Thoughts on China

Hi! My name is Scott Keller and I visited China from October 3, 2007 to November 15, 2007. This blog is about the trip, but now that it’s over, here are some tips on how best to view the blog:

1. If you don’t like the color scheme, the yellow, green and blue buttons above the calendar on the right allow you to change it (as well as giving you a different banner picture up top).

2. I have included quite a few pictures from my trip in the blog. If you want to see more pictures of a particular place, most posts contain a link to more pictures I took that day. These will open a new window and go to that photo album within my Google Picasa space. For instance, here is a link to all my photos of China (and a few more). Each of the albums has both the date and the place in China.

From 20071014Beiji…

3. The photo to the left (under the heading “China Trip Photos”) is also a link to my whole Google Picasa site, which contains pictures from the entire trip organized by day (and, therefore, place).

4. The blog is ordered from the end of the trip to the beginning (as blogs generally are). Here are links to the other pages, as well as what locations are covered on them:

The trip starts in Beijing, with the bottom post being the oldest one: http://thoughtbyscott.com/blog/page/4/

To travel forward in time, after you are done with that page, just change the page number in the link (like http://thoughtbyscott.com/blog/page/3/) to get to the next newer page.

5. Some of the posts are rather long. I hope you enjoy them, but if you’d rather just look at the pictures, that’s great too. My friend, Allwyn, who really likes food, suggested that I take a lot of pictures of the food I ate there, so I’m blaming him for having so many food shots!

I hope you enjoy the blog! I’m going to be creating other parts to my overall web site, so the http://www.thoughtbyscott, which now redirects to the /blog directory, will change in the next few months to have a link to the blog, as well as to other “thoughts”.

再见 (zài jiàn, or “Bye!”)

Well, I didn’t get sick all the time I was in China…I waited until I got home for that! As it turned out, I could use the meal vouchers ($20 total) from Northwest Airlines at the airport, so I had a big breakfast (I use the breakfast term loosely, as I had more Bar-B-Q from that Interstate place). I also had some Starbucks coffee and a cheese danish. By the time the flight was coming up, I was feeling very queasy, but I thought it was just because I had eaten so much.

The ride to Tallahassee was only one hour in the air, but I was getting bluer in the face minute by minute. I had had over 2000 hours as a C-130 navigator, as well as many other flights in my time and I had never puked on a plane, so I was determined not to start now! As you’ll see later, I’m lucky my determination worked!

My wife, Linda, picked me up at the airport. It was good to see her, although by this time I was really feeling bad. I wanted to drive, though, since I hadn’t driven in six weeks. As we got about a half mile from the airport, I had to pull over…I threw up all of what I had eaten that morning, which would have filled up about two of those plane airsickness bags, so that’s why I was really glad I made it through the flight…

It turned out I was really sick with some kind of bug and I have been in bed for the past two days, only getting out to watch the Seminoles play Maryland yesterday. I am starting to feel better now (Sunday at about 2:30 AM). I’m certainly glad I didn’t get sick in China. Linda suggested that maybe I should have gotten shots over there to come to America!

Well, I didn’t think quick enough to get pictures of the sick episode, which would have been a fitting end to this blog, but some things are better left to the imagination…

Once again, I want to thank everyone who traveled along with me and commented on the posts. It really gave me something to look forward to as I went around China. I have to say, I wish I could stay there a year, as I had an absolutely wonderful time and the people were incredibly friendly.

Well, back to work tomorrow…I will have to figure out what I’m going to do with my web site. I will keep the China trip blog as www.thoughtbyscott.com/blog , but will probably change the redirect from the main page, so that there will be a page that will link to the blog, as well as other things I will be putting up. It probably won’t be for a little while, yet, but I just wanted you to know, in case you cared.

Also, I will complete the post on my overall impressions of China when I feel better.

If you happen to have run across this blog in researching a trip to China and have any questions, don’t hesitate to add a comment to a post. I have an RSS feed that alerts me to new comments and I will respond within a day.

