出彌遠

Photos from Mt. Shibao

2009-08-09T18:39:00.000-07:00

The view from the drive to Mt. Shibao

The remnants of an idol

Walking around the mountains

The mountains of Yunnan

Monkey with kid

The guy feeding this monkey identified the monkey as "the monkey king"

Climb to the top of the mountain

The temple as seen from the front gate

View of the mountain

The trails leading up the mountain

Mid-level of the temple

Mountain peaks

These likely once held the ashes of a monk

Idols on higher levels of the mountain

The view from the top. I believe you can see all the way to Er Lake, near Dali

Peak of the opposite mountain

Ruins of a temple on the top of a mountain. Someone lives there now.

Chickens in the temple

Fields for cultivation next to the temple

Coming down the mountain

And more mountains, lovely lovely...

The main idols, a closer look. The golden one is Maitreya, the Future Buddha.

Temple complex, from the level of the idols

For scales

FOOD PORN! This was a ridiculous vegetarian feast the temple prepared for us. Directly in the foreground was one of the rare misses: it tasted like sticks covered in sugar, and it might have been. But next to it is awesome fried cheese.

The idols in the mountain again. I usually avoid taking pictures of the idols, but it was pretty hard to do here.

Mountains again.

Photos from Xizhou

2009-08-07T16:20:00.000-07:00

Vats of dye at the batik making factory

Tie-ing the tie-dye

MICHELLE!

Fixin' the dye

George trying to dye fabric

My host daughter, who was kinda cute

Slabs of pork hanging there to dry. I never quite got what that was about.

Cooking equipment and produce

Cutting up some pork, straight from the pig

The marble table in the living room. In the Dali area, marble is so plentiful (the word for marble in Chinese is literally "dali stone" that it's extraordinarily cheap. So even though this family was not incredibly well off (although also far from really poor), they had tons of marble furniture.

View of the mountains from the house.

Marble patio, see my note above.

Host dad!

Host mom wearing traditional Bai headdress.

Photos from Dali

2009-07-25T12:48:00.000-07:00

The mountains surrounding Dali

The old, intact walls of Dali

A pavilion in the city

The old streets

Lovely little street

Gates

The mountains as seen from the city

Interesting church with Chinese architecture

Gate to the city

View from that gate

The view of Lake Er

The town on the slope of the mountains

This is where you can go to eat a minority family, I guess. Weird thing: the Chinese actually says "Ancient town family".

Michelle! Skewers!

Old town at night

Dancer at this bar

Unreal view of Dali and lake Er from the campus of Dali University, which is only six years old and insanely pretty

This is all faculty housing. Yep.

The hills behind Dali University. Eat your heart out, Wash U.

Photos from Mt. Weibao

2009-07-20T20:03:00.000-07:00

The view of the Kunming mountains from Mt. Weibao

The trail through the mountain

More view

Temple complex on the mountain

View from the temple

Lovely little pavilion in one temple

Yin-yang

Another shrine building

Lovely frescoes of taoist deities

Wood carving in the temple

Temple in the woods

More yin-yang. That's the way they roll on a Daoist mountain

Stairs to a high temple

I really liked this image of the mountains through this smoking censor

Photos from Weishan

2009-07-19T21:29:00.000-07:00

This shop sells colorful things for festivals

Can you handle the pressure? Apparently, representing the culture right doesn't mean spelling the words right.

Lovely stone gate with view of the mountains

Old courtyard house

Lovely old streets, reminds me of Europe

City park

I kinda liked how beat up the buildings in this park were

Grass on the pavilion roof, this place was legit

Elaborate wood carving in a new house being built

The tower at the city center

Believe it or not, this is an elementary school. I think it used to be a temple.

How tea is sold in the village

The village's open air market. Those cuts of meat are generally straight from the animal.

More village

The restaurant we ate at, an old courthouse mansion

Photos from Stone Forest, Sani/Yi Village

2009-07-14T18:35:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of official proclamation you typically encounter on entering any sort of Chinese national park, I like the official language in the first paragraph

Stone formations in a lake. These formations were formed through thousands of years of rain on limestone.

The stone forest from above.

One of the formations up close

Stone formation called the "water buffalo"

This is the classic photo from the Stone Forest, those are the Chinese characters for "Stone Forest"

You can even rent minority costume to wear! Hooray for weird Chinese exoticism!

Grafitti from the Cultural Revolution, it says "Chairman Mao, may he live ten thousand years!"

"Stone Forest"

Magnificent formations, nothing much to say on them

Walking into the Sani village

The pigpen

Pinyin chart for teaching kids

Sani villagers in traditional costume preparing to sing

The really insane food they prepared for us

The main community house

Our professor, Qin Wenjie, talking with the village head, his family and villagers

This is the village's prize fighting ox. Every year, there's a certain festival where they bring that ox to fight other village's oxes. It was awesome

The village community hall, dates back from the Cultural Revolution

The basketball court

Sani woman and drying corn

Old style Sani lute

Shots of the village

This is the door to the sacred grove of the village. The characters on the door are in the Yi language.

Village

Dog!

Village garden

The village head's daughter with the village head's son. She's my age, believe it or not.

Twin Pagodas, Downtown Kunming

2009-07-10T13:49:00.000-07:00

These are the twin pagodas that dominate the heart of Kunming

View of one of the pagodas, the newer one, built in the late 1900s after the Hui burnt down the original

Ornamental carving near the other pagoda

The older pagoda, dating back to the Tang Dynasty

A newer carving

These are kinda tacky in retrospect, but notable at least for the unusual minority style

Old building near the pagoda, not sure what it's for, but it was empty

The pagoda, close up, note the simple Tang dynasty style

An old city gate type structure between the two pagodas, this might have been refurbished by a development project in this area

Shot of the development buildings

Rhododendrons in the park of the other pagoda

The pagoda

Xi Shan, Dian Chi

2009-07-07T15:11:00.001-07:00

The breathtaking view of Dian Chi from Xi Shan

Xi Shan

Kunming

Cherry blossoms

This strange cow idol. I think the story is something like, the cow found this sacred spring.

Up the mountain

Dian Chi

Kunming

Dianchi up close, it's polluted as all hell

Photos from Bronze Temple

2009-07-06T18:16:00.001-07:00

Pictures from Bronze Temple, a Taoist sanctuary on a mountain on the outskirts of town.

The gate to the mountain

Spirit wall at the beginning of the path up the mountain

Mountain path

Gate to the temple

Gorgeous gardens inside the temple

Looking down the mountain from the temple walls

Walls of the temple

Stairs inside the temple buildings. The complex dates back to the Ming Dynasty.

The gardens from an overlook in the temple

Stone gate to the inner temple

Inside the temple

Lovely stone lions

These reliefs surround the altar

And even traces of paint on some...

Temple architecture

A fountain with a stone frog in it, you throw coins in as offerings

A pond, and that statue is supposed to be a legendary beauty, as I recall

The tall pagoda behind the temple, I think this was actually restored relatively recently, actually, might have been entirely built recently

This bell dates to the Ming Dynasty, but has been moved from its original location

Views of Kunming from the top of the pagoda

A troupe of retired alter kockers playing folk songs in the park

Kunming's botanical gardens are located right next door to the temple, and this is some sort of odd statue in the gardens

Walls of the temple

Lovely path through the woods on the outskirts of the temple

Wisteria, I think.

7/6/2009, Final Thoughts

2009-07-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

I've resisted, if you haven't noticed, posting my final thoughts on China. I said I'd do it a week after I came back, and then I figured I'd do it once I was done posting my photos. So that was my plan, but in reality, I think it was a stalling tactic. Because even though I have now been in America for more than a month, I don't quite know what to make of my experience in China, and even now, as I write this, I am fully aware that it will take a while for me to make sense of it all and determine what really did or did not happen to me in China. But something I read today made me reflect on the whole experience and what it meant to me, and I figure that I will write that reflection as my final thoughts.

So people ask me three questions. They ask me, first and foremost, how China was, or what China's like, or some variation on that question. And my response has been repeated so many times I have it memorized and ready to pull out at a moment's notice. China's a big country, I say, which is mundane, but probably the truest observation I have of China as a whole, and something that people who have never been can't really understand, I think. The key fact is that it is a country the size of America with four times the population, and that doesn't sink in until you go. Outside of that, it's hard to say what China's "like". Which part? When? For who? So I neglect to go any further than saying, China's a big country. My response can either be that, or the entirety of this blog; nothing in between would be quite accurate.

Then they'll ask me if I miss China, and that one's hard for me to answer. No, not exactly. Parts of it I certainly don't miss. And even the parts I have fond memories of, well, I'm just not really the missing type. Life moves on. But more to the point, I have a hard time integrating the memory of that time with the rest of my life. China was so different, and feels so distant - and is so distant, in so many ways - from the rest of my life that it sometimes doesn't feel like it actually happened. I feel like I went to another planet for a couple of months and then came back. So no, I don't quite miss it, when I'm sometimes not even sure it actually happened.

And then the hardest question, which is rare, but I still get: did China change you? Now that's the hardest one to answer. No, on one hand. I still feel like me, just with a slight disruption. I have the same flaws, and the same problems. I don't feel like I really changed. I'm still as stubborn and convinced of myself as I've ever been, and still very skeptical - perhaps more so now than ever - that that kind of experience can really change people.

But then, I also feel like it was a big experience. I feel like I saw things differently, at least for a time, that I got some glimpses of a different way of being. It affected me, I am sure. When I talk about how China was rough sometimes, people often counter, but you were in a pretty comfortable position, being a Westerner, with access to Western things and hell, even the internet. But that's not what was hard to me about China. There is a distinct, unbelievable isolation that comes with being a stranger in a strange land, cut off from your language, your culture, your family and friends. And no matter how many comforts you may have, you are still cut off, you are still not at home. It really is the sensation of the Freudian unheimlich (not coincidentally literally translating as "not at home"), uncomfortable even though nothing is all that different. I don't know if that's any lessened by having this experience in a culture closer to one's own, since I haven't had that experience. I just know it was intense as all hell in China. When I was lonely in China, I was lonelier than I've ever been.

Do I feel like I have a better understanding of China? On one hand, on a superficial level, obviously; I mean, I've been there. But then, I think about it, and my observations and thoughts based on my limited experiences in China, interacting with the Chinese, are only slightly less superficial than my thoughts before hand. So I spoke to some Chinese. So I visited some places. I still can't tell you what China is, or what it will be. I doubt that's even an option for the Chinese. So what can I say? I don't know what I got out of the experience or learned from it, either about myself or about China or the Chinese. Yet I feel so sure I got something out of it...

Today, in my reading, I came across a quote written by Ovid when he was in exile that finally encapsulated how I feel about China, at least in the immediate aftermath. Ovid writes, barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis, translating as, "I am here a barbarian, because I am not understood by them." On one hand, it is the nightmare of exile, and it was the nightmare of being in China. It was the feeling of "what the hell am I babbling about, anyway?" Not just when I was trying to make myself understood in Mandarin or in English, but when I was trying to convey my feelings, what was important to me, and trying to explain why it mattered to me and why it should matter to them, trying to explain the touchstones of my culture. What the hell was I talking about and why? I looked like an idiot. I felt like an idiot. Because, in that context, I was an idiot.

But with that nightmare also comes a sort of lucidity and an opportunity that you can't have in America: the opportunity to understand oneself. With Ovid's nightmare comes a certain identity: he is the barbarian. I came to realize that all that stuff that I was babbling about, all those needs and basic desires I suddenly realized I had, all the stupid pop culture things that suddenly became so vital to me when I left home, well, they were me. They were what I was. The thing about the unheimlich that is so uncomfortable, after all, is the fact that you are looking at yourself, as nakedly as possible. So I do think that I received a better understanding of myself from China. Not that it's something that's actionable; understanding yourself and being able to change are two different things. And it may be something that I no longer possess. Ovid wisely uses the qualifier "here"; when he returns home, he's Ovid again - whatever that means. So it might not mean anything, and it might no longer exist, but while I was in China, I got a better sense of who I was. And that is why this blog, despite my desperate efforts to document China and not me, ultimately became concerned mostly with my thoughts and feelings. The thing I experienced most wasn't China, after all - it was myself.

