor of China. The place is a world heritage sight, but even though I visited the damn thing, I couldn't tell you where it is, or what exactly it is. The site remains unexcavated, because (and this is kinda neat) Qin Huangdi ordered the site surrounded by rivers of mercury and booby traps to prevent looting. So there really isn't much to see there except a mound. I say, skip it if you're ever in Xi'an.
By the time we got to the Terracotta soldiers, we were hot and pissed and ready to swear off Xi'an all together. But the Terracotta soldiers are really worth the fuss. Like everywhere in China, it's the size of the site that really shocks. The excavated pits are literally the size of football fields, all filled with terracotta soldiers. The artistry is also really amazing, especially when you consider that the soldiers are over 2000 years old. The way the fabric is draped, the lifelike poses, the fact that no two faces are alike...it's really stunning. A dramatic thing to see and experience. Qin Huangdi was right that this would be a tribute to his power: when you think about the sheer power that it would take to get people to build this, it's downright scary.
By the time we got back to Xi'an and bought our train tickets (in a mob scene that I have not seen anywhere in China), we were tired and starving. This being China, everything was of course a pain in the butt. It took us forever to get to where the restaurant was, and then another forever to find a working ATM. When we finally sat down, the "dumpling banquet" I had read about seemed to be unavailable, so we just had dumplings. They were good, but I wasn't blown away: I'd just as soon have some Shanghai xiaolongbao. We finished the night off in the hostel bar, which inexplicably was playing some great blues songs (Big Mama Thornton's "Hounddog", Howlin' Wolf's rendition of "Spoonful").
Today was kind of a low day. It took me only about forever to get to Big Goose Pagoda. Big Goose Pagoda is, well, real big, and again, would give a great view of the city if it weren't for the smog. It's historically very important as the destination of the Monk Xuanzang, who journeyed to India and returned with Buddhist scriptures (inspiring "Journey to The West" and, um, Dragonball Z). But it's just not that artistically impressive, although the peony gardens are nice and fragrant.
After that, I walked to the museum, only to get discouraged by the ticket situation (that old China standby, the weird, non-moving line), and decided to take a bus back to the bell tower in the center of town. I kind of regret it, since I was in the mood for a museum. I got a frappe at the Bell Tower starbucks (ah, global capitalism, how I love you), and then tried to find a foreign bookstore I had heard about. Of course, this being China, it was near impossible to find. My lunch was a variety of street food (skewered meat and what I think was some sort of crab squash cake, and a damn delicious muslim gyro type sandwich), and finally, I found the bookstore by asking, though it was extremely not where it should have been and probably not the bookstore I was looking for. Once there, I found that they had few english translations of Chinese works, and mostly just English/American classics. I desperately bought a copy of "Sister Carrie" and got out. It did warm my heart, however, to see Chinese copies of Locke on sale...maybe it'll rub off..
After that, I ventured into the muslim quarter to see the Great Mosque of Xi'an. The muslim quarter is pretty nuts, filled with vendors of muslim food and snacks, and a mob of shoppers. The mosque is gorgeous, and strikingly old, with a minaret that looks like a pagoda, and Chinese style stelae with Arabic writing. Here I was, comfortably back in the Chinese periphery. I even caught the afternoon prayer service, which was really lovely. After that, I ate a mush recommended by the guidebook in the Muslim Quarter. Well, it turned out to pretty much just be a mush, so count me as disappointed.
Guess I'm just having a low day today. Hopefully my mood will pick up, and my computer will revive. Tomorrow, I head to another dynastic capital, Luoyang, to see the Longmen caves and the Shaolin temple. I'll check in when I can.
The bigger concern right now is that my laptop is not working at all. I had a regular viking saga getting the damn thing repaired and sent to me here, and now, all of the sudden (literally as I was using it in Xi'an), it's flipped out on me and won't start at all. The indicator light turns on, the fan/drive makes one of the most sickly noises I've ever heard a computer make, and the computer just never starts. I've tried all sorts of computer won't start tricks, from the sophisticated (resetting the PRAM) to the desperate (shaking it), and no luck. Right now, I'm just praying that it'll magically fix itself somehow when I get to Luoyang. Otherwise, when I get to Kunming, I'll first try and connect it to another power adaptor (oh man, if it were the power adaptor, that would be so the best...), and then take a look inside. Best case scenario, it's the power adaptor, medium case, it's a fan malfunction, worst case scenario, it's damaged RAM or eeek, the main logic board. If it's the worst case scenario, I'm really in for it: I can't imagine what it would be like to try to get hardware repaired/replaced in China, and I'm not about to try, so if there's anything that requires more than compressed air and a q-tip to repair, I'm out a computer for over a month. I've been thinking of what an incredible pain in the butt not having a computer will make my life for the next month, and it's been bringing me kind of down. In the meantime, it means no more posts with pictures :-(.
Anywho, Sunday was primarily a travel day. Flying in China is basically comfortable, although America's airport system is far superior. I took a cab with an amiable driver with hilarious shades who quizzed me on how to say relevant terms to him in English, and got to Shangri-La's airport, which is basically a little puddlejumper airport with one gate obviously constructed in the last ten years. The flight itself was painless (and on a full sized jet, thank God), but then I had to switch to a flight to Xi'an, which meant picking up my checked luggage and checking in all over again. In China, apparently, it's unusual to get to your flight more than an hour in advance, so the woman at the check-in counter in Xi'an actually made me come back to check-in later. I checked in after a lunch at KFC (where they actually had run out of things to drink), and after being manhandled by security, caught my flight and got into Xi'an. Flight really isn't too bad here, although it's just as expensive as in America. I also, however, ran through all my reading material (a New Yorker and a collection of essays by Lu Xun), which started another saga once I got in.
Xi'an is really quite a nice city. The streets are wide and it's not sickeningly overcrowded, and one thing I noticed today: what makes a big difference is that all the streets are tree-lined. Somehow just makes the whole city more livable. It is also quite a jarring shock, coming from the Chinese borderlands, to go to the place that is one of the cradles of traditional Han Chinese culture. Xi'an was the capital of China during two of the most formative dynasties for Han culture: Han and Tang. Everything here just feels typically Chinese, whatever that means. The old core of the city is also still enclosed by a dramatic set of city walls. A small, petty note: for whatever reason, it seems to be a hell of a task to hail a cab in this city, and that makes it sort of hard to get around.
That first day, I got in around six, so I just went straight to my hostel from where the airport bus dropped me off, near the Bell Tower in the center of the city. Walking to the hostel and struggling to get a cab, I saw a cab driver hit a guy on a motorcycle. Nobody seemed to be hurt, but it was quite a spectacle. Also, in Xi'an, motorcycle drivers like to offer their b- seat to you. I actually burst out laughing at the guy who offered it to me as I was standing there with all my luggage. My hostel here is nice, with great water pressure, although it also happens to be over a very popular bar ("the only terra-cotta soldier themed bar in Xi'an"), and gets noisy during the day. I grabbed a meal at a terrible restaurant near my hostel. It's funny how the signs of a bad restaurant are universal. Even if I couldn't understand my neighbors complaints about the service, I'd be able to tell from the way that the waitstaff seemed to be an average age of sixteen, running around chaotically, that the place was no good. First, the waiter spent like an hour explaining the menu, until I finally had to ask him if I could just sit down. Then, they charged me to use utensils (making sure that I didn't bring my own that I could use instead, to be fair). When the dish came, there was so much red pepper and sichuan peppercorn in it that it was downright painful to eat. Also, the Chinese have an annoying habit of using the neckbones of the chicken, which means a lot of bones and no meat. Oh well. That night, my computer broke, and having no reading material and no computer, I practically died of boredom. I watched Chinese TV for a while, then gave up and went to bed.
The next day, I headed out to meet Sarah and Michelle and go out to see the Terracotta Warriors. Getting out there is relatively easy, actually, just hop a bus at the train station and follow the crowd. A shady character at the train station tried to charge us 100 kuai for a private car right in front of the 7 kuai bus, obviously trying to pull one over us foreigners, which made me mad. When I travel with Sarah and Michelle, it's kind of a funny phenomenon, since they are Korean and not obviously foreigners. A lot of times, the Chinese will direct their questions and answers to them, even though I can obviously understand what they are saying. Sometimes, Sarah and Michelle get treated poorly because people think they're Chinese until they speak. The Chinese complex about foreigners is really sick: both an undying admiration of them and a barely concealed resentment, and it can be real unpleasant to be around.