Until next time…再见 (Zàijiàn, or Good bye)!

OK, so Creedence Clearwater Revival was singing about Lodi, California. I had a bad day yesterday, as did everyone trying to get to Tallahassee on Northwest. I’m stuck in Memphis and they weren’t going to get me home until tomorrow!!! That’s two broken plane cancellations out of four legs on the journey…

Originally, I got told that all planes to Tallahassee today (Friday) were overbooked and they were only going to give me hotel and 2 breakfast and 2 dinner vouchers, without any other compensation for making me two days late!!!

Miracles never cease and I was able to get a flight this morning, to get to Tallahassee around noon today. I say miracle, because there were roughly 40 people trying any way they could to get to Tallahassee as soon as possible.

Since I was stuck in Memphis, I figured the least I could do was check out the famous blues club strip, Beale Street. But, I wasn’t even able to get to there, since even the hotel bus didn’t show up and a few of us had to go get Northwest to give us a voucher for a taxi, instead, only getting to the hotel in Memphis an hour and a half after we were supposed to be in Tallahassee (it was 11:30PM)! The resaurant at the hotel was already closed and wouldn’t reopen until 6:30 on Friday. Well, because I have to catch the 6AM bus, I won’t be able to use the breakfast voucher, either. So, first, I’m glad I ate that big plate of ribs yesterday afternoon, because NW airlines caused me not only to not be able to get home yesterday evening, but so far their vouchers for food are worthless and I’ll have to go argue my case to get another airport meal voucher. What a pain in the neck (and some people have a lower opinion of it!!!).

I’ll update this after I get home. With Northwest Airlines and their treatment of the passengers yesterday, I felt like I was returning home to a third world country! Welcome back, we’ll get you home in a couple of days, maybe…

Well, I’m in the Memphis Airport, ready to fly to Tallahassee. I figured I’d have to do one last food picture, when I saw that Jim Neely’s Interstate Bar-B-Q had an outlet at the airport (and because Northwest Airlines screwed up several times (no surprise there) I got a voucher for $10 at an airport vendor. I paid an extra $10 and got a full slab of ribs…now dat’s good, ya…

OK, well, I started writing a long post earlier, so I’ll copy and paste what I had here. I may go back and refine it later. I don’t have much time at the airport here, so here it is:
___________________________

OVERALL IMPRESSIONS

Well, I’m writing this as we are climbing to cruise altitude out of Narita Airport in Tokyo. This will be an 11½ hour flight, so I’m glad the computer has a long battery life!

I was going to write about some other aspects of Huangshan, such as the sunrise, etc., but I think the pictures speak better than I could. Since I went to Shanghai after Huangshan, and I’ve already written about there, I thought I’d start a post on my overall impressions of China.

I’ll concentrate on what I was expecting and what I found. I often have been painting a rosy picture because all you seem to hear about China in the American press is the negative stories, be it lead in toys, pollution, tainted dog food, or how China is taking American jobs. Unless you actively go out and learn about China (or read blogs, such as this one), you never hear about the very nice people who are always ready with a nod of the head and a smile. You never hear about the amazing history (except in very hazy generalities) or the horrible things that have been done to the Chinese people over the last 150 years or so, both by foreigners and by their own people. You don’t hear about the amazing landscapes, or the crazy, yet sane traffic in the huge cities that make up “the Golden Rooster”.

I’ll try not to wax poetic here, but just describe some of the things I was expecting and what I found…

1. I thought China would seem a lot more crowded than it did to me. Shanghai, for instance, has over 20 million people! I was expecting something more like the scenes from “Soylent Green”, where Charleton Heston is climbing over people sleeping on the stairs to get to his apartment. Even during the National Day Golden Week (the first week of October) in Beijing, Tiananmen Square was not completely packed and you could be all alone at the Summer Palace simply by walking around the lake on the path less taken. I worked at Disney World for about 3 months (remember that, Jay?) in 1979, and that park seemed much more “crowded” with 100,000 people in them than do the cities in China. I’m not saying that there are not as many people there, just that you don’t see them all at once!