With that observation, even though it likely isn't my last thoughts on this whole weird semester, I conclude the writing on this blog. I'll continue to post photos until they're all up there. It just takes me forever.

Photos from around Kunming

2009-07-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

Lobby of the hotel where I lived

Funky mural in the lobby

Woman who worked at the desk, very nice, very shy

Hotel from the outside

The campus

Laundry drying in the cherry trees outside the hotel

Supermarket across from the side gate near our dorm

The side gate

The street in front of the side gate (jianshe lu)

The skybridge at the intersection of Jianshe Lu and Yi Er Yi Dajie

Gate to the main Buddhist temple in town. I actually never got to go inside, but I heard it was pretty run-of-the-mill.

Weird block of chalk writing

Walking the streets of Kunming

One of the many ceremonial gates scattered around the center of town

The gate to the old Confucian temple, now a park. The temple was gutted during the Cultural Revolution.

A memorial to martyrs of the civil war

The puppy mart! Cute/depressing!

See, Archos is big!

Central square of Kunming

I only eat things baked by professionals

A teahouse in old Kunming

The buildings of old Kunming. Unfortunately, this area was demolished while I was here.

Selling birds in the ruins of Old Kunming

Set for demolition

The streets of Old Kunming

Kunming's central mosque

The restaurant inside the mosque

The central sanctuary

More mosque

Yunnan Normal University campus

Cherry trees in bloom

Main gate of the university

Photos from 2/11/09: Shanghai

2009-06-29T16:49:00.000-07:00

Photos from my last day in Shanghai. Gee, it only took me an hour and a half to upload them all. I had assumed it was China, but Blogger's upload sucks...

The Shanghai Art Museum. Wow, this photo is so dramatic and high-school-photography-class artsy!

Interesting wood sculpture.

I do not know why there is a statue of Bach in Shanghai. But here he is.

Charmingly industrial Suzhou Creek

lolz

NO SCRIBBLE!

These are all pictures of the 50 Moganshan art complex, a converted cement factory filled with galleries

Ritzy cafe in the glass complex, full of laowai like me

See, used to be a factory. I love industrial relics. They remind me of home.

Haier has started selling some fridges in America, but somehow their logo hasn't made it over. It's the damn oddest thing I've ever seen. And it's all over China.

Grafitti and construction

Elevated track on the outskirts of Shanghai

Nice path in Lu Xun park

This is why I love Chinese parks

The weird fifties torture contraptions that every park has, and yeah, people actually do use them to work out

Somehow, the clearest picture of the Lu Xun statue I could get

Text in front of Lu Xun's tomb

Lu Xun's tomb

The madness at the People's Square station of the subway during rush hour

Glitzy Chinese street! Well, this one had a lot of prostitutes on it.

Food porn. I can't remember what exactly this is and I'm not sure I knew at the time, but I remember it being damn delicious.

Pudong skyline at night

And the Bund skyline at night

Back to Pudong

Buildings along the Bund

Except this one, this is the Bund

Photos from 2/10/09, Hangzhou

2009-06-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

So I've got my computer back now, and I can finish posting photos from my trip. Additionally, since I actually have a decent connection to the internet in the states, it theoretically shouldn't take forever and a day to post pictures, so I'll try to speed up the pace a bit.

The super futuristic new Shanghai South train terminal. Not shown: spaceport on other side, Cardassians

Park in Hangzhou

More park

Super sweet koi pond, chock full of fish

West Lake, from the shore

More West Lake scenery

The lovely little tourist ferry I took across West Lake

If I remember correctly, during a certain festival (thinking Mid-Autumn), they light the lanterns out in the lake

Zig-Zag bridge in center island (Three ponds mirroring the moon)

Some lovely detailed stone work

More stone work

Ponds and trees

View across one of the ponds in the central island

Promenade along the shore of West Lake

The tomb of Wu Song. Wu Song is a hero of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin, famous for killing a tiger with his bare hands

I always wonder how they determine these sorts of things...

Pagoda seen from a distance

Climbing a hill on the shores of West Lake

View of West Lake from the top of the hill

Trellises with wisteria vines

Table near the top of the hill

Hangzhou residents chilling by West Lake

The gorgeous Bai causeway

Walking along the Bai causeway

Pagoda from a distance

Canoes on West Lake

Forgot what exactly this was about, some sort of fair linked to the New Year

View of distant temple and square

The old style tourist street where the Tai Ji teahouse was

Tai Ji teahouse workers standing outside with tea, dressed in traditional Qing costume

The inside of the teahouse

Longjing tea, with snacks!

Amazing over-the-shoulder trick pour by the waiter. They are specially trained in this stuff for years.

Food porn! This time, it's Dongpo Pork, pork prepared in a clay pot full of shaoxing wine. As you can see, they literally just cut a slab out of the pig; I was counting hairs on those suckers

6/3 - 6/6: Shanghai

2009-06-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

Sitting here and thinking about trying to account for my time in Shanghai, I'm kind of at a loss as to what I can write about. I spent most of my time being fairly ill, barely able to get up off the toilet or out of bed.

We woke up fairly early in Nanjing to catch the next available train to Shanghai. Since we were on the Beijing-Shanghai line, we were lucky enough to be able to take a Z-class train to Shanghai, which is pretty comfy. I didn't really notice, however, because at this point, whatever I ate in Guangzhou was beginning to really settle in. I was glad we did the last leg by train, because traveling China by train is my favorite way to see the country, sitting with the common people, seeing the countryside pass by, it's something I'll miss.

We rustled ourselves into a nice hostel near the Bund. This time, we had four beds in a six bed hostel room. The hostel's a nice place but full of hostel people, who I have little time for. Once settled, we went to meet my friend Kaity, who's in Shanghai for the summer, by the Bund, which took way too long. Even though she had been there a week, Kaity was more disoriented in the city than I was. The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, we got coffee, and then beer, and then Kaity and another friend of mine, Julia, who's native Shanghainese, took us to the "Duck King". There, we had turtle (pretty good even though the shell was still there, reminded me of a Louisiana dish I couldn't quite pinpoint) and goose. It was a great meal, but my stomach was so bad that I couldn't really enjoy it. We were supposed to go out that night, but we were all kind of tired and my stomach was killing me, so we fell asleep at 11.

I can't even clearly recollect what I did the next two days, besides wake up late and eat very little, and sit on Kaity's couch and read gossip blogs. I bought a bunch of Chinese medicine for diarrhea (of course, I whispered it to the pharmacist and she yelled it across the store). They smelled bad, looked like bird droppings and tasted like metal, but seemed to work in the short term. We also chilled for a while in a park in the French Concession. It was a hell of a denouement for my China experience, but at that point, when you feel that bad, it doesn't really matter. It was also a good easy transition back into American life. It was fun seeing Kaity and Julia's apartment, and generally fun to see what it's like for Chinese people to live in China. Granted, both are Americans, and actually, I had a leg up on them in certain situations because I can read and they can't; a sort of strange scenario. But the bottom line is that Chinese people are treated differently by the natives, and there was a realization on my part of how far I had to go with my Chinese and how, even if my Chinese became fluent, how there were certain barriers I'd never be able to break through. One thing that I realized from taking cabs with them that I didn't realize last time (probably more because I just didn't take cabs last time in Shanghai than any language difficulties) is the insanity of taking a cab in Shanghai. Most of the drivers are from the sticks, which means when you give them an address, they have no idea where it is. Sometimes they will lie and say that they do, and really have no goddamn clue. And you have to watch them like a hawk to make sure they don't scam you. At one point, Kaity asked, you're not giving us the runaround because we're in a cab with whitey? And the cab driver responded, no, for me the Chinese and whitey are alike. Great.

I clubbed a lot my last days in Shanghai, and though I had a fun time, also realized why I never club in the States, and why I don't particularly want to club ever again. Shanghai has all of those usual club features, the greasy white guys, but with the added creep-out factor that all those club greasers are chasing after Chinese girls - and are generally successful with them, no matter how greasy and ugly they are. Some clubs were quite nice though. One place we went to (against Julia's warning, it should be said), was a total nightmare. There was literally no room to dance, and even when we found a little corner, old, poorly dressed Chinese guys shoved us guys out of the way to dance up on our girlfriends. Ecch.

Honestly, not a lot of build up or excitement to my exit from China. I'm not the type who has grand ceremonies about leaving one place or another, and this was no exception. The morning of the sixth, I got up, checked out, had a leisurely breakfast, and caught a cab. I originally wanted to take the bullet train to the airport, but in a great last China moment, the driver pretended he couldn't here me, and then argued me out of it. I was too tired to give a shit, and also knew he was right: it was more convenient for me to take the cab, I just wanted to take the bullet train for the novelty. A long, sweaty, sleepless (when the plane leaves at 3:45, you can't really recalibrate your body) flight later, and I'm back in the States, still suffering headaches and GI pain. Woo hoo.

So far, it's just been sort of weird and tiring to be back in the States. I think I've finally shaken whatever bug I had, which is a relief, but it took a while. I've generally kind of been laid out with jet lag, which hit me pretty hard (a lot of naps, eleven hour sleep sessions). It was very strange the first time I paid for something with dollars again. It's just sort of a weird sensation of the uncanny: everything is strangely familiar and doesn't quite feel weird. I'll wait a week or so to reflect on it, and then give a final post and close up shop here.

6/2 - Nanjing

2009-06-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

We woke up sorta early the next morning to drag ourselves up to the rooms we had originally wanted, and then to set out to the Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum. By the time we got dumplings and canned coffee, it was around 12. So not a rushed day. I couldn't really tell you what I thought of Nanjing overall, except that it doesn't have a lot of bars that we could find. I mean, my impression was that it was a nice, modern city that reminded me of New York, but I felt drugged and lethargic with a massive headache that whole day, the precursor to the full on blechness I'd feel in Shanghai. Like I said, probably the bad fish at the Guangzhou airport.

We took the convenient tourist bus for about an hour and a half to Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum, a not particularly attractive but rather impressive edifice for the tomb of the Father of the Country. While climbing the steps to the top, I did a double take when I saw a soldier wearing a Guomindang uniform. I looked around and saw a lot of them. It turned out that they were actors shooting a movie. Still, pretty freaky to see, as if you went to Moscow and suddenly saw hundreds of guys in Soviet uniforms. In general, it's odd to come to the tomb and see so much Nationalist iconography, as it's pretty much taboo outside of the tomb and Sino-Japanese war serials. Once again, I had my set of reflections on Sun Yat-Sen, whether he'd have remained a national/international hero had he lived longer, whether he's someone that deserves praise, having crafted the nationalist framework that the CCP clings to to this day. Hard to say. All I know is that circling Sun Yat-Sen's coffin is one of the only times I have seen the Chinese keep perfectly quiet and fully respectful of anything.

After that, we went to a pretty unremarkable temple solely because it was included in the ticket price. There was a nice nine story pagoda designed by an American that we climbed to get a view of the city. I actually got incredibly dizzy climbing the steps and was terrified by the time I got to the top. The view was also made somewhat less dramatic by the Nanjing haze. Actually, I won't blame it on the temple. I had an awful headache and just felt like a total wreck, and my traveling buddies weren't much better off: at one point, we just lay on the steps leading to the temple while Sarah and Michelle ate corn. For like an hour.