Our first stop was the Huaqing hot springs, where Tang dynasty femme fatale Yang Guifei (think a Chinese Marie Antoinette) famously bathed and where Chiang Kai-Shek was kidnapped by his own XO and forced to agree to a second unified front with the CCP against the Japanese. Michelle was disappointed because the hotsprings were not wild, open pools surrounded by rocks and trees, but rather channeled into a series of bathhouses. I, on the other hand, having never been to a hot spring, was pretty stupidly amazed by the fact that the water was naturally hot. I also liked seeing some of the Tang-era pools, some still filled with water and some shaped into lovely designs. After that, we took a cable car up to Mount Li, which overlooks the city. The view would be great, if Xi'an werent choked with so much smog that the overlook is practically pointless. Since we weren't into any of the sights at the top, we took the cable car right down again and hopped back on the bus.
Our next stop was the site of the tomb of Qin Huangdi, the first historical emperor of China. The place is a world heritage sight, but even though I visited the damn thing, I couldn't tell you where it is, or what exactly it is. The site remains unexcavated, because (and this is kinda neat) Qin Huangdi ordered the site surrounded by rivers of mercury and booby traps to prevent looting. So there really isn't much to see there except a mound. I say, skip it if you're ever in Xi'an.
By the time we got to the Terracotta soldiers, we were hot and pissed and ready to swear off Xi'an all together. But the Terracotta soldiers are really worth the fuss. Like everywhere in China, it's the size of the site that really shocks. The excavated pits are literally the size of football fields, all filled with terracotta soldiers. The artistry is also really amazing, especially when you consider that the soldiers are over 2000 years old. The way the fabric is draped, the lifelike poses, the fact that no two faces are alike...it's really stunning. A dramatic thing to see and experience. Qin Huangdi was right that this would be a tribute to his power: when you think about the sheer power that it would take to get people to build this, it's downright scary.
By the time we got back to Xi'an and bought our train tickets (in a mob scene that I have not seen anywhere in China), we were tired and starving. This being China, everything was of course a pain in the butt. It took us forever to get to where the restaurant was, and then another forever to find a working ATM. When we finally sat down, the "dumpling banquet" I had read about seemed to be unavailable, so we just had dumplings. They were good, but I wasn't blown away: I'd just as soon have some Shanghai xiaolongbao. We finished the night off in the hostel bar, which inexplicably was playing some great blues songs (Big Mama Thornton's "Hounddog", Howlin' Wolf's rendition of "Spoonful").
Today was kind of a low day. It took me only about forever to get to Big Goose Pagoda. Big Goose Pagoda is, well, real big, and again, would give a great view of the city if it weren't for the smog. It's historically very important as the destination of the Monk Xuanzang, who journeyed to India and returned with Buddhist scriptures (inspiring "Journey to The West" and, um, Dragonball Z). But it's just not that artistically impressive, although the peony gardens are nice and fragrant.
After that, I walked to the museum, only to get discouraged by the ticket situation (that old China standby, the weird, non-moving line), and decided to take a bus back to the bell tower in the center of town. I kind of regret it, since I was in the mood for a museum. I got a frappe at the Bell Tower starbucks (ah, global capitalism, how I love you), and then tried to find a foreign bookstore I had heard about. Of course, this being China, it was near impossible to find. My lunch was a variety of street food (skewered meat and what I think was some sort of crab squash cake, and a damn delicious muslim gyro type sandwich), and finally, I found the bookstore by asking, though it was extremely not where it should have been and probably not the bookstore I was looking for. Once there, I found that they had few english translations of Chinese works, and mostly just English/American classics. I desperately bought a copy of "Sister Carrie" and got out. It did warm my heart, however, to see Chinese copies of Locke on sale...maybe it'll rub off..
After that, I ventured into the muslim quarter to see the Great Mosque of Xi'an. The muslim quarter is pretty nuts, filled with vendors of muslim food and snacks, and a mob of shoppers. The mosque is gorgeous, and strikingly old, with a minaret that looks like a pagoda, and Chinese style stelae with Arabic writing. Here I was, comfortably back in the Chinese periphery. I even caught the afternoon prayer service, which was really lovely. After that, I ate a mush recommended by the guidebook in the Muslim Quarter. Well, it turned out to pretty much just be a mush, so count me as disappointed.
Guess I'm just having a low day today. Hopefully my mood will pick up, and my computer will revive. Tomorrow, I head to another dynastic capital, Luoyang, to see the Longmen caves and the Shaolin temple. I'll check in when I can.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
4/23 - 4/25: Zhongdian (Shangri-La/Gyeltang)
In honor of my birthday, I've decided to release another monster post, but this time, with PICTURES, so enjoy.
I spent my last morning in Lijiang speaking to a high school English class. It's always nice to be able to talk up a blue streak in the mother tongue, and I do like to teach. At the request of the teacher, my classmate George and I did a little lecture on tips and tricks for learning and pronouncing English, and I did a little spiel on etymology. The class dynamic is kind of funny. First of all, around ninety percent of the students were not Han, but Naxi. Second of all, the teacher's English left a bit to be desired. Finally, an interesting and insane note about the way the Chinese learn English. They do not actually learn to sound out words, but instead learn pronunciation through the IPA, and then try to learn how to spell. And then they wonder why spelling is so hard for them. I actually had to explain the concept of sounding out words, and even did a short impression of the Electric Company.
They also asked us general questions about America. I held forth on the world financial crisis in America, and then about Obama. Also, when there was a request for me to sing a pop song, I delivered a great rendition of the chorus of "Billie Jean". China, man, damn.
My classmates Sarah and Michelle, who spent the weekend in Shangri-La with me, thankfully convinced me to buy my tickets early. The bus system in Yunnan is more like the train system elsewhere, because the mountains in northern Yunnan make train travel very difficult. So the bus station is very done up, and the buses run on a set schedule, so my plan of just jumping a bus definitely wouldn't have worked. My bus, however, was as rickety a piece of junk as I had ever seen. They tied our bags to the roof and the engine sounded like a lawnmower.
The trip there was incredibly gorgeous though. The highway to Zhongdian runs along the first leg of the Yangtze (called the Jinsha River here), and the incredible gorges it cuts through the mountains. The whole thing was really an amazing drive.
Halfway through the drive, however, the lawnmower engine finally stopped put-putting and we pulled along the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere Yunnan, next to a bewildered farmer and her goats. To my surprise and laughter, the driver popped open a hatch in the middle of the van to reveal the engine, and grabbed a set of tools and spare parts from the back of the van. As we watched, he swapped out a fuel lead (is what it looked like) and replaced it with a new one. From the way the passengers didn't blink an eye, I guessed that this must happen all the time.
The metal tank behind the driver's seat is actually the radiator, and we made a couple of pit-stops to fill it with a hose.
A traditional Tibetan house on the road to Zhongdian. As we went farther into Tibetan cultural territory, we saw more and more of these houses and Tibetan chorten (Tibetan buddhist stupas), all framed by the beginnings of the snowcapped Himalayas. This area really does just feel like a special place, just from the geographic extremity of it. I felt like I was traveling to the end of the earth.
Three days, three old towns, three cultures. This weekend was spent entirely in Shangri-La, which originally was named Zhongdian in Chinese. Both names are kind of irrelevant, actually, because this city is really the Tibetan town of Gyeltang. Zhongdian really doesn't feel like China at all. I feel like I'm in a totally different country here. And actually, that kind of makes sense, because until 1949, Gyeltang really was part of Tibet. I didn't know this before coming here, but before 1949, Tibet was actually much larger than the Tibet Autonomous Region, including parts of Yunnan and Sichuan. Of the three old towns I've seen this week, I liked Zhongdian the best by far. It's really tourist oriented, but it's not as crowded as the other cities, and it still feels like a real town, where people live and work, and Tibetan grandmas hang out on street corners. It's got a real peaceful air to it, and I kind of wouldn't mind spending a lot more time here.
Tibetans dancing in the main square of the old city.
That first night in Zhongdian, we had maybe the best meal I've had in all China. Juicy yak meat (think a cross between venison and beef) on a hot plate under bread, mutton skewers, yak roast beef, and Tibetan flatbread. I ate like a pig, and it was incredible (although a bit too salty), with the best quality meat I've had in China by far. I will say, however, that having had two or three experiences with salty yak butter tea, I don't really need to have it like, ever again
The old town is towered over by a small temple with a giant prayer wheel that's lit at night.
My room here is really nice, a bit more expensive than other hotels here (though still only twenty bucks a night). The weather up here is loopy. It gets frigid here at nights (especially in my room, where there's no heat), but it's blazing during the day. I also had a funny experience here. I figured out my room with the front desk guy in Mandarin. He was very excited that I could speak mandarin, and spoke it himself somewhat awkwardly, and said that my Mandarin is better than his. I asked if he was Han, and he replied, no, I'm Naxi. It's a funny thing about Yunnan that I discussed with my classmate Max the other day. It wasn't too long ago that Mandarin seemed like the most exotic language there is. Now, I'm relieved if someone can speak good Mandarin as opposed to Yunnan dialect, not to mention Naxi, Bai, or Tibetan.
