China 2004

Saving my stalkers some time…

Today I was supposed to find a recent picture of myself, and since I’ve taken so many pictures recently I went through and put together a collection of self-portraits and mirror shots. Only one of these photos was not taken by me:

Tiananmen Square, Beijing Lama Temple, Dali Archway, Hong Kong Ferry, Lijiang SUV window, Lugu Lake, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Tianjin clock mobile, Tianjin sky tower, Wudangshan peak hotel, Beijing-Wuhan train WC, Hard sleeper, Lijiang Mu palace.

Also, food pictures are on my Xanga.

permalink | Micah | 2004.08.25-21:47.00

More Photos Uploaded

More photos have been uploaded from Hong Kong, so you can put some pictures to the words. Here are some highlights:

Beijing

Micah, John and Dwight at the Bookworm in Sanlitun.

When I retire, I’m going to buy a Hong Qi.

Ladies all over Beijing wear these socks.

I don’t know what “Please stay off the grass” has to do with ping-pong, but I like it.

“Bobo’s New Equipment”?

The Haxor Economist appears in the paper.

Checking out the b-boys, the b-boys, and also checking out the b-boys.

The children of Japanese tourists were practicing calligraphy in the courtyard of our hotel.

The National Party Regulations game show. Exciting!

Peking duck and /basi pingguo/ with Katie and her father.

Hot lemon and ginger cola at the Be There or Be Square cafe.

The Beijing western train station is impressive. The southern train station is the pits. Our bunkmates on the train were English teachers from Enshi, Hubei coming home from a vacation in Beijing. I got a good photo of Ted on the train. He can put that one on the jacket of his book.

Wuhan

In Wuhan, we ran into the most hilarious display of Chinglish I’ve ever seen. This menu advertised soft drinks, a line of salad, sandwiches (“I’ll have the three civil administrations in the corporation, on rye.”), and various desserts. It was a hoot.

We ran into a guy selling tofu out of a wodden bucket, but we went with the meat buns and sour plum punch (at least, until McDonalds opened). Wuhan truly was an oven, and a dreary oven at that. The one redeeming feature seemed to be the East Lake, which was truly huge and beautiful.

Wudangshan

Wudangshan is supposed to be the place that inspired certain settings for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. We went to a small temple which I enjoyed more for the painted-over Cultural Revolution slogans than for anything else. I enjoyed the post-temple popsicle, too.

The view on the first day was pretty good, but the weather was brutal. On the second day, the clouds moved in, the humidity moved up, and the temperature remained the same. Still, I refused the porters and their chairs, and did the three-hour climb all on my own. No big feat, really, as the vendors do this pretty much every day.

The view from the top was somewhat obscured by clouds, but still pretty amazing. I go tsome pretty neat pics, especially of the flowers in the garden. The temple at the top had a pretty good communitygrown up around it, amazing for how much of a hike it was. At the top I met Lu Tian, a teaching asitant at a university in Wuhan, and we ended up hiking down together and snacking on /liangfen/. In this picture, you can see one of the guys carrying loads up (or in this case, down) the mountain. Most of them started from this pile of sand in the parking lot, and hiked for hours up the mountain. Truly gruelling work.

Yangtze Cruise

We reached Yichang, the starting point of our Yangtze cruise, in the middle of a pouring rainstorm. I took one picture at our hotel before the lens of my camera fogged up.

I got some good pictures the next day when we boarded the boat. Most of the cargo (food) was still loaded on the old-fashioned way: porters. They had a system of bamboo sticks as counters of the number of loads each person carried. As with veggies all across China, our cabbage was stored outside, for maximum freshness! At one point, a porter offered me a chance to shoulder his load. He had two boxes of apples at each end of his shoulder bar, and I couldn’t even budge it. A one-apiece load, however, was managable. The porters got a laugh out of that.

Our boat went through some locks. Random passengers asked to take their picture with Ted (very photogenic!). I didn’t get any pictures of the actual Three Gorges Dam locks because I elected to take the dam tour, where I saw the only sprinklers I’ve ever seen in China(being used to wet down a road, no less). I like this picture of the dam construction site — but it’s like the Great Wall, nearly impossible to capture the scale of it in a single picture. Permutations of Uncle Ted and I made several tours over the four days we were on the boat. The girl with the flag was our tour guide, as was the guy standing on her right (yes, picking his nose! how embarasing). On one of the tours, we got pulled upstream like the ships in days of old. It was pretty tacky, but the tourists in the back of the boat got excited and would break into song spontaneously.

Random picture of boat man eating ramen straight from the bag.