Eventually, we made it down to the Nanjing University area. Nanjing University makes Yunnan Normal University look like a horse barn, real fancy and with a ton of foreigners. I hate seeing other foreigners in China. Partly, it's my own general misanthropy, but I feel like a lot of them have weird reasons for being in China, either to exploit China or because they have weird sexual fetishes, or whatever. I had coffee which enabled me to get through the rest of the night, and then we had some pretty mediocre Korean food next to the university. We immediately cursed ourselves after passing by a million better looking food joints, and crawfish, which I would have loved to have but never got a chance to try in China for whatever reason. We spent the rest of the night wandering around Nanjing searching for a bar, with no luck. It seemed like we were in a damn dry county. Finally, we found The Castle, a bar that seemed to be in the basement of the city drum tower, with the surliest bartenders in all of China (a girl literally threw the bar menu at me). Not the nicest place to have a drink, but they had a good deal on wine and after a few glasses, we were relaxed and spent the night chatting about the trip and life. A pleasant end to an admittedly wasted day.

5/31-6/1: Guangzhou

2009-06-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

So early on the morning of the 31st, we made it into Guangzhou. In another stressful whirlwind, we stuffed ourselves into two taxis and got over to a hotel that promised us beds for fifty kuai a night. Another city, another "o'clock room". This place was probably the worst hotel I stayed in in China, and that's saying something. As soon as we walked in, we realized that the tile floors were still wet somehow, that the air conditioning and TV didn't seem to work, and the walls were chipped and badly painted. The bathroom consisted of a shower positioned so that you had to stand directly over the squat toilet while you showered, and the squat toilet often didn't flush properly, or flushed only by flooding the entire floor. Also, Max found hair on the bed. On the plus side, vibrating condoms were available for purchase in the room for only twenty five kuai! We decided to rest up until 11, at which point we decided we'd set off for dim sum in Guangzhou, the home for dim sum.

Guangzhou is a strange place, coming from the rest of China. First of all, at that latitude, it's damn near tropical, even compared to Kunming. When I was there, there was a hot, damp heat that reminded me of New Orleans. The parks are filled with all kinds of tropical flora; you sometimes feel like you're in Thailand or Vietnam as opposed to China. Also, in Guangzhou, the primary language (hell, often the only language) is Cantonese, which doesn't even sound like Chinese. It's a weird sensation, walking the streets of Guangzhou and hearing Cantonese and just feeling like you're in another damn country. Also realizing that in certain situations, I might as well speak English to people, since they have just a good chance of understanding English as Mandarin. Finally, Guangzhou has an unusual number of 7/11s. I have no idea what that's about, but no other Chinese city seems to have them, and Guangzhou has tons.

Gotta give it up for dim sum though, which, to be honest, was probably the real reason I wanted to come to Guangzhou in the first place. It took us a while to figure out dim sum at the place that we went to, because of course, being China, nothing was obvious or clear, even though the waitresses were friendly. At first, we couldn't get a dim sum menu; they just gave us a general menu, which confused the hell out of us. Finally, we explained ourselves and they sat us upstairs, in the dim sum section. But dim sum works differently in the states, at least at that place. Instead of the little carts that come around (a much better system), we had to get up and actually pick up dishes ourselves. It took a while for the waitress to explain that to us, and by that time, everyone but me was discouraged. I ended up having to serve all of us. But man, what a meal...great shumai, dumplings, and some kick ass lo mein. Cantonese food is closest to American Chinese food, since most Chinese-Americans come from Guangdong. It was good to have those familiar tastes again, and we left full of a lot of great little dishes.

After that, we took a casual stroll to and around Shamian Island, which used to be the British and French concession, and as a result, is a lovely, leafy place on the Pearl River, extremely walkable and full of grand colonial architecture. Of course, after walking for a while, we settled on a Starbucks on the island, where I got a frappuchino - ahh, neocolonialism. Until you walk a mile in China, don't mock me for my loving-Starbucks ways. As we left, we saw street vendors selling fish (probably from the Pearl River...ecch) on the sidewalk, and then we saw a cop heading their way. We stuck around to see if the cop would beat heads. Instead, he bought a fish from them. Well, that's China.

After that, we spent an hour at the Mausoleum of the Nanyue King. Underlining the insane amount of history in China, a history that still remains to be fully excavated, this nearly intact tomb was only discovered through new construction in 1989. The Nanyue kingdom was a briefly independent kingdom in the Guangdong/Guangxi area during the late Qin/early Han period. A couple of things I took out of it. First, and most superficial, people were damn small back then: the tomb, which we could enter, had door frames that were basically three feet high, and also, the fantastic jade death shroud that had been reassembled by a crack team of archaeologists suggests a man no taller than four foot something. Second, the shock at the insane artifacts that can be found in China as opposed to the States. For all we looted, there's still so many beautiful things left in China: intricate gold work, breathtaking glazes, amazing carvings of mythical animals. Finally, the discrepancy between the concept of a unified culture of China going back thousands of years, and the fact that most of these Qin-era artifacts barely look Chinese at all. When the CCP either falls or really reforms and China opens itself for serious introspection, there will be a serious dissection of the nationalist myths that have long defined the historiography of the Qin and Han periods.

From there, we got a dinner, and not a fantastic one, near our hotel. Actually, most of the dishes were quite good: we had some terrific double cooked pork, mapo tofu and roast goose. But one dish was absolutely no good: a specialty, the "jade chicken", that looked like plain raw chicken to all of us. Thankfully, no one got sick...we think. After that, we headed out to the Guangzhou clubs. A bunch of us weren't particularly in the mood, and Guangzhou turned real weird at night. The streets suddenly swarmed with African and Turkish drug dealers, and cops who looked the other way. We went into just one club, a dead joint with the least interested bartenders I had ever seen that I was pretty sure was controlled by the Russian mob. We didn't stay long, and walked for a while among streets that were weirdly filled with Turkish people.

The next day was kind of a wash out, but we didn't mind. We had a late lunch/breakfast at a McDonalds that was inexplicably swarming with loud children, and then made a snap plan to go to the Guangzhou art museum. When we got there, we found out that the museum was shut down because it was International Children's Day. Really. So we were faced with a Guangzhou that was pretty much shut down and also filled with tons of running, screaming Chinese children. Luckily, the museum happened to be in a park, so we just walked around and relaxed for a while. Eventually, we came upon a lake, and in another snap judgment, we got into a paddleboat and chilled on the lake for a while. Best International Children's Day ever.

After killing time in another Starbucks (I know, shut up) in the lobby of a fancy Guangzhou hotel near our hotel, we schlepped like mad men to get to the airport. The hotel was real nice though, a reminder of how you can actually travel in China if you're not a poor student. Bathrooms with bathroom attendants! The Guangzhou airport bus weirdly enough had ads on the bus that advertised the bus, as if you weren't already on the bus. When we got there, thankfully, my baggage didn't cost me an arm and a leg, although it probably did end up costing about the same as the ticket. The women at the ticket counter provided some fun China racism times as well. She was trying to convince me to cut my luggage bill, and was asking me whether one of my bags had liquid in it. I had no damn idea how to say liquid in Mandarin, and so she gestured to Sarah and said, please help your friend. Sarah, of course, also had no idea how to say liquid in Mandarin. She finally got a translation from a co-worker at the desk. So there, it wasn't me being a stupid white guy. Or maybe it was, but Sarah was stupid too.

We had time for a quick, overpriced dinner of weird Chinese slop at the airport (including some brown fish that I did not know was fish when I ordered it that is now the chief culprit for my current diarrhea/GI pain thing), and we got into Nanjing late at night. We took another airport bus that seemed to drop us off in the middle of nowhere, where we were quickly, literally surrounded by cabs and touts. Hilariously, they seemed totally unaware that we might be able to understand Mandarin, and speculated openly on whether Sarah and Michelle were Korean ("Some Koreans look just like us, only prettier"). We desperately tried to find beds, and then finally agreed (sort of), to a rate quoted by a tout, at which point our bags disappeared into cabs at a terrifying speed, and we had to rush and insist on being on the same cars as our bags. We arrived at another fleabag sex hotel, but were then told that the only room that was available was a weird, spare set of dorm rooms on the first floor. Apparently, the whole city was short on rooms, since the head of the Guomindang (in Taiwan) had come to visit Sun Yat-Sen's Mausoleum the day before. This filthy hotel had also clearly never had American guests; they wanted to see an American dollar bill, and I obliged them, even though it was a weird request at about 1:30 in the morning. Best of all, the dorm room (which was probably just used by the staff most of the time) had no lock, so we were unceremoniously given a chair to wedge under the door knob. I instead barricaded the door with our gigantic luggage, and we all went to bed, safe(ish) in Nanjing.

5/28 - 5/30 - Guilin, Yangshuo

2009-06-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

After the program ending banquet on the night of the 27th, me, my friends Sara and Michelle (who also accompanied me on the trip to Zhongdian and Xi'an) and my friend Max caught a flight the next day for the beautiful karst geology of Guilin, in Guangxi province. It was kind of weird just up and leaving the hotel room I had lived in for four months, realizing that the staff would just clean it up as if I had never been there and put someone in there, maybe the next day. But I'm not big on goodbyes, I kind of just grabbed my stuff and hustled out of there.

A persistent feature of this trip was my stuff. I had calculated that it would be cheaper to pay airline excess baggage charges rather than to ship, but of course, the other side of that was that I had to lug my stuff on to airplanes, on to cabs, on to buses and trains. Not an easy task, and in fact, a persistent pain - a literal pain when my luggage began to leave bruises on my body. I had one giant American suitcase about the size of a medium refrigerator that ended up weighing an easy 30 kilograms. I also had to withstand every freakin' taxi driver in the country criticizing me for the size of my luggage as if it were a personal failing of mine. But I was right, it was cheaper. So there, I'm not an idiot. Yeah.

The two hour plane to Guilin was unbearably hot, or so I was told. I don't remember any of it, I knocked out as soon as I sat in my seat and barely woke up to get off the plane. Guilin's airport is very nice, evidently very new. From there, Michelle got us into a twenty rmb airport shuttle bus that would drop us off...somewhere. Near the train station, we assumed. We were uncomfortably wedged in with our luggage, the vast amount of which clearly irritated the driver and other passengers. The ride was so uncomfortable that Sarah declared on the bus that Guilin sucked. Once we got off the bus, we were immediately swarmed by a mob of desperate touts who wouldn't take no for an answer. We took our insanely heavy baggage, which probably shouldn't be moved by anyone on foot for any period of time, and walked in the vague direction of a hostel, until Sarah found a tout who got us a good deal on the "o'clock room" at a fairly anonymous hotel near the train station. That was only the first of the many "o' clock rooms" we stayed at during this trip. They usually have hourly rates, and it was clear from seeing couple who avoided eye contact with us in the hotel hallways what they're usually used for. Whatever, cheap and clean enough.

Touts in China are funny. Some of them are definitely trying to rip you off (especially the one in the big cities), but the other ones, the vast majority, are just trying to make a little money and often do actually have the best deals. It goes along with how most capitalist ventures in China are generally highly informal. We used touts twice on this trip, and did pretty well on both occasions. Our tout in Guilin was a woman who basically just looked like someone's grandma, and as suspicious as I was of her, we used her to find a hotel and to book a tour, and she helped us out and didn't screw us over. So bravo to you, grandma tout.

Once we got settled, we started walking in Guilin, and found a place that looked basically good enough and sat down for dinner. We ate like kings in Guilin. At this place (which had a woman dressed in traditional clothing playing the gucheng...fabulous!), we had probably one of the best meals I had in all of China. Delicious roast goose, perfect Japanese tofu, killer eggplant and a marvelous local specialty, Guilin rice noodles, that have this wonderful chewy consistency...really the kind of meal I'll miss here in the states. After that, we walked Guilin for a while.

Guilin is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the nicest cities in China, and definitely the most pedestrian friendly. Fairly laid back and not overwhelmingly huge, with lovely parks and European style cafes that line the rivers that run through Guilin, all surrounded by dreamlike limestone peaks shrouded in mist. I felt like I was in a European city, and for once in a Chinese city, I enjoyed just walking around, especially along the banks of the lovely Li river. We finished the night with a beer in a cafe on the banks of the river, and then called it a night and prepared to see the various sights of Guilin in the morning.