2. There is an interesting dichotomy in China between working together and individuals competing against others. The competition is obvious in many situations, like:

a) The competition to get scores on a test that will get children into college lead to many children never really getting a “childhood” as they study into the night, every night, because if they don’t the neighbor’s child will. This type of competition continues in adult life, causing many people to work long hours and not take vacation for fear that if they don’t, someone else will and they will lose their job. It’s this relentless pressure and competition that causes many Chinese to want to move overseas, not necessarily the government.

b) Lines (queues) don’t form in China, everyone rushes tries to get to the front at once. This happens in traffic, trying to get on a train, etc. Many Westerners consider it rude, but it works out OK, since everyone is doing it.

i. In traffic, for instance, if the first person at a light that turns green doesn’t go, others will simply go around them, even if it means going outside their lane. People going the other direction anticipate this, because they would do the same thing, so they move to the other side of their lane to let it happen. In the US, a line of cars behind the first one would sit there and not move, while honking and/or fuming inside about the driver that didn’t have a clue. Also, in the US, where everyone is supposed to and does follow the traffic rules almost always, if someone doesn’t, there is likely to be an accident because people don’t drive that defensively most of the time. In China, however, people who are driving, riding bicycles and even walking are constantly aware of their surroundings and the actual number of vehicles through a light (in other words, traffic flow efficiency) seems to be much better here than in the US.

ii. In lines, it goes against the element of fairness that we Westerners hold dear (that is, first come, first served). But then again, if there is a queue in the US and someone buts in, there is a huge to do about it. In China, you just hone your skills in getting ahead in line, but only use it when you really need it. In other words, sometimes, this behavior actually allows those who urgently need something to push harder than others to get to the front of the line, allowing the order to change by who needs the thing more. This would not happen in the US, where the sense of fair play dictate that everybody waits their turn, no matter what. Personally, I like the Western queuing better, but I recognize the two systems and can live with either. As long as the ground rules are known, all you have to do is to behave according to them.

The above examples show the extreme self-centeredness of the Chinese. Paradoxically, working together is also prevalent in China. This can be seen in anything from doing morning exercises together in the park, to the lineup inspection and team building moment in front of each restaurant before they open for the day.

The combination of individuality and teamwork can be seen at mealtime, where everyone sits together in a circle and eats from the dishes that are placed in the middle. Everyone is eating individually, yet everyone takes care of each other at the same time. It’s actually pretty cool.

3. Every Chinese person knows at least one English word…”Hello!”. In addition, many Chinese people want to get their picture taken with you. I’ve read several blogs from people that are annoyed by this and the bloggers can really cop an attitude about it. From my perspective, it shows that they are trying to communicate with you in your language, even if they only know one word. I’m not talking about the watch hawkers and other types that hang out at tourist areas waiting to leech off of foreign tourists and use “Hello” as an attention getter (followed by “buy watch” or “buy …”, but rather the average Chinese person who notices you as you are walking down the street and bursts into a spontaneous “Hello!”. I always just smiles and replied “Ni Hao”, showing, which always got more smiles, since we were saying “Hello” to each other in each other’s language. Many times, after I said “Ni Hao”, they would talk to each other in a way that indicated they thought that’s the only Chinese words I know. When this happened, I’d throw in another sentence or two. This generally started a good conversation with an appreciation on their part that I was trying to learn their language. It’s amazing how many Chinese apologized to me for their poor English. I just responded that we were in China, they shouldn’t have to speak good English there! There were very few people who said “Hello!” that were not genuinely warm and friendly after a little further discussion.

4. There were a lot of places where smoking was not allowed and a lot less smoking than I expected. Of course there was quite a bit of smoking, but my expectations were that there would be a lot more than there was. China seems to be where the US was in about the 1970’s, but with a lot of no smoking areas, as well.