This one’s for people who like weapons: horse spikes.

Typical breakfast on the boat. People relaxed on the boat; I got the idea that for a lot of Chinese, the cruise wasn’t so much for hte scenery or for the sights so much as for spending time with family and friends. I did as the Romans, spending an inordinate amount of time watching people play mah-jong and introducing Skip-bo to a group of girls that hung out in the forward lounge.

As much as I like local dialects… folks, please, Speak Standard Chinese.

Speaking of language, I like it when Chinese make familiar mistakes with their own language. (bingdong gezhong yinliao scratched out, rewritten as gezhong binddong yinliao)

The city of Fengdu is scheduled to be largely submerged by the rising Yangtze. Thus, it was moved to the opposite shore, above the infamous 175 meter line. In this picture, the old city of Fengdu is on the lower bank and the new city on the upper bank. The old city is largely in ruins, but still has a sizable population. Where there are tourists, there will be vendors (half the stores in town are selling film).

Hide your eyes, it’s a propaganda window!

Of course, I think of it too late: I should have looked for illegal registration paper vendor cellphone numbers in old Fendu. That would have been el colmo. (what’s a good English expression for el colmo?)

Dali

Our breakfast in Kunming before taking the bus to Dali was youtiao (churros) snipped into short lengths with scissors, and dipped into dou jiang (hot soy milk).

Dali has been developed like Disneyland, but it makes for some nice photo ops; and the old neighborhoods are not far off.

permalink | Micah | 2004.08.22-18:09.00

My Notebook

I made observations walking around Kowloon today, and wrote a few of them down in the notebook I keep in my back pocket. Here they are:

• I browsed through 1980s Hong Kong comedy VCDs in HMV today, and realized that many Hong Kong residents seem to be stuck in this era, at least in terms of fashion sense and hair styles. Mostly women.

• Hong Kong Singapore? Watching the Olympics Highlights today I caught one fo the many public service commercials that the HK government runs. This commercial was alerting citizens to the new law that beginning on August 1^st, public transit passengers on buses fitted with seat belts are required to wear the seat belts or be subject to fines of HKD 5,000 (about 640 US) and 3 months of prison time. Yikes.

permalink | Micah/Hong Kong | 2004.08.17-23:43.00

Wudangshan Day 2

On the second day, Ted decided to stay in town while I tackled Jin Ding on my own. Armed with an umbrella, a bottle of water and an iron will, I hopped into a mini-bus and was whisked away to the front gate of Wudangshan, bought the men piao (gate ticket), transferred into another bus, and was driven up to trailhead directly by a younger driver who was a little more careful about staying within the lines and making the journey a little easier on the stomachs of his passengers.

The mini-bus system is interesting. The drive from town to anywhere in the park costs 10 RMB. You start by hopping into a mini-bus in town, which fits about 6-10 people and takes you up to the front gate. At this point, you still haven’t paid anything. You then buy a ticket to get into the park (park residents pay nothing, an ID gets them in for free), and transfer onto another bus which is allowed into the park. This bus gets a receipt from a college-age girl in the parking lot that lists how many people it is carrying. About halfway to the first attraction, or about 15 minutes into the drive, the mini-bus comes across a checkpoint, at which the driver produces the receipt and each passenger is asked to pay (or not, for residents). The bus then proceeds further into the park. The process is similar in reverse on the way back into town. I figure that at some point there is a redistribution of money back to the drivers. This whole system struck me as being a particularly interesting example of economic coordination.

I reached the beginning of the trail at about 11 AM (late sleeper by default). A lot of people take the road further up to the lan che, the cable cars, which will take you up to the peak for a fee, and then they walk down the trail. That’s the wimpy way, and since I was looking to, as my friend Lu Tian said, tiaozhan ziji, to challenge myself, I started the three hour hike from the bottom, planning to take the cable cars down from the top to allow time for another temple or two. Like I said, the park has permanent residents: many of them are farmers, but many tend to the souvenir stands that dot the trail to the top. At the bottom, these are solid structures that double as houses and sell kitchy medals, back-scratchers, and towels. Further from the bottom, these shops disappear and are replaced by blankets spread out next to the trail offering tepid bottles of water (lifesavers, I must have drank five or six), orange-ade and soda, and snacks like cucumbers, hard candy and sunflower seeds. Near the peak are ladies and girls selling medicinal plants (fake, Tian claimed). In fact, nearly all of these items were sold by girls, women and elderly men. Where were the men? They could make more money serving as porters; some heckled tourists, trying to convince them to let themselves by carted up and down the hill for 100 RMB (3 hours of steep stairs, I would say it’s a fair price); others shouldered bamboo or wooden bars with sacks of sand hanging from each end and carried these up the hill to spots where concrete was needed for trail repair.