The next morning, under my bold leadership (I had the guide book), we took off for Seven Star Park on the other side of the Li. Guilin is just one of those amazing Chinese cities that seem to have been plopped down in the middle of unbelievable geography, so sheer limestone cliffs and peaks rise right out of city avenues and around apartment blocks. The Seven Star Park is especially lovely, seven peaks in a beautiful, obviously newly renovated park, with clear signs for once. As soon as we walked in, we saw, to our surprise, that there was a zoo with pandas in it, which was great because Michelle and I had yet to see a panda in China. We tromped through a typically depressing Chinese zoo (concrete enclosures with iron bars, filthy animals going crazy, people actually petting a bactrian camel...), and wandered around for a while before we finally found the pandas, in a fairly grim enclosure that could only be viewed in the panda gift shop. The panda didn't look too clean, or too healthy, and was asleep for the ten minutes we saw it. Pretty fantastic animal, if not the most exciting thing in the world. I liked watching the little Chinese kids brought by their parents to look at the panda. But overall, pretty depressing.

After that, we walked over to Seven Star Cave, a series of caverns under one of the big mountains. The entrance to the cave, typically, had giant graffiti from the Cultural Revolution: "The Chinese Communist Party is the guide and benefactor of the Chinese people"). Also, the cave had sets of cheesy colored lights that could only be activated by a tour guide, but were also the only way you could see a lot of the formations, so we had to stick with the Chinese tour. It's strange to me the way that the Chinese seem to need tour guides to explain everything to them. Even when they're looking at natural beauty, they seem to need somebody to say, this is something worth looking at, this is important because it looks like this, etc. But me personally, I had never really been in a cave, so it was still pretty impressive, beyond all the cheese. Seven Star cave is really big too, and has several fantastic formations. I was impressed, in any case.

From there, we visited one last peak, Solitary Beauty Peak, a sheer outcropping with an almost vertical cliff facing, and insanely steep steps that Sun Yatsen apparently climbed by night in 1923. After huffing and puffing on the way to the top, we took a breather and took in the fantastic views of Guilin, a modern looking city surrounded by these dreamlike, unearthly peaks. It is just so hard to believe that places like Guilin exist, but there are just so many of those places in China. After we came down from the mountain, we booked our tour of the Li river with Grandma Tout (actually, Michelle booked it. I'm glad I traveled with the girls, because although I can negotiate in Mandarin if I really have to, I usually can't be bothered). Then, we went to have another Guilin specialty: beer fish, fish marinated in beer and cooked in a skillet right on your table, good stuff.

We then went to a shady webbar and planned the rest of the trip. It was Sarah and Max's plan to just kind of go with the flow and plan things as we went along, which of course, unnerved me to bits, but I kept my mouth shut, and in any case, things more or less worked out. We quickly figured out that we wouldn't be able to visit Wudang Shan and get to Shanghai on time, and so we played a funny game of seeing if there was any point in between Guilin and Nanjing that would be of any interest at all to us. Finally, Sarah found a cheap air fare from Guangzhou to Nanjing (really cheap...around 35 dollars American), so we figured we'd take a night bus from Guilin to Guangzhou, hang in Guangzhou for a day or two, and then fly up to Nanjing. Which is what we did.

We ended the night with a trip to a club in Guilin. Chinese clubs are ridiculous. Part of it is because I never go to clubs in the States, and I tend to think clubs are inherently ridiculous to begin with. But there's something about Chinese clubs...just the way that they're all sort of the same and all over the top and nuts, loud as hell, filled with scantily clad dancers and singers, just the desperate aping of Western conventions. The nightclub in Guilin was notable because it had the worst DJs I have ever seen anywhere, two guys on CDJs who were so incapable of mixing that they just used the submerge effect between every single song, as if to trick us into thinking that they mixed the songs. Also, they played Aaron Carter, "The Time I Beat Shaq". Even the group of Chinese B-Boys, who were desperately trying to keep the party up, left in the end. Also, we saw a three year old running around the club for some reason, I guess the whole family decided to go to the club. It was really bad, but I had fun, anyway.

We got up early in the morning and rushed desperately to get our stuff behind the counter and catch the bus for our cruise down the Li river to Yangshuo. I still think I left my cell phone charger there. Chinese tours are a little nerveracking because you're never quite sure what the procedure is, and if you've explained yourself clearly to the touts and to the tour guides.We could only hope and pray that we'd get on a boat and somehow get back to Guilin in time for our night bus to Guangzhou. Somehow, somehow, we did get on a boat and spent four hours sailing down the Li river. I'm really glad we did that trip: the karst topography that lines the banks of the Li is simply unbelievable, just amazing, and not quite real. It's crazy to see people live in the shadows of giant, towering limestone peaks, as if that were a normal place to live. At one point, the boat seemed to head for a collision course with a small reed raft, but actually, it was a scheme by the guys on the raft to almost collide with the boat in order to pull along side the boat and sell us trinkets. Easier way to make a living, guys. Of course, the boat owners had to blare at us through a loudspeaker half the time, selling tourist photos and other trinkets and explaining just which rock looked like a donkey and why. Also, we fell asleep for the last hour since we were tired from the previous night, earning laughs from our neighbors. The boats were nice little tourist ferries (think nicer circle line boats) with a giant wok in the back, where they made us a half decent lunch. Very nice morning overall, recommended to anyone who visits.

Yangshuo the town was also nice. It's even more romantic and insanely placed then Guilin, an old town very literally built among a set of limestone peaks. Also, it had pizza. We walked along the river, and then shopped in the old town, and then I had a bad chocolate milkshake and a burger that had shao kao spices. Kinda weird but also kind of good. After we found out that our return bus was running late, we took the always fun Chinese option of jumping on a bus that was heading in our direction for fifteen kuai. We watched a great, strange movie on the bus about Jackie Chan landing in jail and then killing people for some reason.

Once we got back, Max and I traded in our tickets for the more comfortable sleeper bus, and quickly went and grabbed our luggage, which was more of an ordeal than you might imagine. They had given us the wrong check tag for our bags, and the fact that Max had his ID on him that matched the name on the bag and that we were the only damn white guests that hotel had probably ever had, it took way too long to convince them that those were in fact our bags. From there, I had to argue with the cab drivers to get them to agree to take our bags to the bus station (at one point, one driver actually started mocking me). Finally, one agreed, and we got to the station, where Sarah and Michelle came with ten minutes to spare to give us one last bowl of Guilin mifen. Then, with a panic and full hands, we rushed onto a bus.

The sleeper bus was mostly fun, and kind of nice. I sleep like a baby on buses, especially when I'm in a bed. Of course, the ride was not without problems. My iPod gave out, and for a few hours, there was a constant beeping from some mechanical alert that threatened to keep me up and drive me insane. A few times during the trip, the Cantonese men seated near me answered their cell phones and seemed only able to scream their reply to their friends and loved ones. When we arrived, our luggage was trapped for about a half an hour as the driver and a mechanic with a cigarette clenched between his teeth (even when working near the gas tank) worked to wedge open the door.

But it was worth it all to travel through the Guangxi karst at night. At night time, those giant limestone humps become even more surreal and dreamlike. It made me think that although we love to call landscapes like that unearthly, all the most unearthly places are really here, on earth. This is a hell of a planet, at the end of the day.

Last Weeks in Kunming

2009-06-07T09:53:00.001-07:00

Hey folks,

Sorry for the long absence, but for a couple of reasons, I haven't been able to blog. First of all, Blogger was blocked by the CCP in the last few weeks I was in China, mostly to avoid trouble on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen, so I wouldn't have been able to post anyhow. But honestly, I haven't been writing anyways. I was just busy doing work and then, since I was traveling with friends, it was hard to get away to the computer for an hour to jot stuff down, especially without a working laptop (GRR). I'm back in NYC now, safe and sound and since I'm unemployed for the summer, without much to do at the moment. I'll try and take a few hours to write about the last few weeks in China, and I'll break it up into two or three posts to make it more manageable. It's obviously not as good as recording stuff as it happens, but oh well, what can you do.

Like I said, most of my last two weeks in Kunming were spent writing and finishing up the two required papers for my class, one based on the field research I did at the mosque, and one that was a literary analysis of Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q". Writing those papers was rather daunting. First of all, I just had limited time, since Chinese class and homework reliably took up most of the day, and pretty much the whole rest of the time after spring break, I was burnt out beyond belief. I really, really do not like language classes. I never have. I see them as a means to an end, and while I love communicating in a foreign language, I just loathe the process, and can never focus in class. That fact really hit me the last couple of weeks, where I just ran out of gas. Also, it's really hard to do good research in China. We had a very, very small English library (and at least I was doing a project focused on a primary text) and our internet resources were limited both by connection speeds and the Great Firewall. Finally, I didn't have a damn computer, which meant sitting in sweaty web bars for hours writing a paper next to a guy playing DotA. Lots of fun. But actually, in the final analysis, I was kind of happy to write my papers. It was the first real culture learning I did there, and it really improves the study abroad experience to have some idea about what has shaped the place you are culturally. Plus, I was reading a lot about the Late Qing/Early Republican period, which I find fascinating and will probably do some work on at some point. They're not the best papers I've ever written by far, but they're far better then they could have been, considering the limited effort and energy I put into them, and the limited resources I had access to.

I actually saw two movies in theaters in my last two weeks in Kunming. The Chinese movie theater experience is interesting and kind of funny. Since most movies come out immediately on cheaper DVDs, almost nobody goes to movie theaters in China. Also, the seats are assigned: you buy a ticket for a very specific seat. It's kinda creepy to see the state film bureau approval screen show, one of the reminders you get now and then that despite your relative freedom as a foreigner, you are in an authoritarian state. And, as always, the Chinese pretty much seem to have no regard for any sort of cinema etiquette. In Nanjing, Nanjing, a film concerning the RAPE OF NANJING, for chrissakes, we heard no fewer than seven or eight cell phones go off, and sometimes, not only would they answer, but enter into prolonged conversations (In Mandarin: "Yeah, I'm watching a movie right now...Nanjing, Nanjing...it's pretty good"). And best of all, at a climactic scene of Nanjing, Nanjing, we heard the predictable hock...and lord knows where that went. I'm just glad I didn't have to clean it up.

So, my first movie experience was probably the most interesting: the Rape of Nanjing movie Nanjing, Nanjing by director Lu Chuan. For the last month or so I was in China, I kept seeing ads for this movie everywhere, and heard about it from pretty much every Chinese person I talked to, including my language partner. It became very clear to me that someone in the government was pushing this movie hard. So I wanted to see it in Chinese theaters to gauge the Chinese reaction and see exactly what messages were being conveyed. I was expecting a total propaganda flick, but actually, Nanjing Nanjing is really quite fine for the most part, with good performances and stunning cinematography, done in a verite style that, it should be said, borrowed heavily from Saving Private Ryan. I thought that the director did a good job portraying the Japanese humanly (an accomplishment that earned him death threats from Chinese nationalists). Almost all the soldiers in this movie on both sides seem like adolescents, scared and confused, trapped in an awful game that they simply cannot fathom. However, even though the film was well made, with a topic this likely to inflame the public, you ask the always tricky question of whether there are some films that shouldn't be made. Also, the film contained more graphic rape scenes than I have ever seen. After a while you wonder if it is appropriate to depict so many of these terrible scenes or if it crosses the line into exploitative or worse, incendiary. Finally, the position of women in this film is particularly interesting. At one point, a woman is viciously criticized for refusing to cut her hair and disguise herself as a boy to prevent rape by the Japanese, and is later thematically punished by getting raped. As is too often the case in Chinese art, the woman must sacrifice her feminine identity for the good of the nation.