I woke up a bit early, but not too early, and took pictures of the old town during the day. Here's a stupa near the center of town.
The temple during the day.
Tibetans chatting it up. I caught that guy in mid gesture, he's not covering his face. Note the Tibetan hats. The Tibetans are a hat people, just like the Jews. Another reason to like them. Quite seriously, the Tibetans are great, very warm and friendly, and pretty good looking too.
That morning, we took the bus out to the Ganden Sumtseling Gompa monastery, a huge complex north of town that is home to six hundred monks. It was a stunning place, with overwhelming views of the mountains and ornate, surreal Tibetan painting work on the inside, with jaw-droppingly huge golden idols. It's nuts to see a community of faith that is so big and so active.
A stupa type thing in a lake that the monastery overlooks
The monastery from below.
The gate to the monastery, decorated with Tibetan paintings of the 4 heavenly kings.
Close ups of the kings.
The steps to the monastery. Try climbing that in the hot sun, with thin Himalayan air.
Prayer wheels.
A large idol building.
The view from the main Monastery complex.
Another angle on the complex.
A very common motif at Tibetan holy sites. This is the wheel of Dharma, basically, an illustration of all the things that can happen to you after you die, from hell at the bottom to heaven at the top.
View from the top of one of the buildings.
The name of the monastery written in Chinese and Tibetan on a hillside.
More temple!
We took a nice long walk along the wetlands the monastery overlooks. Here are some shots from there.
Michelle looking real goofy.
After we got back to town, we scarfed down a big bowl of bibimbob (yes, even in Arcadia goes Korean food...), and then we headed to the temple that overlooks the old town. Here's the big prayer wheel, during the day.
Since the wheel was pretty much always moving when I was in the town, I assumed it was motorized. Nope, it's just almost always constantly driven by the Tibetan faithful. Here are some old ladies pushing it, and let me add, having pushed it, it's not light.
View of the town from the temple.
The tourist influx has left the Zhongdian government flush with cash. We visited, out of curiosity, a brand new museum dedicated to the part of the Long March that went through here, and beyond that, dedicated to lying about the Communist Party's relationship with the Tibetans. But hey, sweet dioramas!
The kind of lies you'll see in a party museum.
Monks and comrades, bff.
We were also shepherded by a very enthusiastic Tibetan into a yet unfinished museum on the ethnic groups of Yunnan. The museum is really nice, and he literally unlocked the main halls in order to show us around. So this development stuff is really a double edged sword. The Communist party gets to lie, but the Tibetans also get a museum. And the Tibetans seem pretty damn happy about it to.
That night, we did Yak hotpot for dinner. I have to say, I'm not very fond of the hot pot. I don't like things where you cook your own food, and the boiling hot pot just tends to blanch the flavor out of food. We ate till we burst, however.
We arranged a tour the next day of the neighboring wetlands, and a flower meadow, complete with horseriding. Early that morning, a Tibetan from a nearby village drove us to his village, a few kilometers away. The drive was great because it was over the worst roads I had ever seen (roads they were literally still building). The guy had a CD full of songs about Shangri-La that he played on repeat, and he also friendly-honked every tractor and car full of Tibetans that passed us, since they were all from our village (neat note about the Tibetans: they often stick their tongues out to say hello). We sat at his house for a little bit, a big wooden place with no bathroom but still more square footage than my house in Brooklyn. Here's what ghetto fabulous Tibetan-style looks like.
We spent the morning hiking up to this gorge. The views were beautiful, but the trail was barely a trail, full of rocks and hard to climb. I'm not much of a hiker, and Michelle definitely isn't, so we had to turn back a bit early.
In the afternoon, we rode horses in the wetland. There wasn't much to see, since the lake dries up in the spring and summer (it's home to the endangered black capped crane in winter). The Tibetans let their livestock (pigs, cows, horses, yaks) graze freely in the wetlands, and claim that they can always find which ones are theirs, and that they come when called. Except, somewhat comically, they couldn't find one of the horses we were going to ride, so we just had two horses and switched off. I rode a little pony for the first time since I was six.
I ended the night with another visit to the monastery. This is really a special place, and one day, I hope to visit real Tibet. I wish I could stay longer a bit, but tomorrow I fly out to Xi'an. By the way, today's my birthday. I'm 21.
I spent my last morning in Lijiang speaking to a high school English class. It's always nice to be able to talk up a blue streak in the mother tongue, and I do like to teach. At the request of the teacher, my classmate George and I did a little lecture on tips and tricks for learning and pronouncing English, and I did a little spiel on etymology. The class dynamic is kind of funny. First of all, around ninety percent of the students were not Han, but Naxi. Second of all, the teacher's English left a bit to be desired. Finally, an interesting and insane note about the way the Chinese learn English. They do not actually learn to sound out words, but instead learn pronunciation through the IPA, and then try to learn how to spell. And then they wonder why spelling is so hard for them. I actually had to explain the concept of sounding out words, and even did a short impression of the Electric Company.
They also asked us general questions about America. I held forth on the world financial crisis in America, and then about Obama. Also, when there was a request for me to sing a pop song, I delivered a great rendition of the chorus of "Billie Jean". China, man, damn.
My classmates Sarah and Michelle, who spent the weekend in Shangri-La with me, thankfully convinced me to buy my tickets early. The bus system in Yunnan is more like the train system elsewhere, because the mountains in northern Yunnan make train travel very difficult. So the bus station is very done up, and the buses run on a set schedule, so my plan of just jumping a bus definitely wouldn't have worked. My bus, however, was as rickety a piece of junk as I had ever seen. They tied our bags to the roof and the engine sounded like a lawnmower.
The trip there was incredibly gorgeous though. The highway to Zhongdian runs along the first leg of the Yangtze (called the Jinsha River here), and the incredible gorges it cuts through the mountains. The whole thing was really an amazing drive.
Halfway through the drive, however, the lawnmower engine finally stopped put-putting and we pulled along the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere Yunnan, next to a bewildered farmer and her goats. To my surprise and laughter, the driver popped open a hatch in the middle of the van to reveal the engine, and grabbed a set of tools and spare parts from the back of the van. As we watched, he swapped out a fuel lead (is what it looked like) and replaced it with a new one. From the way the passengers didn't blink an eye, I guessed that this must happen all the time.
The metal tank behind the driver's seat is actually the radiator, and we made a couple of pit-stops to fill it with a hose.
A traditional Tibetan house on the road to Zhongdian. As we went farther into Tibetan cultural territory, we saw more and more of these houses and Tibetan chorten (Tibetan buddhist stupas), all framed by the beginnings of the snowcapped Himalayas. This area really does just feel like a special place, just from the geographic extremity of it. I felt like I was traveling to the end of the earth.
Three days, three old towns, three cultures. This weekend was spent entirely in Shangri-La, which originally was named Zhongdian in Chinese. Both names are kind of irrelevant, actually, because this city is really the Tibetan town of Gyeltang. Zhongdian really doesn't feel like China at all. I feel like I'm in a totally different country here. And actually, that kind of makes sense, because until 1949, Gyeltang really was part of Tibet. I didn't know this before coming here, but before 1949, Tibet was actually much larger than the Tibet Autonomous Region, including parts of Yunnan and Sichuan. Of the three old towns I've seen this week, I liked Zhongdian the best by far. It's really tourist oriented, but it's not as crowded as the other cities, and it still feels like a real town, where people live and work, and Tibetan grandmas hang out on street corners. It's got a real peaceful air to it, and I kind of wouldn't mind spending a lot more time here.
Tibetans dancing in the main square of the old city.
That first night in Zhongdian, we had maybe the best meal I've had in all China. Juicy yak meat (think a cross between venison and beef) on a hot plate under bread, mutton skewers, yak roast beef, and Tibetan flatbread. I ate like a pig, and it was incredible (although a bit too salty), with the best quality meat I've had in China by far. I will say, however, that having had two or three experiences with salty yak butter tea, I don't really need to have it like, ever again
The old town is towered over by a small temple with a giant prayer wheel that's lit at night.