5.  Spitting

6. Taxi Drivers

7. Olympics

The reason this is called “Part 1″ instead of “Day 1″ is that many impressions of Huangshan are built collectively over your stay here. Rather than give a narrative description of what I did in a timeline, I think that connecting ideas from the entire stay will work better. I hope you agree.

It’s really strange, Huangshan was so awesome, that even after the scams and bad information, I highly recommend it to anyone. As I mentioned, I had met a Scottish couple and we three made the trek together. The couple from Germany, that had made the reservations in Tunxi, went up on the cable car, while we walked up the Eastern route. Like Taishan, the first thing that strikes you about Chinese mountains that are famous is that the entire mountain has been made into a giant staircase! It is incredible the amount of work this must have taken. Like the Great Wall, it takes enough work just to climb the stairs, you simply can’t imagine how it could have been built. But since, unlike Egypt with the pyramids, China has 5000 years of continuous history, there are things being done even today that let us understand a little of how these amazing creations came to be…

Workers are still carrying up supplies to build hotels on the mountain the old fashioned way. It amazes me that they don’t use animals, like pack mules, but carry these incredible loads themselves.

OK, well, that explains how some of these loads got up the mountain, but there are steps that are built against sheer cliffs, like in this picture of my Scottish friends (note that this only gives you a small idea, in many places these are steps, not bridges, that wrap around the entire mountain without anyplace that would be an easy place to start):

Again, because they are doing this today, one place gave us a clue as to how this was done. A complete wooden scaffolding (i.e., staircase) is built, then the stone staircase is built with materials transported up this wooden bridge. I can only imagine how many people may have died in building the staircases…

Again, this picture doesn’t give you the feeling of how seemingly impossible this work must have been. Now that you’ve seen a small portion of one of the stairs and the only wooden staircase we saw that gives a clue how they were made, look at this picture and see if you can see the staircase wrapped around the mountain about three quarters of the way up:

It is really unimaginable how these workers without modern machinery have built these very sturdy structures on the sides of sheer cliffs!

I’m going to stop with that thought and continue with another thought in my next post.

It’s a little awkward writing this post, after having written a little about it in a comment and then in another post, but I’ll write this as if I hadn’t written about it before. Sorry for the redundancy, if you’re reading everything…

So, upon waking on Saturday the 10th, I checked with the hotel reception desk and, after quite a bit of conversation (some of which I actually understood), I realized that it would be a huge pain to get to Anji (and probably a bigger pain to get from Anji). I really wanted to spend two days at Huangshan and be back in Shanghai with time to pick up my bag that I left at a hotel there and pack everything well for the trip home. So, I decided that I’d just go straight to Huangshan from Yixing.

It wasn’t that bad a bus ride. I forget exactly how long it was, but with a blow up neck pillow and an iPod, I was ready for anything! Well, almost anything…

All the tour guides are messed up when it comes to Huangshan. In fact, almost all the information I got about Huangshan was really way off, including the map of the mountain (with English) that they sell for 5Y. Now that this is an actual post, I’ll explain what I mean…

Upon getting to Tangkou at about 5PM, we were immediately met by people trying to get us to go to their hotels. One of them, I found out later, was Mr. Hu, who is a very decent and honest gentleman. I only wish I had followed him instead of seeing the large International Youth Hostel sign and deciding I’d stay there. The reason? As I found out later, the guy who owns this place put the signs up himself, but he is NOT a hostel. In other words, he’s pretending to be a hostel to lure people in so he can scam them. The amounts we are talking about are not huge, but the principle is just so wrong, that it makes you keep thinking about it. I mean, this guy made business cards with the IYH logo on it and has other (real) hostels business cards and advertising in the lobby, etc.

So, the room there was only 80Y a night, which is very cheap. You had to ask them to turn the hot water on 30 minutes before you wanted to take a shower, however, which wasn’t pleasant. After checking in, I went down the street to look for a good restaurant. I found a couple of people I had seen before and went in to what turned out to be Mr. Hu’s place. (BTW, I’ve nicknamed him “the Doctor”, as in “Dr. Hu”). He is always busy helping somebody and getting them the best price he can. His wife is the cook and I had pork with bamboo shoots, hot and sour mushroom soup, and a green vegetable. All of them were delicious. She is one of the best cooks I’ve encountered, it was that good!