In general, I am downright terrified by the Chinese attitude towards the Japanese. The intensity and the blindness of the hatred, and the fact that it is being actively encouraged by the government as cover for the government's own failings (it's no surprise that Nanjing, Nanjing and the government support it received came mere months before the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen). It should also be noted however that it's not fair just to ask the Chinese to forgive and forget, either. I think Americans have little concept of the extent and brutality of the Sino-Japanese war, and also, the bottom line is that the Japanese, unlike the Germans have never apologized or even acknowledged the atrocities (in a disturbing conversation with my Japanese roommate, he denied that the Rape of Nanking ever occurred). But after seeing so many Sino-Japanese war serials, and hearing so many Chinese speak openly of their hatred for the Japanese, you hear the peculiar and terrifying drum beat of a nation that, rather than examine the failings of their own nation, creates a racial scapegoat. It's something we've seen before. And it disturbs me to the extent where I predict that if the CCP were to fall in the near-distant future (which I doubt), it would be replaced not with a democratic government, but with a nationalist/fascist government that would go to war with Japan. And I am quite serious about that.

Also, I saw Star Trek, which was pretty cool. This time, we were the only people in the theater, so there wasn't much of a China experience, although the Chinese subtitles were often very funny (it's amazing the wide variety of English expressions which were translated simply as "haode", which means "alright"). What did I think of the movie? Eh, I didn't think it had much of a brain, it was just action, none of the philosophy or political stuff that draws me to the Star Trek franchise. The plot was pretty simplistic, and I HATE time travel plots. It also might have been that as a Trekkie, I just didn't like to see certain things happen, and couldn't enjoy the movie as a result. Plus, I felt weirdly exposed seeing it with a bunch of non-Trekkies (who didn't even know what the Kobeyashi Maru test was...fuh). Simon Pegg as Scotty and Zachary Quinto as Spock were great casting choices. But in any case, I left with mixed feelings.

Sad saying goodbye to my language partner. I really felt that by the end of the semester we had become pretty good friends, and I hope she feels the same way. It'd be great if she could manage to come out to NYC after she finishes her semester in Canada in the fall, although she might decide that it's too expensive. It really saddens me that it's simply out of the question, even for those who can manage to get a study abroad in the states, to travel to the extent that we did in China. I had one last good moment with her, discussing Chinese history. I mentioned that it was awfully bloody, with a lot of people boiling other people alive (actually, not knowing how to say boiled alive, I said "hot potted alive"). Western media lies, she said. Actually, I countered, I read that in Sima Qian's History Classic. Oh, she said, well, it's not all like that. That's only some of it.

My last weekend in Kunming, I made sure that I got my papers done early so that I could visit my favorite places in Kunming. I made sure to make some time to sit in Cuihu Park for a while and read. Sitting in the peaceful park, watching the Chinese sing folk songs and dance in unison and be their social, quirky selves, I saw how I would very easily miss more than a few things about China. You know, when you're studying and just living day by day all alone, you focus on what's difficult about China, and there's a lot that is. But China is also a lovely country, with some very nice places, and from time to time, it's a great place to be and to live. I also thought about how I could have lived differently in China. I never really got settled in China, and I spent most of my free time hanging out with my classmates, never really reaching out to the Chinese or other expats. That's my fault and it's a sad thing. But then, it's also hard to do that in only four months. Most of the expats said you really have to be in China for a year before you start to love and understand it. It was funny also going to Kunming bars and clubs on my last weekends and seeing familiar expat faces, realizing that even someone as marginally part of the community as me could recognize the expat stars of Kunming. It's an interesting life, I think, and it attracts interesting people, but I could never imagine living so far away from America from so long. But who knows? Every time I told an expat I was leaving, they asked me when I would be back, which always made me kind of laugh, since I was so eager to return home at that point, I couldn't imagine ever coming back. But now I'm back, who knows, maybe I'll come back to China one day. I wouldn't rule it out.

My last week and a half, I traveled from Kunming to Guilin, then from Guilin to Guangzhou (Canton), from Guangzhou to Nanjing, and then finally, from Nanjing to Shanghai. If I can shake off the lethargy inspired by jet lag/American comfort, I'll post about it. Stay tuned.

Week 11: Kunming

2009-05-11T02:47:00.000-07:00

Lord, I really don't have much to report this week, and I'm just checking in to check in. Back to Kunming means back to the grindstone, and with final papers on the horizon, that goes double. I'm near the end of my rope now. The many difficult elements of living in China and being in this program are starting to add up and make life just suck. First and foremost, a busted computer that almost certainly won't be fixed until I return to the states means that I spent Saturday and Sunday in a smoky, hot webbar writing a paper next to a guy playing Starcraft, a paper which, although I haven't looked at the draft since I quit working on Sunday, is probably no good. I'm getting really tired of not having my own space. My roommate is nice (honestly, nicer and more considerate to me than I am to him), but I just hate having to negotiate space: for chrissakes, I'm not a freshman, I should get to have my own damn bedroom. Also, it seems that every day something new in the dorms breaks: the shower, the key, the outlet, the toilet. I'm pretty much completely out of gas when it comes to Chinese class. I've never really enjoyed Chinese class; I see it as a necessary evil. I'm damn sick of spending hours a day just on language, it's like a complete brain death. And the novelty of China has pretty much worn off. I don't really have time to travel, so it's the same old greasy food, same old KTV (this weekend included several Michael Jackson songs, Twist and Shout, and If You've Got The Money, Honey), same old hot pot. Bleh. And to top things off, this weekend, I somehow contracted a cold. So, great.

It was at least nice to see my language partner again. We chatted about my travels, and she gave me a whole bag of coffee candy, which is essentially what's keeping me alive at this point. She's also going to Canada as an exchange student, and she's going to try and get a tourist visa to the States, which means she might swing by NYC during Christmas time, which would be pretty sweet. This week, we discussed the Taiwan situation, which was less juicy than you might think. To my surprise, she readily conceded that Taiwan had not historically been a part of China and was functionally independent. Discussing the Taiwan situation with the Chinese is kind of funny, because it means tapping into the stock phrases of propoganda. Every Chinese person knows by heart the party line on Taiwan, that it is "an inseperable part of China", in those same exact words, no matter who you ask, every time. But then she made me explain, in a very convoluted way, that yes, America probably had no right to intervene to protect the Guomindang in Taiwan, and yes, they probably shouldn't have, but now that Taiwan is a democracy and they already intervened, they should probably still protect Taiwan. We also had a funny discussion of democracy where she said that China's congress was elected democratically too, and anyone can run, except that, of course, nobody knows anything about the people who run, and the party more or less selects them. But don't the American parties select their presidential candidates, she asked me. No, I said, and explained the primary system, to which she replied, oh, I guess that is more democratic. To soften the blow, I pointed out that America also has problems with democracy, like the fact that you need money to run for anything here. She's fascinated by the idea that American mayors don't get paid that much, and yet aren't that corrupt, which led us to a discussion of corruption, which led me to tell her about how William Jefferson had ten thousand dollars in his freezer. Good times.

I really don't have much to report, nothing that happened to me this week was new or particularly exciting. Maybe next week I'll have more to report. Hopefully, I'll be in a better mood. Check in later.

5/2/09: Luoyang, Xi'an, Kunming

2009-05-03T02:41:00.000-07:00

Hey folks, I'm back safe in Kunming, although my computer still doesn't work :-(. I had a long, sort of interesting day of travelling yesterday, so I'll just write briefly about that.

Luckily, my train back to Xi'an wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, or it very well could have been, thanks to the help of a friendly Chinese woman and her ten year old kid. Indeed, my ticket on the train was a standing ticket, and I still had no idea what to do, but this woman, whose son wanted to play cards with me, ushered me over to sit with them. We played Chinese poker (yes, it actually is in China, although the rules are slightly different) and another game, where certain cards were highs, but I couldn't remember which ones, and they had to keep repeating which ones were trumps to me. The woman was basically playing for me at points (it's been a long time since I've played Chinese poker), which was kind of annoying, since sometimes I was trying to strategize, rather than not knowing what to do. I slept for a good three hours, to their great amusement, and then woke up and taught them Rummy 500, and immediately remembered how tedious that game can be at times. As the mother said when she was adding up her cards, "This is exercise!" They were really nice, exceptionally warm people, and I thank them for making that train ride pleasant.

I had a really terrible lunch of bland noodles in soup with grey beef and bread (a Xi'an specialty, believe it or not), and caught a cab to the airport. I got to the airport ok, and had a fun conversation with the cab driver, where he talked for a while about the different forms of martial arts in China ( I did not know that Taoism and Buddhism had different forms of martial arts). He also had a great line. "You're from where?", he asked me. "America", I said. Then he started making a machine gun notion and jovially announced, "Americans are always fighting wars everywhere!" I couldn't help but laugh and offer a meek "sometimes..." Since you can't check in to the gate until two hours before your flight, I finished Sister Carrie while drinking a seven dollar (that's American dollars...ecch) cappuchino in an airport cafe. Sister Carrie is a very strange book. It strikes me that the socialist-moralizing populist voice is a very American voice thatused to be very common in American literature and has now almost completely disappeared. The book is filled with very irritating moralizing and judgment from the author, and yet it seems to succeed in spite of itself; the fact that the author's moral judgments seem to have no bearing or no actual relation to the events of the novel kind of makes the novel better in a way.

The plane flight was also very painless. I sat next to a girl who had obviously never been in an airplane before. It was funny, because she kept reminding me to put on my safety belt and keep my tray table in an upright position, as if she had been studying up on flying. When I landed, I had another interesting cab ride with a cab driver who loved America, and had very strong negative opinions on Chinese culture and society that I had never heard openly spoken by a Chinese person. Interestingly, as a way of expressing his dissatisfaction with the current state of Chinese society, he said that today's society was not influenced by socialist ideologies, but rather, by Japanese ideologies (his shorthand for capitalism). It was also kind of funny because he insisted on displaying his knowledge of American history, and recited American history from the revolution to the Civil War, as if I had no idea.

So now I'm here, safe and sound. I've got another four weeks of the program left, and accordingly, I'm going back to once a week dispatches. Hopefully, I can figure out my computer, and go back to posting photos. Now I'm here, with the exception of Luoyang and my computer, I feel like I had a pretty good time with it. I can't decide whether I want to travel another week after the program, or fly back home ASAP. I think I might travel another week if Sarah and Michelle are doing something interesting; it's when I'm alone that I get nervous and anxious and homesick. I don't know, I'll see how I feel. Touch base with y'all later.

5/1/09: Shaolin Temple

2009-05-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I had pretty much the worst day of travelling I've ever had in China, but for some reason, I'm not in a bad mood right now, because I came back alright, and tomorrow, I'm back in Kunming, so the horizon is in view. Right now, I'm feeling kind of low on the concept of doing any more travelling in China, but who knows, maybe I'll plan another grand tour in the next few weeks for my last week or so in the country.

Today was supposed to go pretty smoothly, since the hostel owner showed me exactly where I could buy the tickets, and I was ready to go. I went confidently up to the window, bought a ticket for Shaolin Temple (later than I wanted to go, but I also got up later than I should have). I stumbled into the parking lot after I realized that this bus depot didn't at all resemble the orderly one in Lijiang, and was ushered on to a bus by someone in an official uniform. The only seat was in the way back, next to a family with little kids, but I was confident at least that I'd get there.

I fell asleep, and woke up just in time to see us pass Shaolin Temple. Ok, I figured, maybe the parking lot is a ways away. But when we finally stopped, I was told that we had an hour, and I was hustled into buying a ticket at the booth of a place that was definitely not Shaolin Temple. This place was a very old Confucian academy, distinguished by very old and impressive cypress trees, but nowhere I particularly wanted to be. Pissed off at being yoked into what seemed to be a tour, I stomped around for about thirty minutes, which was really more time than anyone needed in that place, and then got on the bus, where the hustler calmed me down, said we were going to Shaolin Temple next, and I stupidly bought a return ticket.