My room here is really nice, a bit more expensive than other hotels here (though still only twenty bucks a night). The weather up here is loopy. It gets frigid here at nights (especially in my room, where there's no heat), but it's blazing during the day. I also had a funny experience here. I figured out my room with the front desk guy in Mandarin. He was very excited that I could speak mandarin, and spoke it himself somewhat awkwardly, and said that my Mandarin is better than his. I asked if he was Han, and he replied, no, I'm Naxi. It's a funny thing about Yunnan that I discussed with my classmate Max the other day. It wasn't too long ago that Mandarin seemed like the most exotic language there is. Now, I'm relieved if someone can speak good Mandarin as opposed to Yunnan dialect, not to mention Naxi, Bai, or Tibetan.
I woke up a bit early, but not too early, and took pictures of the old town during the day. Here's a stupa near the center of town.
The temple during the day.
Tibetans chatting it up. I caught that guy in mid gesture, he's not covering his face. Note the Tibetan hats. The Tibetans are a hat people, just like the Jews. Another reason to like them. Quite seriously, the Tibetans are great, very warm and friendly, and pretty good looking too.
That morning, we took the bus out to the Ganden Sumtseling Gompa monastery, a huge complex north of town that is home to six hundred monks. It was a stunning place, with overwhelming views of the mountains and ornate, surreal Tibetan painting work on the inside, with jaw-droppingly huge golden idols. It's nuts to see a community of faith that is so big and so active.
A stupa type thing in a lake that the monastery overlooks
The monastery from below.
The gate to the monastery, decorated with Tibetan paintings of the 4 heavenly kings.
Close ups of the kings.
The steps to the monastery. Try climbing that in the hot sun, with thin Himalayan air.
Prayer wheels.
A large idol building.
The view from the main Monastery complex.
Another angle on the complex.
A very common motif at Tibetan holy sites. This is the wheel of Dharma, basically, an illustration of all the things that can happen to you after you die, from hell at the bottom to heaven at the top.
View from the top of one of the buildings.
The name of the monastery written in Chinese and Tibetan on a hillside.
More temple!
We took a nice long walk along the wetlands the monastery overlooks. Here are some shots from there.
Michelle looking real goofy.
After we got back to town, we scarfed down a big bowl of bibimbob (yes, even in Arcadia goes Korean food...), and then we headed to the temple that overlooks the old town. Here's the big prayer wheel, during the day.
Since the wheel was pretty much always moving when I was in the town, I assumed it was motorized. Nope, it's just almost always constantly driven by the Tibetan faithful. Here are some old ladies pushing it, and let me add, having pushed it, it's not light.
View of the town from the temple.
The tourist influx has left the Zhongdian government flush with cash. We visited, out of curiosity, a brand new museum dedicated to the part of the Long March that went through here, and beyond that, dedicated to lying about the Communist Party's relationship with the Tibetans. But hey, sweet dioramas!
The kind of lies you'll see in a party museum.
Monks and comrades, bff.
We were also shepherded by a very enthusiastic Tibetan into a yet unfinished museum on the ethnic groups of Yunnan. The museum is really nice, and he literally unlocked the main halls in order to show us around. So this development stuff is really a double edged sword. The Communist party gets to lie, but the Tibetans also get a museum. And the Tibetans seem pretty damn happy about it to.
That night, we did Yak hotpot for dinner. I have to say, I'm not very fond of the hot pot. I don't like things where you cook your own food, and the boiling hot pot just tends to blanch the flavor out of food. We ate till we burst, however.
We arranged a tour the next day of the neighboring wetlands, and a flower meadow, complete with horseriding. Early that morning, a Tibetan from a nearby village drove us to his village, a few kilometers away. The drive was great because it was over the worst roads I had ever seen (roads they were literally still building). The guy had a CD full of songs about Shangri-La that he played on repeat, and he also friendly-honked every tractor and car full of Tibetans that passed us, since they were all from our village (neat note about the Tibetans: they often stick their tongues out to say hello). We sat at his house for a little bit, a big wooden place with no bathroom but still more square footage than my house in Brooklyn. Here's what ghetto fabulous Tibetan-style looks like.
We spent the morning hiking up to this gorge. The views were beautiful, but the trail was barely a trail, full of rocks and hard to climb. I'm not much of a hiker, and Michelle definitely isn't, so we had to turn back a bit early.
In the afternoon, we rode horses in the wetland. There wasn't much to see, since the lake dries up in the spring and summer (it's home to the endangered black capped crane in winter). The Tibetans let their livestock (pigs, cows, horses, yaks) graze freely in the wetlands, and claim that they can always find which ones are theirs, and that they come when called. Except, somewhat comically, they couldn't find one of the horses we were going to ride, so we just had two horses and switched off. I rode a little pony for the first time since I was six.
I ended the night with another visit to the monastery. This is really a special place, and one day, I hope to visit real Tibet. I wish I could stay longer a bit, but tomorrow I fly out to Xi'an. By the way, today's my birthday. I'm 21.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
4/17-4/22: Weishan/Mt. Weibao/Dali/Xizhou/Mt. Shibao/Lijiang
Geez louise, it's been a whirlwind tour through Yunnan, with nary an internet connection in sight. Finally, now that I'm sitting in a cafe in Lijiang, I can update you on the goings on. I'm seeing some amazing things, although with the familiar stresses of travel (and the various unpleasant elements of group travel).
On Friday morning, we set off on a cramped bus to northern Yunnan. I have just about zero leg room wherever I sit, and our bus is driven by a highly competent driver with the worst combover you'd see pretty much anywhere, and a tremendously evident do-not-give-a-damn attitude. The roads to the big tourist sites in Yunnan from Kunming are very good, but the other ones, not so much. Think hours on a bumpy dirt road, gravel flying, dodging farmers, cows, goats, chickens and other cars on a windy mountain road built by the PLA, probably on the way to Tibet in the 40s. The scenery is majestic in Yunnan. The roads wind right through rice paddies, where farmers still cultivate and harvest rice the old fashioned way. April is the plowing season, and we saw a bunch of farmers driving water buffalos with plows through their fields. It seems like every road here chose the hard way instead of the easy way, built right into sheer cliffs, but on the other hand, that means incredible views of the towering mountains and valleys of Yunnan. This is one of the most naturally beautiful places I've ever been, hands down. It's not fun, however, to sit in a bus with no shocks for an hour and no soft place to lean your head against, as you go over mile after mile of bad road.
That first day was spent in the old city of Weishan, which has been probably my favorite old city of the three we've visited here, if only because it felt like a place where people actually lived and wasn't mobbed by tourists. You can feel the difference walking in a city built according to traditional Chinese principles, with courtyard houses and cobblestone roads emenating from a central square. Weishan felt nearly European, certainly cleaner and more humane than your average Chinese city. There's nothing really to see there, just a slice of Chinese life. I walked around the city, through a sort of run down park where the old Confucian temple used to be, through the series of gates along the main road on a north-south axis, and even got my first stinky glimpse of village life, walking through the city market (which included freshly slaughtered meat). I also bought a sweet Mao era comic books for children (about a comrade who gets a convoy of trucks through a snow storm with the power of communism...I think) for under a dollar. We ate dinner that night in a lovely courtyard restaurant.
As we drove up the winding road to Mt. Weibao, the Taoist mountain that towers above Weishan, we could see the whole medium-sized town of Weishan nestled between two giant mountains. It's been a continuing theme of this trip, seeing things like that. People seem to settle in the most improbable places, and you wonder just how in the hell they got there in the first place, and how so many of them decided to stay. We lodged the night near the top of the mountain, in a charming little hotel that only had us as guests in the offseason.
In the morning, we hiked the mountain. There isn't anything particularly special about Mt. Weibao, but it was lovely, a misty day in old, mossy, temperate pine forests, with the chirping of the birds as the only noise I heard. I really like walking alone on these mountains. It really calms me, and when I hike them, I feel like I've finally got all my ducks in a row, and that life will be alright. Taoist mountains (the two I've climbed, anyway) seem to have a special air about them. As I walk past the moss on the rocks, I suddenly start to see things from the moss' point of view, and think about living in a world so small and steady, where me walking by is probably the biggest event of its little life. Then I look at the mountains and see how small I am, just as small as that little moss, and what a strange thing it is for me to be so far away from where I was born. I really do think that the reason people build temples on these places is because these places do have a special air about them.
After a deliciously fresh lunch, we bussed out to the ancient city of Dali. Dali is another one of those most improbable places for human settlement. It used to be the capital of Yunnan, and beyond that, the capital of the ancient Nanzhao Kingdom, a kingdom of the Bai people that, at its height, extended from Sichuan to Burma. Even today, it has over half a million residents. Yet the whole of the city is enclosed in a mountain valley around an alpine lake. It's unspeakably gorgeous. The old city is enclosed within a set of old walls, and the streets of the old city are wide, cobblestone streets decorated with fountains and gates. The mountains surround the city on all sides, but the valley is so flat that if you climb one of the city gates (a scant three or four stories high), you can see the whole city, and the lake below it. The catch is that the Yunnan government is fully prepared to pimp the city out. It seemed like there was nothing in the city at all except cafes offering western food and stalls selling cheap trinkets. I enjoyed Dali despite it all. I had probably my weirdest food on a stick moment (a whole fish! on a stick! Sweet!). We also had a blast at a dance club in the city that night, where the DJ obligingly played "I Will Survive", succeeding in sweeping us all up on the dance floor along with some goofy looking middle aged Chinese men, and I led the crowd in a chant of "Go China!" in Mandarin.