The Doc said he could arrange whatever I needed as far as transportation, etc. and I thanked him, but didn’t make reservations at that time. When I went back to the “hostel”, there was a guy there who said he was the owner (and the only one that spoke any English at all) and wanted to know if I needed him to make reservations for staying overnight on the mountain (the Doctor said he could get me a bed for 80Y) and for a bus to Shanghai. Since I thought I was staying at an IYH facility, which is very reputable, I said, “Sure.”

He said he could get me a room at a hotel on Huangshan for 160Y. I told him Mr. Hu had said 80Y. He told me that Mr. Hu would put me up in a corridor, but he would get me a room. So, still thinking this was a legitimate hostel, I said “OK”. He then booked me a bus to Shanghai for around 4:00PM the following day.

I’ll make this short and then go back and talk about the time at Huangshan. The next morning, he switched out the “receipt” he had written for the room, saying that it was now at another hotel. I said, “OK.” When we got to that hotel, the receptionist said she would get a porter to show us where the bed was. I said that the man at the hostel had said it would be a room in this hotel and she said that no, it wasn’t. So, I got her to call the guy at the hostel. To make this short, it ended up being a bed in a fairly small room that had 12 bunk bed births in it. Hardly a room with a private bath that he had promised!

The other part of the scam, now that I knew what a rip off artist this guy was (he promised to give me 20Y out of the 160Y back, after I told him that two of the people in the room were paying 70Y (and, of course, they got their beds through Mr. Hu). So much for the corridor vs room…I said this was unacceptable, but would talk with the (now not good
English speaker) when I got down from the mountain the next day.

The second part of his scam was the bus to Shanghai. I talked to Mr. Hu and he asked how much the tickets were. When I said 165Y, he said he could have gotten them for me for 120Y. Like I said, the amounts aren’t huge (a total of about $15), but the priciple is the thing.

When I got back from Huangshan, I told him that I’d accept the 20Y back if he’d let me take a hot shower before the bus ride to Shanghai. I hadn’t showered since Yixing because his policy of only turning on the hot water 30 minutes before someone wanted to take a shower and because the dorm on the mountain didn’t have showers. After two days of strenuous hiking, I needed to get a shower in a bad way. He agreed and turned on the hot water in one of the rooms so that I could at least be somewhat presentable.

After the shower, I asked for the bus ticket and he didn’t have it. He said that we would get a bus from the “hostel” and that bus driver would give us the ticket. I said that was unacceptable, because he had said the same thing to a Scottish couple who I walked around Huangshan with the day before. The “bus” never came, but instead a taxi pulled up and the “hostel owner” said this was our transportation. The taxi did not put the meter on (and we all rightly assumed it was because this is part of what we had paid for). Of course, the taxi driver didn’t have the Huangshan tickets the couple had paid the “hostel owner” for and they had to go through a couple of aggravating phone calls to finally have the taxi driver pay the entrance fare for them.

Because we had already experienced this and because he had had two days to get the tickets for the bus, I said this was unacceptable. The Scottish couple, who had booked an overnight hard sleeper train to Shanghai through a travel agent, liked what the “hostel owner” said about a 5 hour bus ride and had the agent cancel the train and got “bus tickets” through the scam artist posing as a hostel owner. They said he had given them tickets and I asked to see them. It was almost funny. They pulled out what appeared to me to be a few transfer tickets from a local bus line. They were definitely not long distance bus tickets. I told the “hostel owner” that I wanted either to have a ticket for the bus or my money back and I’d buy the ticket myself. He ran across the street and came back with another small bunch of local bus transfers which he tried to hand to me as a “ticket”. I told him this was not a ticket and again (perhaps a little more loudly) demanded either a real ticket or my money back. This is when he changed his story to the fact that they were “invoices” (whatever that means). I told him I didn’t want an “invoice”, I wanted a ticket.