Well, the next stop wasn't Shaolin Temple. It was a perfectly undistinguished Buddhist temple I had absolutely no interest in seeing. At this point, with half my day gone, I was positively steaming. I still don't really understand what the incentive was to lie to me, since he didn't actually make any money from decieving me (other than me buying a return ticket, but I might have done that anyhow, since I wasn't sure how I was going to get back). And I was pissed because I definitely didn't request any ticket other than the one to Shaolin Temple, and went through an official broker, not a street tout. The next stop wasn't even Shaolin Temple. They stopped for food for forty minutes. Meanwhile, the kids next to me were getting antsy. The genius parents bought them sticks of incense for some reason, and they proceeded to wack me in the face with them, because, obviously, as a foreigner, I'm basically furniture. Pleasant.

By the time we finally got to Shaolin Temple, it was 3:40, and we only had two odd hours there. The driver explained that I should rush to see the show with the group, but I lost the group, and then stayed and watched a show which was not the real show, I later found out. It was kind of neat, but not overly impressive. I really like the idea of the Shaolin Monks, and kung fu in general, on a very adolescent level. I like the idea that through enough hard work, you can train your body and mind to do superhuman things. I also like the idea of a band of monks fighting for justice.

Shaolin temple, unfortunately, at least when I visited, was a miserable place. Zen Buddhism started there, but with throngs of people (probably not helped by the fact that today is a Chinese national holiday), it's the least zen place you can imagine. Also, every landmark is a good kilometer away from every other one, so I spent most of my time walking, and when I wasn't walking, I was wrestling with the crowds. Already pissed off and in no mood to deal with throngs of Chinese tourists, I saw pretty much none of what I had planned to see. I tried to see the next kung fu demonstration, but I missed that one too, and at that point, I calculated that I wouldn't be able to see anything else and catch my bus back. So I went back early, thoroughly disappointed, and just read Records of The Historian for a while. The reading helped calm me down, proving that what it really might have been was that I was just sick of travelling. As a last little irritation, the tour leader hustled me on another bus that was going back earlier. Except there wasn't actually a seat for me on that bus, and I sat uncomfortably hunched over near the front of the bus for two hours. Luckily, I had a solid dinner when I got back, which always helps things.

Well, tomorrow is the end of this journey, but it's gonna be a nuts day of travelling tomorrow. An early morning five hour train ride, and then a semi-mad dash to Xi'an Airport. I'll start at 7 tomorrow morning and hopefully get back to the dorms around 11 in the evening. And my ticket says that I have an assigned car, but no seat, so, that should be interesting. Hopefully, I'll write you from Kunming tomorrow, wish me luck.

4/30: Luoyang, Longmen Caves

2009-04-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

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.

4/29: Xi'an, Luoyang

2009-04-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

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!

4/26-4/28: Xi'an

2009-04-28T06:03:00.000-07:00

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.

4/23 - 4/25: Zhongdian (Shangri-La/Gyeltang)

2009-04-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

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.

4/17-4/22: Weishan/Mt. Weibao/Dali/Xizhou/Mt. Shibao/Lijiang

2009-04-21T06:10:00.000-07:00

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!

Week 8: Kunming

2009-04-14T09:11:00.001-07:00

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.

Photos from 2/9/09: Suzhou

2009-04-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

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).

Week 7: Kunming

2009-04-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

First of all, sorry for the lateness of this post, I had a three day weekend this weekend due to a Chinese holiday, and I was pretty intent on enjoying it. I'm afraid this post won't be very much fun, as it's been a real tiring week for me, and I've mostly just been studying. But as always, count on there being a lot of it.

The work has been getting really heavy lately; this last week was not too much fun and next week, until Friday, won't be too much fun either. The deal is that, in addition to our midterms, which cover a semester's worth of material back in the states, we're learning two new chapters this week, and have the same amount of quizzes and homework, which is a heck of a lot. Not to mention an oral exam, which requires us to prepare five minutes each on two topics. I'm kind of despairing about it, so I find it really hard to focus and work, but mostly this weekend I've just been sleeping late and studying. I'm kind of getting burnt out on it. As always, I like the end result of learning a language, but I take absolutely no joy in any part of the process: it's just plain work for me.

I do really love communicating though. For some reason, in our discussion class, OJ Simpson came up. We had to figure out how to explain that we all thought he was guilty because he wrote a book called "If I Did It" (Our translation, btw, was "Yaoshi wo zuo le"). My language partner is also too much damn fun. Our first topic this week was "one time use products". After we established that there was pretty much nothing to discuss on this topic, she went on to horrify me with a dozen or so stories about hygiene in China. Par for the course: she explained to me that sometimes, to get chopsticks white, they dunk them in sulfuric acid. Splendid. Our second topic that week was animals, and she explained to me how afraid she was of pretty much every animal there is, especially dogs, which is rather ironic, because she lives in one of the more biodiverse regions of China. After she described a dozen or so animals as "fierce/vicious", I asked her if there was any animal she thought wasn't fierce or vicious. Her answer? "Maybe little birds". She also related to me a couple of entertaining stories about her family eating a python when she was little, and according to her, the existence of an elephant graveyard in her region of Xishuangbanna. She also told me some horrifying stories about the prevalence of elephant poachers in the region, and the eating habits of some Chinese (taking a hot bowl to remove the skull of a monkey while it's still alive and then eating its brain; throwing rats live into a roaring fire). If I could magically learn Chinese and just talk to my language partner all day, I would. Is there a program that offers that?

On Friday, I went to the mosque again, with my culture professor in tow to do translations. People were amazingly welcoming, and actually encouraged me to come back a couple of times, so long as I wrote good things about religion in China. Before the service, I talked to the guy who is essentially the Communist official in charge of the Mosque, and then after the service, I spent a few hours talking to some alter kockers in the congregation. It wasn't easy - I just flat out missed some things that they said in their heavy Kunming accent - but it was really fascinating. It was funny to hear familiar Muslim doctrine in Chinese. "You're Jewish?", one of the guys said (I was unfortunately outed by my professor, but luckily it didn't hurt me any), "Well, that's fine. But you know, the Qu'ran came last, so it incorporates both Judaism and Christianity..." Some of these guys had even been on the Haij, to my amazement. As for more detailed observations, I'm writing a paper on it, so I'll spare you too much detail. Basically, what's interesting to me, and the crux of my paper, is how the state has essentially required the Hui to form a religious identity and a separate national identity, as opposed to the combined ethnic identity that say, American Jews possess. For the Hui, at least the official version, they are first Chinese and then Muslims, but there seems to be no idea to them of an inherent "Huiness" or Hui Culture that doesn't necessarily fit either category. Again, with my language skills being what they are, and my time in the culture being limited, there's a very clear limit to what I can conclude, but that's what it looks like to me.

On Saturday, I went back to the mosque to try and find the Imam so I could have a discussion with him, but I couldn't find him. So instead, I went to KFC, which was, after months of Chinese food, finger lickin' good. KFCs and McDonalds here have a different vibe, because they are more expensive and a little bit classier than the average street food. If you work at a McDonalds, it's actually a pretty good job. The clientele are mostly middle class folks on breaks from their shopping trips. For whatever reason, I've been killing myself for some fried chicken, so it was much appreciated.

This Saturday night, I returned to the KTV. Not much to report, basically the same insane deal it was last time. I liked how I said at the door that I had friends inside, and without a moment's doubt, they just led me to the only group of white people in the club, who were my classmates. In case you're interested, I led a rousing rendition of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", and closed the night out belting the lead to the ABBA classic "Winner Takes It All". After a hard night of KTV, I had some late night McDonalds. So I've been really doing the America thing lately.

Really, this weekend, I've mostly stayed inside and studied, both because I've had to, and because April means that the rainy season has come to Kunming, and it's been cold and rainy all weekend. The upside to that is that I've now finished the second season of BSG, which is just a plain masterpiece. The Pegasus episode is one of the best things I've ever seen on television, hands down; it's a seriously moving piece of work, which is all too rare for TV and especially sci-fi. It's also much better than the first season. The first season is too belabored with the Cylon plan and the prophecy, and the show is always better when it's humans causing problems for other humans, with nobody controlling things from above.

So I guess this post is actually kind of a short one. It hasn't been a thrilling week really, and I've been killing myself with work, but after Friday, it should be more fun, especially with my parents coming to Kunming on Thursday (which I am really looking forward to...at least it'll be an experience). Hopefully, things will turn up on all fronts, and in any case, we're leaving for Dali and Lijiang on the 17th, and after that, I've got another long stretch of traveling ahead. I'll post more pictures when I can.

Photos from 2/8/09, Shanghai: French Concession/Pudong

2009-04-02T06:46:00.000-07:00

Second day in Shanghai, classy stuff.

Don't know where this building was, neat place though.

Where the CCP was founded.

The Commies love their state propaganda.

Exactly what it looks like.

Lovely former French park in the French Concession.

Sun Yatsen's former residence. Sun Yatsen in the foreground.

Spiffy backyard.

House from the outside.

Another shot from the outside. The Chinese just says "Sun Yatsen's old house".

Skyscrapers from the Pudong.

Walking along the Pudong.

The Pudong boardwalk. Reminds me of Hudson River Park back home.

This blue bit of goop was all over the place. Apparently, he's the symbol of some sort of world's fair type thing that's going to be in Shanghai, 2010.

The mob transferring from lines 1 to 2 in the Renmin Square subway.

Photos from 2/7/09, Shanghai: The Bund/Yu Yuan

2009-03-30T22:59:00.000-07:00

Shanghai! The glitz! The glamor! Lots of photos!

The pedestrian mall on East Nanjing road.

The Pudong district, as seen from the Bund.

Closer up view of the Pudong

Building on the Bund, I think this is the old Customs House

A beautiful cafe I had coffee in in the old Customs House

The Yu Yuan from the street.

An alley on the way to the Yu Yuan

The tourist mob in the Yu Yuan old town shopping section. It's a madhouse! A MADHOUSE!
\
Just kidding, there is no way out.

Inside the Yu Yuan, Ming scholar stones and lovely pavilions

A nice pond.

Jinmao Tower, as seen from the Yu Yuan

Chinese gardens really are quite lovely.

A Beijing opera stage within the gardens

Folks fishing at a Shanghai park

Not quite sure why I took this, but the Chinese at the park

Forget which buildings these are.

Skateboarders in Renmin Square

I believe this is the Shanghai Symphony building, dating back to the colonial period.

More skyscrapers from Renmin Square. Shanghai actually has more skyscrapers than Manhattan.

Tall buildings wow!

The Shanghai Museum

Public art in Renmin Square

The gorgeous Art Deco Grand Theater.

The creepy clean Shanghai subway. Welcome to the future, ladies and gents.

French Concession at night.

FOOD PORN! These are my awesome pork noodles, with green tea. You can also see the menu thing.

Taste of home.

Renmin Square skyscrapers at night.

East Nanjing Road at night.

Bright lights, big city.

Week 6: Kunming

2009-03-29T07:02:00.000-07:00

A fun week this week, with some good stories. I had a really good Sunday, so I'm riding that vibe right now.

As far as classes go, not much to report. This week was a good reminder that Chinese is easily my worst subject, especially when I'm dead to rights. I'm still doing ok, but stuck in that B plus/A minus range, which kinda drives me nuts when I feel like I should be doing better. On the other hand, I don't feel like putting forward any extra effort, when I already feel like I'm working like a dog, so I ought to just suck it up, and take it like a man. I've noticed that my discipline regarding speaking Chinese has pretty much gone, and it makes me sad when I remember how hard I tried to speak Chinese in the past weeks. The other classes are going ok. We watched our professor's movie on Tuesday, which told the story of an old master monk's funeral on the sacred Buddhist mountain of Emei Shan. I like those kind of films, where you just watch a part of someone's life, and I like monks, so I dug this movie; reminded me of the old abbot's funeral in The Brothers Karamazov.