The next day, we got a lecture at the brand new Dali University from a Bai Professor who studies the culture of the Bai people. Dali is interesting in that the city has never really been considered "Chinese" for the vast majority of its history. Dali is a city of the Bai people, who have a different ethnicity, culture and language. For one thing, as our guest professor unfortunately spent a lot of time on, the Bai believe in free love before marriage, and hold a bunch of Bakhtinian style festivals throughout the year where people have sex with whoever they want to, and commoners and nobles mingle. The facilites at Dali University, btw, are insane. This is a beautiful college campus by any standards, with lovely faculty housing, great manicured lawns, and a breathtaking view of Dali and Erhai, the lake around which Dali is built.
After the lecture, we headed out to the Bai village of Xizhao, where we met a Bai host family. It's a surreal thing to walk around a minority village and see people walking around, going about their business in the elaborate Bai traditional dress. We visited a dye factory, where the Bai make Dali's famous blue tye-dyed batik fabric. After that, I headed to my host family's home. They had a twenty two year old daughter for me to talk to, so it was really quite pleasant. Honestly, their home probably has more square footage than my place back home, and a view to die for. A weird thing about a village home in Dali: Dali is China's main source of marble. In fact, the word for marble in Chinese is "Dali Stone". So, in and around Dali, it's the cheapest building material outside of concrete. As a result, this house, which didn't even have a toilet connected to a plumbing system, was covered in marble: marble tables, marble floors, marble everything. It was like spending the night in the Parthenon.
I took a nap in the afternoon, and then watched TV with my host daughter. There was a great show on set in the Qing Dynasty. The main villain was a Chinese guy with a ridiculous moustache and powdered wig. I couldn't tell whether he was supposed to be an actual Westerner or just a turncoat Chinese, but he would occasionally punctuate his eeeevil chinese statements with odd english phrases and wicked laughter: "That's great" "Of course" "I'll pay cash" "Two birds one stone". Pretty much the best TV I've seen since I've been to China.
I also, unfortunately, spent a lot of time on the toilet. I'm not going to go into great detail, but bad traveller's diarrhea, with almost constant stomach discomfort, hit me for about a week this week, the worst possible time, since it meant going repeatedly in the most awful bathrooms in China. I threw everything I had at it, pepto, immodium. My host family also gave me a ridiculous cocktail of pills, a weird orange drink and a tablet that worked for about a day, and then the nightmare returned. The Chinese, btw, are not shy about diarrhea. In fact, whenever I tell them, oh, I have stomach problems, they straightaway ask me, oh, do you have diarrhea? Finally, faced with going in some of the most nightmarish bathrooms I have ever been in on Mt. Shibao (basically, just a damn trench), I gave in and went for the big guns: a course of antibiotics. Although I feel bad about not beating this on my own strength, I have to say, the antibiotics worked pretty much immediately, and I'm up and at 'em again.
After that, we went to a market and shopped for dinner. Let me just say that I know that the pork we had that night was fresh, because I saw the pig it was carved out of. I helped out in the kitchen when I could (I have no idea how to cut up a slab of pig), and took notes as they threw together a delicious meal I unfortunately couldn't really enjoy because my stomach was wrecked. I do, however, have to say that one dish, my host family dad's favorite, didn't really appeal to me. For whatever reason, they didn't keep leftovers in the fridge, but just put them under a fly hood on the dining room table. There was a congealed bowl of pork, pickled vegetables and fat sitting under there, and the host family dad took it out. I assumed he was going to throw it out or do something with it. Nope. He threw it right back in the wok and cooked it. The result was the same disgusting white goop that had been sitting there before, and he insisted I try some. Well, what could I do? It wasn't awful, but it also was pretty much as bad as you might imagine.
We went that night to see a bonfire party that the Bai villagers had organized for us. The Bai women, in full costume, did an amazing elaborate circle dance with batons to a band of horns, drums and gongs. It was an incredible thing to see, something you'd never expect to see in China of all places. I've been seeing a bunch of stuff like this in Yunnan, and it strikes me that I've never thought I'd ever see something like this in my life. It's seriously straight out of National Geographic, a whole other world, and I'm so grateful for the chance to see it.
The next day, we travelled out to the Buddhist mountain of Shibao, first making a stop at a collection of caves containing Buddhist statues and reliefs. These statues and reliefs are remarkable pieces: layers of elaborate relief work, intricately posed Buddhas and monks dating back to the Tang dynasty, with that familiar Tang simplicity. It got me pumped for visiting the Longmen caves next week. However, Shibao has a bunch of interesting features besides just the stunning pieces of statuary. First of all, the statues show signs of western influence (including stunningly realistic portrayals of foreign monks). Also, the art work is evidence of the fact that Yunnan never used to be part of the Chinese sphere: it contains a relief that depicts the Nanzhao court, as different from the Chinese imperial court as you can imagine. Finally, Shibao was a Buddhist appropriation of a site that was formerly the center of a Bai fertility cult. As a result, there is one shrine that has as the central idol a stone pudendum, surrounded by Buddhist iconography. Really quite amazing, to see mother worship that open and that integrated into mainstream religion.
We stayed that night on the monastery on Mt. Shibao, which is an incredible sandstone peak with a set of temples and giant Buddha statues built on the edge of ledges. Unfortunately, Shibao does not recieve the visitors or the revenue that some other sacred sites do, and as a result, the upkeep of the buildings has suffered. The giant statues of the Amitabha Buddha that overlook the monastery are just stunning, however, and I climbed to the peak to get some breathtaking views of the surrounding countryside, all the way to Erhai. We had some delicious vegetarian fare for dinner, and after dinner, got to ask the old layman caretaker about Buddhism and the monastery, which was pleasant. We stayed the night in the monastery itself, which was incredible. However, it was also cold and we were all crammed in one room. I went to read and write for a while, and came back late. I went to what I thought was my bed, set my stuff down, and started to climb in, only to hear my classmate Nick ask, "Dylan, what are you doing?" It was so dark, I had got the bunks confused and almost got cozy with him. Staying in the monastery was really incredible. It was a beautiful place, and I started to have weirdly vivid visions of the Buddha. On the other hand, a rooster crowed for a full hour starting at 4 AM, so that wasn't so fun.
We drove that morning to Lijiang. Our hotel here is pretty much the worst rathole I've ever stayed at anywhere. It's got all the greatest hits of a bad hotel room: weird stain, awful smell, broken toilet. Luckily, I get out of here tomorrow. Lijiang itself is a nice old city, winding alleys framed by towering mountains, including the glacial, Himalayan giant of Jade Snow Mountain. Lijiang, like Dali, is not primarily Han Chinese: it's the center of the Naxi people, an ethnically Tibetan people numbering about three hundred thousand. The Naxi people have an elaborate animist religion called the Dongba religion, and also use the only living ideographic language in the world (in a nod to tourists, all the signs are translated into Dongba, although Dongba was traditionally mostly used for scriptures. We got the wonderful opportunity to witness a few Dongba priests perform a ritual to Su, a nature spirit who, the Dongba religion teaches, was the half-brother of mankind, and was given the natural world. When man takes from nature, he therefore must appease Su's wrath. This is done through an elaborate ceremony involving calling Su out of the trees using drums, ram and conch horns, bells, and dancing, and offering him flour and a chicken (whose life was spared this time for our sake). Again, another one of those incredible, can't believe I'm here experiences. I really find it interesting to see these sort of lost, premodern spiritualities in action. The Dongba belief is that there is a world beyond this world but located right in this world, and that if you have the right knowledge and perform the correct rituals, you can access it. This is something that has a lot of power for me, or at least a lot of interest. Their conception of the spiritual world just seems so different than ours.
Unfortunately, Lijiang is pretty much totally mobbed by Chinese tour groups, so I don't find it all that pleasant, even though it is really gorgeous, and nice when not packed. It's also another one of those cities that the Chinese have engineered entirely to focus tourism. I don't see evidence of any other sort of economy here. It's also really disturbing to me how much the Chinese exoticize and objectify their minorities. The Naxi are part of the scenery here. There was one disturbing video I got sucked into that advertises having your honeymoon in Lijiang. The honeymooning couple are dancing around, singing, and the Naxi are smiling knowingly at them, while doing their work. Finally, the Naxi say, oh shucks, the heck with it, and just start dancing - as if they really have nothing better to do than entertain the Han. This is really the Han attitude towards ethnic minorities, and it makes me kind of queasy.