It was already after 4:00 PM and the “bus” apparently left at 5:00 PM. He then made a cell phone call and said, you might have guessed it, “the bus driver will have your tickets”. Without going into too many details, he had said it took 10 minutes to get to the bus station and the “bus” that was supposed to take my Scottish friends and me to the bus station was supposed to pick us up at 4:20. It hadn’t arrived by 4:30, prompting me to start again with the money back demand. This was obviously not going to happen, but I had to keep pressing, nonetheless. I told him if the local bus didn’t show up by 4:40 with the bus driver having a legitimate ticket I wanted my money back.

To make a long story a little shorter, the local bus finally showed up at about 10 before 5. There were quite a few other people on the bus, including a group of students from the University of California who were studying in an exchange program at Fudan University in Shanghai. The bus driver did not have our tickets. I was now talking loudly that I wanted my money back right now, thinking we would have to stay another night if we missed the bus. Instead of giving me my money back, the scam artist got on the bus with us! At least he would be there if we encountered problems.

Sinclair, my Scottish friend and others on the local bus that was to break down about 15 minutes later…

Which we did, of course. The local bus, taking on the “10 minute ride to the bus station” was already 15 minutes into the journey (about 2 until 5PM), when its transmission went bad! We got another bus about 20 minutes later, and a promise that the bus to Shanghai would wait for us. It took another 25 minutes on the local bus before getting to a point in the road where the long distance bus was sitting (in other words, not a bus station at all). When my Scottish friend and I went to get on the bus, the ticket taker asked for our ticket. At that point, the scam artist talked with him for a short time and he let us on the bus.

So, we left at 6:30 on the big bus and the “5 hour” bus ride that the scammer promised turned out to be 7 hours, so we arrived in Shanghai at 1:30 AM. Part of that time was spent sitting, while the police were talking to the bus driver for about 15 minutes at one point. My guess is because this was an unauthorized bus and the driver paid him off with some of the extra profits they got from us, but who knows?

It was amazing to constantly be lied to and have to continually push and argue to get what you overpaid for! If you are going to Huangshan, be prepared, there are a lot of scam artists. It would be much better for you to either go to Mr. Hu, or to book the hotel at the top of Huangshan and your ticket out of there through a legitimate travel agent.

Now that I’ve got this off my chest, I’ll be able to write a post about Huangshan without having to weave this tale into it. I’m sorry for spending so much time discussing this, but it definitely pays to be wary…

I’ve been a little out of range the past few days, with lots of stories to tell. Huangshan was awesome! I didn’t go to Anji, because it looked like arranging the transportation was going to be a big hassle and I didn’t know how long it might take me to get back out of there, so I went directly from Yixing to Huangshan. Here’s a couple of pics to give you a sample of what Huangshan was like:

I hiked up on the first day, stayed the night, saw the sunrise and then hiked around (a lot of steps, up and down, about 15-20 miles of steps in 2 days with a big pack on, I’m not in such bad shape after all!). I and my two friends from Scotland were planning to hike down the west route, however, the maps were so bad, we ended up climbing all the way down into this really deep valley and only found out then that this wasn’t the way down, but we had nowhere to go but to climb up the other side and end up at the top of the mountain again! Finally, I took the cable car back, and even that involved a bunch of extra stair climbing, which I’ll discuss later.

Huangshan has some really good teas. I got three different kinds here, including Mao Feng and Taiping Houkui. 好喝! That is, it tastes great (hǒu hē).

OK, I’m going out for dinner and will post a real entry later tonight. Bye for now….

NOTE: Sorry for the slow load, but I’m including quite a few pictures today. The rest are here… Also, I finally got the picture of the lobby which I’ve added to the previous post.