I really have fun with my roommate. Unfortunately, he's begun trying to use his English, which I don't really like because, for one thing, he was the only person I had to speak Chinese to, and it was good practice, and on the other hand, his English isn't too great either. He knows strange phrases: once, he broke out for my friend MC, his classmate, the term "kitchen drunk", and expanded upon it in Chinese, "Drinks and cooks at the same time!" Tonight, when I had dinner with him and MC, he broke out, almost at random, the term "garage sale". It's a lot of fun. To my embarrassment, apparently, in class with MC, he said, "Americans like to curse a lot. Dylan is always saying f***", and he has taken to doing an impression of my F-bomb, complete with an imitation of my goofy adolescent cursing voice. The other day he cracked me up. I went to open my door, and all of the sudden, I heard a voice behind me saying, "Boo!" I'm easily startled, so I cursed and freaked out and then laughed. Song Ben smiled and said, "Suplise", which had me laughing for pretty much the rest of the day.

As always, my language partner is generally the most interesting part of my week. This week, searching for things to talk about, I asked her if she had ever been to Burma, since Xishuangbanna, where she's from, is right on the border. Apparently, she had been once, to a city in Burma that's apparently like a Chinese Las Vegas (or more like a Chinese Tijuana), and did the Las Vegas things. She also paid a visit to the Long-Horn Miao (Hmong), whose women like to do the hair up around two giant horns they wear as a headdress, hence the name. Apparently, it used to be quite easy for the Chinese to get visas to go to Burma, until too many Chinese started losing all their money in Burmese casinos! It was kind of kooky for me to think about, since Burma is pretty much off limits to me, but that's Yunnan, a contact zone.

These language partner sessions are sort of like therapy sessions, in that we have two set topics, which take us about ten minutes to answer, and then we have to find something to talk about for the rest of the hour. A moment of comedy ensued this week when I took out my coursebook, which arrived in the mail this week, for lack of anything better to talk about. "See," I said, "In America, we can choose our classes. We have all sorts of departments." Since I had just opened to the beginning of the book, I pointed out the first department listed, "For example, the African American Studies department." My language partner opened her eyes wide and said, "Oh, because black people need to be put all together in one class, they can't be mixed with other students?" I laughed and quickly explained the situation. I was really able to engage her in China that session, since I also showed her a book of ethnic minorities, and she was able to talk about all the ones she had seen, and Dai customs regarding temples and monks. According to her, many of her friends, at the university and at home, are increasingly interested in Buddhism, to the point where some spend their vacations at monasteries studying sacred texts. She also mentioned that Kunming had a Tibetan restaurant, which I later visited with a bunch of my classmates.

A lot of good language partner stuff this week. For one session, she brought her friend, an English major, to chat with us. Somehow, we got on the topic of Marx. They asked me if I had ever read Marx, and I said yes. I asked them if they had ever read Marx, and they said well, they have mandatory Marxism classes every semester. Ok, I said, but have you ever actually read Marx? They said no, just primers. I started laughing, and said, never, not once? And they said no. We're interested in, their literal words, "Marx after he came to China", and then, the kicker, they said that they study, using that old shopworn phrase, "Marxism with special Chinese characteristics". We discussed various English works (The English major's read Chaucer, I have not, how's that for humbling) and I had the longest, slowest, most humiliating joke fizzle, where it was explained to me that my joke was not funny because I have "American humor" and so they didn't get it. I got a special recitation of the English major's Hunanese dialect, which was kind of kooky (Hunanese is about as different from Mandarin as French from Spanish), and that led us on to the discussion of English accents. I did a special performance of a heavy New York accent, but what really interested them was when I explained that I probably have more of a Jewish accent, and spoke a few words of Yiddish. "You're Jewish?", the English major asked, "You don't look any different." They begged me to speak Yiddish, so I taught them "Oy vey" and "kvelling", as they were the first two terms I could think of. So now my language partner can say "kvelling". What can I say, I'm kvelling.

On Friday, as part of my ethnographic study type thing, I attended services at a mosque. Since Kunming is so multicultural, I don't really think about how strange my China experience is, because that's just the way it is. It's only when I think what it's going to be like for people to ask me how China was, and for me to say "Well, I spent a lot of time at a mosque...", that it strikes me as a little odd. The mosque is a funny little place, in that it runs a restaurant within the sanctuary which is patronized by Han Chinese, even right before services. It also serves a strange role as an embassy of Hui (Sinophone Muslim) culture for the Han. One great sign in the mosque is a long article with a heading that says "Why don't the Hui eat pork?" Another sign reveals the intimate arrangements these mosques must have, by necessity, with the state: "This mosque struggles to make a civilized city". The mosque has many old wooden signs with Muslim principles written in Arabic and Chinese calligraphy. It sort of resembles a Buddhist temple without any idols.

As for the service itself, I had never been to a Muslim service, so that was a first for me in any case, and once again, it's odd to think that my first Muslim prayers were in China. The prayers are recited in Arabic, and lead by a kaffiyed imam. The service in many ways reminds me of praying with my grandfather: these services, too, although better attended, were largely filled with alter kockers, and the sound of chanted Semitic languages always strike a certain note within me. Interestingly enough, the imam gave a reading of scripture in Arabic, which he followed with a reading of the same scripture in Chinese. He also gave a long sermon. I understood barely a word of it, but hilariously enough, it had a familiar drawling preacher cadence. I learned the Chinese word "chanhui", which means, to repent, since he used it a couple dozen times in a rhetorical trope: "They are not repentant men, they are liars". I hope to visit next week, and this time, I might actually talk to someone.

A fun story from this Friday. I went out to drinks with my friend MC, and as we were preparing to leave, the waitress had to run and go get change. We were among the last people in the bar, and another group of two guys were sitting at a table near the door. One of these guys was really drunk, and had a flattop. "Ice cream!" he barked out in Chinese. He asked us to sit, and pointed at my friend MC (a white woman) and said, "Ice cream!" When the waitress came back, he pointed at us and said, "An ice cream for her, and a beer for him." When the puzzled waitress said, "But we don't have any ice cream...", we made our exit.

Another Chinese family weekend. This time, since the apartment downstairs was undergoing renovations, we went out to the Bamboo Temple, near the outskirts of town. I really loved this temple. There was almost nobody there, since it's a little bit out of the way, and it was quiet and lovely. This temple is known for its five hundred clay statues of arhats (Buddhists who have reached enlightenment), carved by the master Li Guangxiu. These statues really blew me away. Each statue has an exaggerated, unique character and pose. It's an achievement that easily equals most achievements of Western sculpture, and I was pretty much in awe. To add to the experience, it happened to be the time for prayer for the resident monks, so I got to watch the monks chant in the temple, which was really neat and really peaceful. We had vegetarian food in the temple restaurant for dinner. Eating dinner in a Buddhist temple, with a Buddhist idol keeping close watch...now that's an experience.

Like I said, I had a great day today. Did a lot of reading, and even went to nearby Cuihu Park to read, since it was a really pleasant day. Reading good theoretical texts on China really makes me view the country with a more critical mind, which makes me really happy. Instead of just living day to day, I start observing. Especially in Cuihu, you feel the contrast between the stereotype of China and the real thing. Watching Dai, Yi and Tibetan women walk past in ethnic costume, you just stop for a second and think to yourself, what is this place like really. Well, I still don't know.

If I can get my act together (I have too much to do already, and I owe my host family daughter a mix CD), I'll start posting photos to go along with the copious text. I'll try to post pictures every week day or so, provided I have the time. Till next week.

Photos from 2/6/09: Dai Miao/Train to Shanghai/Shanghai

2009-03-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

A small section of photos from a travel day.

A gorgeous arch from the entrance of the Dai Miao. Note the decorations for Chinese New Year.

More floats set up for Chinese New Year.

Bonsai trees in the Dai Miao

On the walls of the Dai Miao, looking onto a gate.

Beautiful ornate stone carving on the top of a tablet.

My hotel room in Shanghai.

Kooky hotel bar, in an open air courtyard in the center of the hotel.

Photos from 2/5/09: Taishan

2009-03-26T06:58:00.000-07:00

Jeez, Taishan is hard to capture on film. I hope you get maybe just a small sense of what it's like.

My hotel room. See, fairly swank. Not pictured: lurid ads for prostitutes.

The very beginning of the trek. According to legend, this is where Confucius began his ascent. The Chinese inscription on the gate just says "The first gate".

A few of the six thousand steps, all sized, unfortunately for me, for a much smaller Chinese foot. Imagine schlepping all this stone to the top of the mountain.

The nearby woods.

The initial glimpses of the peak. Note the outcroppings of ancient greenstone.

Climbing up the stairs, seeing the peak.

The peak again, from the midpoint of the climb, called "The Midway Gate to Heaven".

Mist, peak, trees.

The insane view from the cafe at the midway gate where I had some tea and refueled. Tea in foreground, freakin' Taishan in the background.

I continue the climb. Seems like I was kinda peak fixated.

Pretty much my view for half the climb.

Waterfall over an inscription in the rock. Probably more dramatic come springtime.

Some insane calligraphy on the mountain side.

The trail up, with a ways to go.

Aaaaaaall the way up.

This is near the top, I think, an example of the breathtaking scenery

A marvelous rocky outcropping. A sign that looks ironic in this photograph.

From pretty much at the top.

The surrounding mountains

Believe it or not, the best picture I was able to take on Taishan. I guess serenity looks like someone took a dump in my cereal.

The Jade Emperor Temple, at the very peak of the mountain. The guy wearing the skullcap in the background is actually an ethnically Han Muslim, or Hui.

Temple complexes on the mountain.

More shots from the peak.

Photos from 2/4/09: Marco Polo Bridge/Ming City Walls/Night Train to Taian

2009-03-25T06:45:00.001-07:00

The last of the Beijing pics, here we go.

An example of the striking drama of the Socialist Realist reliefs as the memorial.

The centerpiece of the memorial.

The walled village of Wanping, right at the bridgehead of the Marco Polo Bridge. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident is sometimes known as the Wanping Incident in China.

A wider view of the whole memorial.

I think this plaque bodes well for Japan-China relations. I also didn't notice at the time that the bottom part is written in kanji. Nice touch.

More friezes! Woo-hoo!

One of the gorgeous lions that decorate the bridge.

The length of the bridge, with the decorative lions. The rough path in the middle is the original paving.

The bridge from the bridgehead.

More lions. You can see how each lion has a unique pose.

The Ming City Walls, or what's left of them, anyway.

The massive Beijing Train Station.

Folks waiting for the hard sleeper. Believe it or not, there are only five or six of these waiting rooms.

Photos from 2/3/09: The Great Wall at Badaling

2009-03-23T22:44:00.000-07:00

Considering how breathtaking these pictures are, I'm surprised I only took a few that day, but I guess I felt like a few went a long way.

The hills around the Great Wall, as we approach from the south, taken from the car.

Another view. One thing that they don't tell you about the Great Wall is how naturally beautiful the setting is. It isn't so much the wall that's magnificent as the sweeping mountains it climbs over.

The Great Wall from the main guard house at Badaling. Note the billboard touting the Beijing Olympics.

The surrounding hills.

The wall over the hills.

It goes on and on and on...the Chinese name for the Great Wall is more apt - "changcheng", or "long wall"

First of a series of pictures I tried to take of myself in KWUR gear on the Great Wall. I don't know why I'm not smiling in any of them. Picture taking is not my forte.

Another picture of Mr. Grumpy Gus.

The Great Wall really is spectacular.

The picture I finally posted on the KWUR blog. This is shortly before I beat the piss out of the photographer, from the looks of things.

Close up of the wall over a rocky outcropping. This photo was also taken from the wall, btw, at Badaling, a section sort of doubles back on itself.

The crowds moving up and down the wall. Badaling is the most tourist friendly section because it's closest to Beijing.

The wall, seen through a guard window

The wall from ground level. As you can see, the wall itself is not that high, it's the mountains its on that give it its defensive value.

Nice full shot of the wall.