Today I walked around Lijiang, to a great overlook called Lion's Hill, where you can see the whole city and Jade Snow Mountain in the back. Jade Snow Mountain is really incredible: eerie, even, a testament to how much bigger the world can be than us, a jagged peak towering high into the sky. I also visited the Mu family mansion. The Mu were the native chieftains of the Naxi, lords of Lijiang and suzerains of the Ming Dynasty. They built a mini-Forbidden City in Lijiang, a lovely little spot with great views of the city. It also contained some Tibetan murals, that are unfortunately badly damaged, but must have been remarkable back in the day. I finished the day off with a Naxi sandwich, which was pretty much the best thing ever: a local bread called baba (think a fried, thick naan), a fried egg, Naxi-style goat cheese and pork. It was the kind of greasy, heart-stopping treat that Elvis would have flown to him if he were still with us. Damn good.
Well, I've written my fingers off tonight, but it's been a busy week. Tomorrow, I head to the Tibetan town of Zhongdian, renamed Shangri-La for the tourists, to spend my birthday weekend. I'll keep in touch!
On Friday morning, we set off on a cramped bus to northern Yunnan. I have just about zero leg room wherever I sit, and our bus is driven by a highly competent driver with the worst combover you'd see pretty much anywhere, and a tremendously evident do-not-give-a-damn attitude. The roads to the big tourist sites in Yunnan from Kunming are very good, but the other ones, not so much. Think hours on a bumpy dirt road, gravel flying, dodging farmers, cows, goats, chickens and other cars on a windy mountain road built by the PLA, probably on the way to Tibet in the 40s. The scenery is majestic in Yunnan. The roads wind right through rice paddies, where farmers still cultivate and harvest rice the old fashioned way. April is the plowing season, and we saw a bunch of farmers driving water buffalos with plows through their fields. It seems like every road here chose the hard way instead of the easy way, built right into sheer cliffs, but on the other hand, that means incredible views of the towering mountains and valleys of Yunnan. This is one of the most naturally beautiful places I've ever been, hands down. It's not fun, however, to sit in a bus with no shocks for an hour and no soft place to lean your head against, as you go over mile after mile of bad road.
That first day was spent in the old city of Weishan, which has been probably my favorite old city of the three we've visited here, if only because it felt like a place where people actually lived and wasn't mobbed by tourists. You can feel the difference walking in a city built according to traditional Chinese principles, with courtyard houses and cobblestone roads emenating from a central square. Weishan felt nearly European, certainly cleaner and more humane than your average Chinese city. There's nothing really to see there, just a slice of Chinese life. I walked around the city, through a sort of run down park where the old Confucian temple used to be, through the series of gates along the main road on a north-south axis, and even got my first stinky glimpse of village life, walking through the city market (which included freshly slaughtered meat). I also bought a sweet Mao era comic books for children (about a comrade who gets a convoy of trucks through a snow storm with the power of communism...I think) for under a dollar. We ate dinner that night in a lovely courtyard restaurant.
As we drove up the winding road to Mt. Weibao, the Taoist mountain that towers above Weishan, we could see the whole medium-sized town of Weishan nestled between two giant mountains. It's been a continuing theme of this trip, seeing things like that. People seem to settle in the most improbable places, and you wonder just how in the hell they got there in the first place, and how so many of them decided to stay. We lodged the night near the top of the mountain, in a charming little hotel that only had us as guests in the offseason.
In the morning, we hiked the mountain. There isn't anything particularly special about Mt. Weibao, but it was lovely, a misty day in old, mossy, temperate pine forests, with the chirping of the birds as the only noise I heard. I really like walking alone on these mountains. It really calms me, and when I hike them, I feel like I've finally got all my ducks in a row, and that life will be alright. Taoist mountains (the two I've climbed, anyway) seem to have a special air about them. As I walk past the moss on the rocks, I suddenly start to see things from the moss' point of view, and think about living in a world so small and steady, where me walking by is probably the biggest event of its little life. Then I look at the mountains and see how small I am, just as small as that little moss, and what a strange thing it is for me to be so far away from where I was born. I really do think that the reason people build temples on these places is because these places do have a special air about them.
After a deliciously fresh lunch, we bussed out to the ancient city of Dali. Dali is another one of those most improbable places for human settlement. It used to be the capital of Yunnan, and beyond that, the capital of the ancient Nanzhao Kingdom, a kingdom of the Bai people that, at its height, extended from Sichuan to Burma. Even today, it has over half a million residents. Yet the whole of the city is enclosed in a mountain valley around an alpine lake. It's unspeakably gorgeous. The old city is enclosed within a set of old walls, and the streets of the old city are wide, cobblestone streets decorated with fountains and gates. The mountains surround the city on all sides, but the valley is so flat that if you climb one of the city gates (a scant three or four stories high), you can see the whole city, and the lake below it. The catch is that the Yunnan government is fully prepared to pimp the city out. It seemed like there was nothing in the city at all except cafes offering western food and stalls selling cheap trinkets. I enjoyed Dali despite it all. I had probably my weirdest food on a stick moment (a whole fish! on a stick! Sweet!). We also had a blast at a dance club in the city that night, where the DJ obligingly played "I Will Survive", succeeding in sweeping us all up on the dance floor along with some goofy looking middle aged Chinese men, and I led the crowd in a chant of "Go China!" in Mandarin.
The next day, we got a lecture at the brand new Dali University from a Bai Professor who studies the culture of the Bai people. Dali is interesting in that the city has never really been considered "Chinese" for the vast majority of its history. Dali is a city of the Bai people, who have a different ethnicity, culture and language. For one thing, as our guest professor unfortunately spent a lot of time on, the Bai believe in free love before marriage, and hold a bunch of Bakhtinian style festivals throughout the year where people have sex with whoever they want to, and commoners and nobles mingle. The facilites at Dali University, btw, are insane. This is a beautiful college campus by any standards, with lovely faculty housing, great manicured lawns, and a breathtaking view of Dali and Erhai, the lake around which Dali is built.
After the lecture, we headed out to the Bai village of Xizhao, where we met a Bai host family. It's a surreal thing to walk around a minority village and see people walking around, going about their business in the elaborate Bai traditional dress. We visited a dye factory, where the Bai make Dali's famous blue tye-dyed batik fabric. After that, I headed to my host family's home. They had a twenty two year old daughter for me to talk to, so it was really quite pleasant. Honestly, their home probably has more square footage than my place back home, and a view to die for. A weird thing about a village home in Dali: Dali is China's main source of marble. In fact, the word for marble in Chinese is "Dali Stone". So, in and around Dali, it's the cheapest building material outside of concrete. As a result, this house, which didn't even have a toilet connected to a plumbing system, was covered in marble: marble tables, marble floors, marble everything. It was like spending the night in the Parthenon.
I took a nap in the afternoon, and then watched TV with my host daughter. There was a great show on set in the Qing Dynasty. The main villain was a Chinese guy with a ridiculous moustache and powdered wig. I couldn't tell whether he was supposed to be an actual Westerner or just a turncoat Chinese, but he would occasionally punctuate his eeeevil chinese statements with odd english phrases and wicked laughter: "That's great" "Of course" "I'll pay cash" "Two birds one stone". Pretty much the best TV I've seen since I've been to China.
I also, unfortunately, spent a lot of time on the toilet. I'm not going to go into great detail, but bad traveller's diarrhea, with almost constant stomach discomfort, hit me for about a week this week, the worst possible time, since it meant going repeatedly in the most awful bathrooms in China. I threw everything I had at it, pepto, immodium. My host family also gave me a ridiculous cocktail of pills, a weird orange drink and a tablet that worked for about a day, and then the nightmare returned. The Chinese, btw, are not shy about diarrhea. In fact, whenever I tell them, oh, I have stomach problems, they straightaway ask me, oh, do you have diarrhea? Finally, faced with going in some of the most nightmarish bathrooms I have ever been in on Mt. Shibao (basically, just a damn trench), I gave in and went for the big guns: a course of antibiotics. Although I feel bad about not beating this on my own strength, I have to say, the antibiotics worked pretty much immediately, and I'm up and at 'em again.