To Be Continued…

permalink | Micah/Hubei/Wudangshan | 2004.08.17-23:34.00

Lemme see…

Where was I? Ahh, Wudanshang. After the provincial museum and East Lake in Wuhan, the driver took us to Wuchang’s train station. We had a quick dinner of fried ou (lotus root) and Sprite, which I later regretted. Greast floating on warm soda is good going down, but not-so-good in the stomach. On the hard-sleeper to Wudangshan station, our tickets were for beds in separate compartments filled with those Chinese businessmen so lacking in distinguishing features that each slack-and-polo-shirt wearing, cellphone-case-on-the-belt toting man blends into the next. At about six in the morning, we were abruptly awakened and nearly thrown off the station as it rolled through the grandiose Wudansgshan station in a not so glorious village-turned-potential-boomtown. Fighting off the hawkers at the station’s edge, we headed downhill and booked a room in a nice place which just happened to be across the street from a mini-bus station. We had a little trouble with the shower: the hot water did not seem to be working. I called a fuwuyuan up to the room, and she took up a position on the squat toilet platform and turned on the shower (the water drains into a drain hole on the floor, hence the need for a little elevation). After a minute or so, she turned off the “hot” water and turned on the cold: behold, hot water. Since then, I’ve run across this same situation at two other hotels on our route. Is this some left-over from the Cultural Revolution, a la red-lights-mean-go?

Dinner that night was uneventful. Our grueling pace and sleeping on the train had done a job on Ted’s digestive system, so I ended up shouldering most of the job of putting down the food, which is usually an adventure when you don’t know exactly what you’re ordering.

The next morning, we headed up to Wudanshan itself, which is a large natural area covering several mountains and villages, hotels and taiji/wushu school, temples, lakes and mountain hideouts. The entry ticket cost 70 RMB (about 9 USD), enough to make me regret not realizing that we could have stayed at a hotel inside the park for a similar price and avoided paying the entrance fee on the second day. The drive up was on a very windy road, and Ted’s still testy stomach decided to send up an exploratory force; the driver seemed unconcerned about keeping his speed down, even when another one of the passengers also needed a plastic bag. Anyhow, Ted took a short nap, and then we spent a while exploring one of the first attraction in the park, an old Daoist temple. Its most memorable features were the large warrior god statues, the priests setting off fireworks outside the front gate, the tourist group of affluent Fujianese, the stone tablets commemorating donations (in Taiwanese and American dollars) from Taiwanese and Hong Kong devotees, and the large revolutionary slogans from the Cultural Revolution that had been painted over in red but were still visible on the outside of the largest temple structure (pictures forthcoming, these were pretty neat).

We walked across the parking lot to the road to find a ride up to the next trailhead, and Ted stopped at the little stand to buy a map and a bag of crackers. The family that runs the stand (four generations) ended up inviting me to lunch with them (fish, greens, pork, rice… delicious). The ladies run the store,and the husband drives a truck to town and back. It looked like they were dismantling an old unused part of the temple and shipping the (valuable?) bricks down into town to use in new buildings.

We caught a ride in a mini-van up to the next top parking lot, where the trail to the Golden Peak, Jin Ding, started. I impressed myself by arguing with the driver when he decided to charge us 5 RMB a person instead of 2 RMB. We tried to make our way as far down the trail as possible, but the oppresive heat, the grade of the incline, and reports that the peak was only three hours away convinced us to end our hike after only 30 minutes of walking. I ventured up a little further along the trail, but was caught by a light rainstorm, found shelter in a little cave, and then made my way back when the rain let up a little. Never mind the rain, though; by the time we got back to the trailhead, we noticed that the most popular souvenir among Chinese tourists (and readily available from most souvenir stands) was a towel to wipe away the sweat from one’s brow. We did as the Romans.

That evening back in town, I ducked into an internet bar while Ted went to bed early. Dinner was negligible, if I remember correctly.

permalink | Micah/Hubei/Wudangshan | 2004.08.17-14:20.00

Today was e-mail, tomorrow is blog.

Walking through HK today (I should have taken the bus, it’s hot and humid), I saw one black-on-white T-shirt reading fan zhan, Anti-war, and another yellow-on-black reading (in English) Is that what you fought the war for? Indeed.

permalink | Micah/Hong Kong | 2004.08.16-21:18.00