Photos from 2/2/09, Chengde

2009-03-22T21:19:00.001-07:00

Looking over these photos, it's a shame that I was too freaked out to really enjoy Chengde, because it really is quite a lovely place.

Rush on to the early morning hard seat train to Chengde

The mess at the train station. That woman is none too pleased and neither am I.

The first altar at the Puning Temple.

The towering Puning Temple complex.

Lamas! These guys chill here all day (literally reading the newspaper), and wait until worshippers pay them money to perform a chant, pretty neat.

The view from Puning temple, note the towering mountains.

These chains of locks were all over the temple, I think they must represent prayers or vows or something, also, note the Stupa.

This is by the gate of the Mountain Summer Retreat, note the mountains that surround the whole city and are visible from the whole city.

A throne in the Mountain Retreat. A woman offered to allow me inside in exchange for money. I declined.

More of the palace.

A disturbing reminder that the Chinese do tend to hold grudges.

Mule deer on the grounds of the mountain retreat.

People playing on the frozen lake in the center of the retreat.

An island in the middle of the park, people on little sleds.

A pavilion along the lake side, note the neat pattern in the stone floor.

A pavilion on a rocky outcropping, with trees all around.

Bridge across the lake.

The gate to the park. According to my taxi driver, this was built to resemble the Great Wall.

On an old bridge across the Rehe River, surrounded by mountains.

Kunming, Week 5

2009-03-22T07:32:00.000-07:00

Afraid I don't have much to report this week, except for a really amazing Saturday. So, of course, you can expect an odd ten thousand words on whatever mundane nonsense I've been up to here in the PRC.

Before I recount my week, I ought to tell you about my Chinese family visit last Saturday, which I neglected to mention. In a certain way, these visits are wonderfully uneventful. I went to a Chinese household, they made us dinner, we watched TV and a movie, not much to say. But of course, with the cross-cultural and language elements, there's always something of interest. This time, the family visit took place at 4 PM, so I was actually refreshed and in a good mood and chattering away in bad Mandarin. I love to be able to crack jokes and schmooze in Mandarin, which I can do to a limited extent. We watched a panda climb a tree on TV, and I commented that I admired the panda's lifestyle: eating, sleeping, eating. Being able to say stuff like that, as inconsequential as it is, is what I really enjoy. We also watched a few minutes of a familiar looking Chinese show: Chounu Betty. It's fun to see familiar schlock in other cultures. The daughter of the family is our age and is clearly enamored of having American wards, she has an incredibly endearing manner about her, and apparently loves cartoons (although she might also be canny enough to pick out stuff we have a shot in hell at understanding), because she had us watch My Neighbor Totoro. It was my first time seeing the film (Totoro's name, in Chinese, btw, is rendered as dalongmao, big dragon cat), and it was sort of odd seeing it for the first time in Chinese, and somewhat disappointing to watch the grainy bootleg print she had, but nevertheless, typically charming, simple Miyazaki. Dinner was very pleasant. I had brought pictures of my family (prompted by a plan formed by my classmate Michelle, not born solely from my ego) and the host family said that my sister was very beautiful, I looked like both my parents, and that they thought both of my grandmothers were very lovely, and that my maternal grandmother looked especially glamorous (sorry, Grandma Suher, the picture of you had you in a sweatshirt, not your best). I had another fun moment walking back, when I heard "Kiss Kiss", and explained in Chinese to our host daughter that Chris Brown was a bad person because he hit his girlfriend. Michelle asked me how I knew, and to my surprise and joy, I quickly responded in Chinese, "Everyone knows! How do you not know?" It's that kind of natural thing that are easily the joys of using the language here.

In one of those jarring China moments, the host family's father asked me if I missed home. I said I did, sometimes. He said, when he was away from home for a long time, about ten years, in the country, in the seventies, he missed his mother's cooking. Piecing it together, I asked if he was a sent-down youth, and he said, yes. It's the kind of insane thing which is common in this country. When I thought about it, it made sense, if you did the math. I knew he was older than my parents, which meant that he was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, and so just about the right age to be sent down. That's the kind of thing that fills this country: ask a few questions, and everyone has this sort of story.

So, the language element this week, as it goes, yue lai yue hao, getting better and better. Drilling is rough, and depending on the day, I'm often just about ready to check out. I received a compliment, however, that my teacher feels that I grasp the language well, and that cheered me up. I do manage to communicate well, most of the time. We've all broken the language pledge here, to varying extents. I feel guilty about it sometimes, and some days I do try and make an honest effort, but some days, like Saturday, I just don't seem to be in the mood to use Chinese at all. When socializing on the weekend, it simply falls by the wayside, since we would be so limited using Chinese. In any case, when everyone's sort of agreed to let it go, it's hard to fight the current, even if you wanted to.

Two movies this week, a documentary on Tibet (Tibet: Cry Of The Snow Lion) and a special screening of a documentary on a small village on the Burmese border called Transformation. Actually, there's not much to say on the Tibet documentary; it's one of those propaganda flicks that reminded me of many Progressive Forum meetings back in high school, and that my contrariness has never reacted well to. In general, although I sympathize with the Tibetan cause, I have to think there's a better way to achieve its goals than by continually describing the Tibetans as a "spiritual people".

The other documentary was actually fairly intriguing, and the director was there, so we got to do a Q and A. This guy had made a lot of money in advertising, and then went to spend seven years in a minority village on the Burmese border, taking hundreds of hours of footage while the village adopted modern agricultural techniques (switching from slash-and-burn agriculture), built new houses, and installed electric lighting. The film is hypnotic. You spend most of the time watching the mundane routines of traditional life, the farming, the sacrificing, the labor and the rituals. The changes come not as stereotypical jarring conflicts of tradition versus modernity, but as ideologically devoid simple improvements that subtly change life without the villagers or the viewers realizing. I was a fan of the documentary, although I also should mention that I did suspect that certain scenes were staged, though I can't say for sure, and really hope that wasn't the case. The documentary certainly made choices that emphasized a "noble savage" outlook, but succeeded despite the ideological goals of the director.

I only met with my language partner once this week. She had a recessed tooth, and so had to get it taken care of, so she was out of commission for most of the week. From my language partner, and some of my classmates who have been more unfortunate with food than I have, I gather that medical care here resembles the "Theodoric of York" SNL sketch. The Chinese doctor's solution to every problem is an injection, and there's no guarantee that the needle will be clean. In Kunming, with the highest AIDS rate in China, that makes medical care a dire last resort. My language partner explained that she had let the cavity go as long as possible because she feared an AIDS infection from dirty dental equipment. Yeesh. In any case, despite all that, she was in as good a mood as ever. Our topic this week was cheating, and she gleefully explained to me the myriad strategies Chinese students use to cheat in this test-obsessed educational system. She also brought a map of the US, and I pointed out places of interest in at least some sort of proximity to the University of Oklahoma, where she hopes to study abroad. One thing that I've noticed and that sort of embarrasses me is that I am less interested in finding out about China through her than I am in representing America to her, and I get a little bit disappointed when she isn't as interested in America as I am. Her first question, when I say that Obama's making America better (of course he is), is whether he'll make it easier for Chinese students to come to America; the Chinese, as always, are most concerned with things that affect the Chinese (remind you of any other society?). Of course, I shouldn't expect her to be inordinately interested in America, but at the same time, I think I do have a general interest in China, and wonder why she's not more curious about America.

Speaking of, courtesy of a set of bootleg DVDs, I've started to get into Battlestar Galactica this week. Hoo boy, what a show. I'm completely hooked. For a politics buff, this show has everything, legitimacy, freedom vs. security, ethics of war, you name it, with great writing. Ron Moore, whose TNG episodes were always the best, has really made a great show. It has me looking forward to studying for Chinese, if you can believe that.

Like I said, this Saturday was really quite neat. We went to a geological formation called the Stone Forest, and then a Sani minority village. The Stone Forest is overpriced (the highest ticket price I've seen for any attraction in China) and just kind of weird, but you can't knock the sight: a breathtaking example of karst topography, resulting in columns of limestone that resemble, well, a stone forest. The Chinese tourists come in droves, and whenever that happens, it's the usual madness of flocks of Chinese behaving badly. Here, there's an extra weird little touch, since the guides are dressed in minority clothing (although some of them aren't even minorities) and there are places where you can pose in minority clothing in front of the rocks. Once you get away from the central loop, however, it's alright. I do have to admit however, I miss my silent solitary revelries, even though I'm glad not to be out on my own.

The minority village was especially rewarding. This village, though I imagine it was nicer than others, was still the real deal: ramshackle houses, rudimentary plumbing, pigs in a shed in the backyard. I saw where they embroider all the tourist crap they sell near the Stone Forest. We were served an amazing meal by the villagers in the village head's house, and not only that, but the villagers insisted on singing special Sani drinking songs while dressed in native costume (we unfortunately could not drink the baijiu, which was in a water cooler like container with a snake inside, a common practice that's supposed to make the liquor more potent). At our professor's insistence, we also sang songs. I was prompted to do a solo, the first song, a very off key rendition of Lefty Frizzell's "Gone, Gone, Gone". I am told a recording exists; so long as I am alive, it will never see the light of day. We also performed "Build Me Up, Buttercup", "Amazing Grace", and "My Heart Will Go On". Oh, American culture, so rich.

After lunch, we went outside to see the village common facilities, mostly built during the Cultural Revolution. There are basketball courts, and grim stone ping-pong tables with rusted copper nets. Also tied up out back: a beautiful ox, apparently bred to represent the village in the annual ox fighting tournaments held at the Sani Torch Festivals. Graffiti on the walls tells the village that "family planning is every citizen's right and duty". We went inside and asked questions of the village head and his family (including a girl our age who looked about fourteen and speaks fairly good English). Hard to say how accurate a view we got of minority village life, since these people have obviously been coopted by the system, but according to them, it's pretty good. The government is moving the whole village in order to restore the area around the Stone Forest back to nature, but offering pretty nice compensation terms. Han Chinese moving into the village? No problem, we get along fine. Han Chinese bastardizing Sani culture, posing as Sani? It's cool, at least they're representing Sani culture. Everything is rosy according to these folks. The reality is probably something in the middle. I am often convinced that the government is generally smart enough to not cause unnecessary grievance to people, but the Sani also do, according to many things I've read, face prejudice. I find the minority situation in China interesting. As I mentioned to the Sani girl who was showing us around, the situation of the Sani represents the situation of the Jews in America in some ways: for example, the grandparents speak Yi, the parents speak a little, the grandkids speak none. It's a similar situation of acculturation and a reaction of difference.

Well, that was my week. Over here, it's pretty late, and I've got a big week ahead. Take care, I'll post pictures when I have time, I'll write next week.

Photos from 2/1/09: Summer Palace

2009-03-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

Not many photos in this chunk, because, as you may recall, my camera battery gave out about an hour or two into the Summer Palace. Unfortunate, because this was a pretty good picture day, as I recall. Oh well.

The view of the main Summer Palace temple from the gate, across Kunming Lake. Looking over these pictures, I am reminded how insane the size of the Summer Palace is, considering it was basically built as a private estate.

Gorgeous marble bridge across the lake to an island in the center

The lovely, colorful interior of a pavilion.

The bridge as seen from the anchorage, with the decorative lions. Note the people walking on the ice in the background.

Another view of the temple, this time from the island.
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A lovely, quiet little pavilion and outcropping along the lake shore.

Getting closer to the temple...

Gorgeous stone screen, love the ornate carving

A gate, surrounded by cypress.

One of the many lovely, quiet secluded paths that wind their way through the Summer Palace.

Amazing set of glazed pottery Buddhas on the walls of the temple.

View of the lake from the temple. Also, I would consider this a masterpiece of Dylan Suher photography. Note that I am not in the photograph, and also note that it is also an awkward photo of another family, who, like normal people, pose for photographs with their loved ones. Keep these themes in mind as I post more pictures.