After that, we went to a market and shopped for dinner. Let me just say that I know that the pork we had that night was fresh, because I saw the pig it was carved out of. I helped out in the kitchen when I could (I have no idea how to cut up a slab of pig), and took notes as they threw together a delicious meal I unfortunately couldn't really enjoy because my stomach was wrecked. I do, however, have to say that one dish, my host family dad's favorite, didn't really appeal to me. For whatever reason, they didn't keep leftovers in the fridge, but just put them under a fly hood on the dining room table. There was a congealed bowl of pork, pickled vegetables and fat sitting under there, and the host family dad took it out. I assumed he was going to throw it out or do something with it. Nope. He threw it right back in the wok and cooked it. The result was the same disgusting white goop that had been sitting there before, and he insisted I try some. Well, what could I do? It wasn't awful, but it also was pretty much as bad as you might imagine.
We went that night to see a bonfire party that the Bai villagers had organized for us. The Bai women, in full costume, did an amazing elaborate circle dance with batons to a band of horns, drums and gongs. It was an incredible thing to see, something you'd never expect to see in China of all places. I've been seeing a bunch of stuff like this in Yunnan, and it strikes me that I've never thought I'd ever see something like this in my life. It's seriously straight out of National Geographic, a whole other world, and I'm so grateful for the chance to see it.
The next day, we travelled out to the Buddhist mountain of Shibao, first making a stop at a collection of caves containing Buddhist statues and reliefs. These statues and reliefs are remarkable pieces: layers of elaborate relief work, intricately posed Buddhas and monks dating back to the Tang dynasty, with that familiar Tang simplicity. It got me pumped for visiting the Longmen caves next week. However, Shibao has a bunch of interesting features besides just the stunning pieces of statuary. First of all, the statues show signs of western influence (including stunningly realistic portrayals of foreign monks). Also, the art work is evidence of the fact that Yunnan never used to be part of the Chinese sphere: it contains a relief that depicts the Nanzhao court, as different from the Chinese imperial court as you can imagine. Finally, Shibao was a Buddhist appropriation of a site that was formerly the center of a Bai fertility cult. As a result, there is one shrine that has as the central idol a stone pudendum, surrounded by Buddhist iconography. Really quite amazing, to see mother worship that open and that integrated into mainstream religion.
We stayed that night on the monastery on Mt. Shibao, which is an incredible sandstone peak with a set of temples and giant Buddha statues built on the edge of ledges. Unfortunately, Shibao does not recieve the visitors or the revenue that some other sacred sites do, and as a result, the upkeep of the buildings has suffered. The giant statues of the Amitabha Buddha that overlook the monastery are just stunning, however, and I climbed to the peak to get some breathtaking views of the surrounding countryside, all the way to Erhai. We had some delicious vegetarian fare for dinner, and after dinner, got to ask the old layman caretaker about Buddhism and the monastery, which was pleasant. We stayed the night in the monastery itself, which was incredible. However, it was also cold and we were all crammed in one room. I went to read and write for a while, and came back late. I went to what I thought was my bed, set my stuff down, and started to climb in, only to hear my classmate Nick ask, "Dylan, what are you doing?" It was so dark, I had got the bunks confused and almost got cozy with him. Staying in the monastery was really incredible. It was a beautiful place, and I started to have weirdly vivid visions of the Buddha. On the other hand, a rooster crowed for a full hour starting at 4 AM, so that wasn't so fun.
We drove that morning to Lijiang. Our hotel here is pretty much the worst rathole I've ever stayed at anywhere. It's got all the greatest hits of a bad hotel room: weird stain, awful smell, broken toilet. Luckily, I get out of here tomorrow. Lijiang itself is a nice old city, winding alleys framed by towering mountains, including the glacial, Himalayan giant of Jade Snow Mountain. Lijiang, like Dali, is not primarily Han Chinese: it's the center of the Naxi people, an ethnically Tibetan people numbering about three hundred thousand. The Naxi people have an elaborate animist religion called the Dongba religion, and also use the only living ideographic language in the world (in a nod to tourists, all the signs are translated into Dongba, although Dongba was traditionally mostly used for scriptures. We got the wonderful opportunity to witness a few Dongba priests perform a ritual to Su, a nature spirit who, the Dongba religion teaches, was the half-brother of mankind, and was given the natural world. When man takes from nature, he therefore must appease Su's wrath. This is done through an elaborate ceremony involving calling Su out of the trees using drums, ram and conch horns, bells, and dancing, and offering him flour and a chicken (whose life was spared this time for our sake). Again, another one of those incredible, can't believe I'm here experiences. I really find it interesting to see these sort of lost, premodern spiritualities in action. The Dongba belief is that there is a world beyond this world but located right in this world, and that if you have the right knowledge and perform the correct rituals, you can access it. This is something that has a lot of power for me, or at least a lot of interest. Their conception of the spiritual world just seems so different than ours.
Unfortunately, Lijiang is pretty much totally mobbed by Chinese tour groups, so I don't find it all that pleasant, even though it is really gorgeous, and nice when not packed. It's also another one of those cities that the Chinese have engineered entirely to focus tourism. I don't see evidence of any other sort of economy here. It's also really disturbing to me how much the Chinese exoticize and objectify their minorities. The Naxi are part of the scenery here. There was one disturbing video I got sucked into that advertises having your honeymoon in Lijiang. The honeymooning couple are dancing around, singing, and the Naxi are smiling knowingly at them, while doing their work. Finally, the Naxi say, oh shucks, the heck with it, and just start dancing - as if they really have nothing better to do than entertain the Han. This is really the Han attitude towards ethnic minorities, and it makes me kind of queasy.
Today I walked around Lijiang, to a great overlook called Lion's Hill, where you can see the whole city and Jade Snow Mountain in the back. Jade Snow Mountain is really incredible: eerie, even, a testament to how much bigger the world can be than us, a jagged peak towering high into the sky. I also visited the Mu family mansion. The Mu were the native chieftains of the Naxi, lords of Lijiang and suzerains of the Ming Dynasty. They built a mini-Forbidden City in Lijiang, a lovely little spot with great views of the city. It also contained some Tibetan murals, that are unfortunately badly damaged, but must have been remarkable back in the day. I finished the day off with a Naxi sandwich, which was pretty much the best thing ever: a local bread called baba (think a fried, thick naan), a fried egg, Naxi-style goat cheese and pork. It was the kind of greasy, heart-stopping treat that Elvis would have flown to him if he were still with us. Damn good.
Well, I've written my fingers off tonight, but it's been a busy week. Tomorrow, I head to the Tibetan town of Zhongdian, renamed Shangri-La for the tourists, to spend my birthday weekend. I'll keep in touch!
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Week 8: Kunming
Boy, nothing much to report this week, except that it was pretty wild. I'm totally burnt out, and I've reached the part of the semester where my work ethic is just shot to hell. I've checked out of everything this week, and I'm really hoping that this coming vacation will recharge me or I'm really done for. I've been feeling lately like I'm doing a lot of work which I am not interested in and which will not benefit me in the long run, and so that's kind of an exhausting and depressing feeling. Really, I just need a break. I'm starting to really miss home. People ask me what I miss about home (my mom asked me what foods I miss) and it's not one thing or another. It's more the whole package, being immersed in my culture, both culture with a capital C and culture just in the sense of the way we live our lives. I miss walking down streets that make sense, doing transactions in english, watching cable TV, all this very abstract stuff that just isn't here.
My parents came this weekend. Serving as their tour guide really pretty much knocked me out. It was great Chinese practice, since I had to handle a million little transactions for my family and order all the food. I took them to the Bamboo Temple, the Stone Forest, and old Kunming. I missed out on a lot of sleep, and of course, family is family, and that meant a fair share of bickering and fighting. Having my parents come reminded me what a pain in the butt China can be sometimes. For example, to get to the Bamboo Temple, you basically have to wait for a dollar van to come. When does it come? When it comes - there's no schedule. My grandmother asked me only about a dozen times when the bus would come, and on one hand, that was kind of irritating, but on the other hand, she has a point. Why can't things be just a little bit easier here? It's crazy to go to even big tourist sites here and see how unfriendly they are for foreigners. I felt good, however, being able to serve somewhat effectively as a guide and translator (if they only knew how bad my Chinese was, they'd be terrified...) and most of all, being able to take them to decent restaurants here. At the tourist restaurants, you pay way too much for terrible food, but of course, if you don't know Chinese, you don't know any better. I was also surprised to see what my family really liked. My dad was amazed by the Stone Forest, and my grandmother liked dancing with the Sani in the dancing stage in Stone Forest. Anyhow, it was nice to see them, and only with the help of chocolate coffee beans that my family brought am I powering through the week.
With that in mind, the main goal of this week is preparing for my spring break. I'm hitting the road again. First, I'm spending a week with my program going to Dali and Lijiang, beautiful towns in the north of Yunnan. After that, I trek out on my own. First, I'm spending a weekend (my birthday weekend, actually) in a Tibetan area of Yunnan renamed Shangri-La, to sample some Tibetan culture and see some beautiful scenery. Then, I'm flying out to Xi'an, to see the Terracotta Soldiers, Big Goose Pagoda and maybe trek out to Hua Shan. Afterwards, I'm heading to Luoyang to see the Buddhist sculptures of the Longmen Caves and Shaolin Temple, then back to Xi'an to fly back to Kunming.
I'm feeling good about the upcoming trip. Helping my parents get around here served as a good dry run for me making my way around, and my Chinese has certainly improved. I've also learned my lesson (at least a little bit) and am not pushing myself to go everywhere, taking my time, and letting myself enjoy stuff. I'm starting to feel the wanderlust again, but mostly, I just have to travel around and not do work.
Well, I really don't have much to say this week. I'll try to post pictures. As action picks up, the frequency of the posts might increase. See y'all later.
My parents came this weekend. Serving as their tour guide really pretty much knocked me out. It was great Chinese practice, since I had to handle a million little transactions for my family and order all the food. I took them to the Bamboo Temple, the Stone Forest, and old Kunming. I missed out on a lot of sleep, and of course, family is family, and that meant a fair share of bickering and fighting. Having my parents come reminded me what a pain in the butt China can be sometimes. For example, to get to the Bamboo Temple, you basically have to wait for a dollar van to come. When does it come? When it comes - there's no schedule. My grandmother asked me only about a dozen times when the bus would come, and on one hand, that was kind of irritating, but on the other hand, she has a point. Why can't things be just a little bit easier here? It's crazy to go to even big tourist sites here and see how unfriendly they are for foreigners. I felt good, however, being able to serve somewhat effectively as a guide and translator (if they only knew how bad my Chinese was, they'd be terrified...) and most of all, being able to take them to decent restaurants here. At the tourist restaurants, you pay way too much for terrible food, but of course, if you don't know Chinese, you don't know any better. I was also surprised to see what my family really liked. My dad was amazed by the Stone Forest, and my grandmother liked dancing with the Sani in the dancing stage in Stone Forest. Anyhow, it was nice to see them, and only with the help of chocolate coffee beans that my family brought am I powering through the week.
With that in mind, the main goal of this week is preparing for my spring break. I'm hitting the road again. First, I'm spending a week with my program going to Dali and Lijiang, beautiful towns in the north of Yunnan. After that, I trek out on my own. First, I'm spending a weekend (my birthday weekend, actually) in a Tibetan area of Yunnan renamed Shangri-La, to sample some Tibetan culture and see some beautiful scenery. Then, I'm flying out to Xi'an, to see the Terracotta Soldiers, Big Goose Pagoda and maybe trek out to Hua Shan. Afterwards, I'm heading to Luoyang to see the Buddhist sculptures of the Longmen Caves and Shaolin Temple, then back to Xi'an to fly back to Kunming.
I'm feeling good about the upcoming trip. Helping my parents get around here served as a good dry run for me making my way around, and my Chinese has certainly improved. I've also learned my lesson (at least a little bit) and am not pushing myself to go everywhere, taking my time, and letting myself enjoy stuff. I'm starting to feel the wanderlust again, but mostly, I just have to travel around and not do work.
Well, I really don't have much to say this week. I'll try to post pictures. As action picks up, the frequency of the posts might increase. See y'all later.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Photos from 2/9/09: Suzhou
I took a buttload of pictures in Suzhou, probably because it's a really beautiful city. Here we go!
From across the river, where the train station is, looking at Suzhou proper.
The covered bridge leading from the train station into town.
My first Chinese token black guy!
A large pagoda in the center of town, seen from a distance.
Canals threading through town
Another canal.
In the Humble Administrator's Garden.
Artificial island in the garden, with pond and walkway.
Pavilion, pond.
View of the garden from a pavilion.
Houses on the pond.
Bridge over the water.
Mandarin ducks. In Chinese, these ducks are sometimes called marriage ducks, because they are known for having one mate for life.
Grove in the Humble Administrator's Garden
Lovely zigzag bridge.
Pavilion!
Secluded stone bridge.
View of the garden from an overlook.
More canals, and the weird modern city.
The rocks of Lion Grove Garden. These rocks are apparently all supposed to resemble lions, the guardians of the Buddhist faith.
Rocks and flora.
From on top of the rocks, looking down on a passage way that goes underneath them.
The central pond.
The Chinese garden in a nutshell: pavilion, pond, scholar stones, zigzag bridge.
Lovely waterfall.
The stones along the pond.
Stones, pond.
I've lived in NYC all my life, and I don't think I've ever been to creamy New York, nor am I anxious to go...
The Ming-era restaurant I ate at
Food porn time again! This was some great, great eel.
Joke posted above the urinal in the restaurant. I think it might lose something in translation.
Long shot of a canal.
An interesting example of Chinglish. Chinglish can generally be divided into two categories: instances where the translation is just plain awful, and instances where the translation is exact, but the original meaning is just kind of weird. This is the second category. The translation is quite accurate (I might render it "coffee talk" instead of "coffee language", but still); the cafe is really called Ming Time Coffee Language.
An alley leading to the Master Of Nets Garden.
Screen at the entrance of Master of Nets Garden.
Pond inside the garden.
Look familiar? That's because this is the section of the garden that served as a model for the Ming Scholar Garden in the Met.
Another shot within that room.
Lovely mosaic work on the floor of the garden.
Pond.
Another canal!
Temple fair by the river.
Lovely arched marble bridge over the river
You see this kind of scene all over China. Fields inexplicably strewn with rubble, just left like that.
Old houses along the canal.
Garden to Linger In, pond.
Bridge over a crick.
All the way down the canal.
A large gate in the city.
The lanterns of the city start lighting up as it gets dark.
The central pagoda lit up at night.
The bridge at night.
The most effeminate bag I have ever carried.
Yuanxiao, a special sweet rice dumpling the Chinese eat for the Lantern Festival (which happened to be the day I was in Suzhou). Tastes like Mochii (which it essentially is).
From across the river, where the train station is, looking at Suzhou proper.
The covered bridge leading from the train station into town.
My first Chinese token black guy!
A large pagoda in the center of town, seen from a distance.
Canals threading through town
Another canal.
In the Humble Administrator's Garden.
Artificial island in the garden, with pond and walkway.
Pavilion, pond.
View of the garden from a pavilion.
Houses on the pond.
Bridge over the water.
Mandarin ducks. In Chinese, these ducks are sometimes called marriage ducks, because they are known for having one mate for life.
Grove in the Humble Administrator's Garden
Lovely zigzag bridge.
Pavilion!
Secluded stone bridge.
View of the garden from an overlook.
More canals, and the weird modern city.
The rocks of Lion Grove Garden. These rocks are apparently all supposed to resemble lions, the guardians of the Buddhist faith.
Rocks and flora.
From on top of the rocks, looking down on a passage way that goes underneath them.
The central pond.
The Chinese garden in a nutshell: pavilion, pond, scholar stones, zigzag bridge.
Lovely waterfall.
The stones along the pond.
Stones, pond.
I've lived in NYC all my life, and I don't think I've ever been to creamy New York, nor am I anxious to go...
The Ming-era restaurant I ate at
Food porn time again! This was some great, great eel.
Joke posted above the urinal in the restaurant. I think it might lose something in translation.
Long shot of a canal.
An interesting example of Chinglish. Chinglish can generally be divided into two categories: instances where the translation is just plain awful, and instances where the translation is exact, but the original meaning is just kind of weird. This is the second category. The translation is quite accurate (I might render it "coffee talk" instead of "coffee language", but still); the cafe is really called Ming Time Coffee Language.
An alley leading to the Master Of Nets Garden.
Screen at the entrance of Master of Nets Garden.
Pond inside the garden.
Look familiar? That's because this is the section of the garden that served as a model for the Ming Scholar Garden in the Met.
Another shot within that room.
Lovely mosaic work on the floor of the garden.
Pond.
Another canal!
Temple fair by the river.
Lovely arched marble bridge over the river
You see this kind of scene all over China. Fields inexplicably strewn with rubble, just left like that.
Old houses along the canal.
Garden to Linger In, pond.
Bridge over a crick.
All the way down the canal.
A large gate in the city.
The lanterns of the city start lighting up as it gets dark.
The central pagoda lit up at night.
The bridge at night.
The most effeminate bag I have ever carried.
Yuanxiao, a special sweet rice dumpling the Chinese eat for the Lantern Festival (which happened to be the day I was in Suzhou). Tastes like Mochii (which it essentially is).
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