Today, I went teapot shopping. As some of you know, I really like Chinese tea and Yixing teapots (teapot is 茶壶, or cháhú, in Chinese). I started off the day going to the Yixing Ceramics Museum, to make sure I would know what high quality would look like. There are a number of workshops inside the gate that leads to the museum and they had people working on making teapots in the same place they sold them. These were generally higher quality pieces, with higher prices than you would find across the street at what I’ll call the “teapot bazaar”. My plan was to look through a ton of shops, not buying anything, but noting what I liked. Then, I’d come back and buy from the places I liked best.

After going through quite a few of the nicer shops, I went across the street. In the Lonely Planet, it talks about prices varying widely and states that “Some say that unless you are buying a teapot made by a well-known artist, don’t pay more than Y30 ( now $4, but $3.75 when the guidebook was published). I beg to differ. There are various qualities to consider in a teapot: 1) the quality of the workmanship (i.e., is the lid nicely fitted, etc.) 2) the quality of the clay (is it a nice sheen, or does it appear dull? If it is shiny, is it because of the clay, or does it appear that some kind of shine was put on artificially? 3) The detail (and quality of the detail) that goes into the scenes/calligraphy on the side of the teapot.

Well, after going through about 40 stores with all of the business cards stuffed in my pockets, I couldn’t remember what I saw where. Besides that, it was already 2:00PM and I hadn’t eaten lunch yet… As I walked away from the teapot bazaar, there were cries of protest from vendors that I had told I was just looking and I’d buy after I finished looking. These were quickly squelched, however, when I explained, “我去午饭。” (”Wǒ qù wǔfàn”, or “I’m going to eat lunch!”). If there’s one thing every Chinese understands, it’s that when you’re hungry, you should eat!

Now, the only problem was where to eat, as I hadn’t seen a restaurant in a while (which is unusual in China). All you can find in this vicinity are teapot shops! So, I asked a couple people and the second one was a lady who pointed in a general direction. When I looked puzzled, she told me to follow her (in Chinese, of course), and she walked me to what seemed to be the only restaurant in the entire area. There were three tables lined up on the left wall and the kitchen was on the right side of the aisle, as you can see in the background of this photo:

The proprietor asked me what I wanted to eat by showing me what she had available. There were quite a few things I didn’t really recognize (and I really wasn’t in the mood to try something I didn’t recognize, since I was hungry and wanted something I knew I would eat), so, there were some chickens and I pointed to them. The head and feet must have been tucked under the bird, because, as you can see, they did show up in the finished product

This time, I didn’t try to eat them… She chopped up the chicken and tossed it around in a wok with some cilantro, dry roasted peanuts and a sauce she made up that was really tasty! I had that with some rice and soup she delivered a little later and had a good meal for Y18 (about $2.40).

Then, it was about 3:00PM and time to get serious about teapot buying. Well, most of the teapots across the street from the museum were of much lower quality than the shops inside the museum compound. Like the silk paintings in Suzhou (which I didn’t get, because the low quality of the affordable ones in the street market and the high price of the ones in the museums there), I was afraid I might be at an impass. But, I went to the shops inside the museum compound to see what I could find. The first place I stopped, I had been to in the morning. She must have been expecting me to buy something, since I came back. But the teapots I liked were about Y1500 ($200) and were made to look like rattan baskets and, looking closely, I detected at least one flaw in each one. So, I thanked her and went on. The next shop had a small teapot that I thought was cool looking and of good quality. She wanted only Y200 ($26.67) for it, so I got it.

I ended up going to a few shops and I found several small teapots that I really liked and were high quality. I got all of them for Y200, except one for Y300. I wanted to get one of the really expensive ones, because they were really beautiful, but I couldn’t really justify it. At the last teapot shop, after I bought the teapot for Y200, the gentlemen asked me if I wanted to drink some tea and I said “好的。”, or “Hǎo de”, which means “OK.” So, he got a fairly small brick of Pu’erh, since I had told him earlier when I was in his shop that I liked that. He didn’t have a pu’erh knife and had quite a time trying to get some off of the brick to put into the teapot.

Well, to make a long story short, he said he really didn’t like that pu’erh and gave me the brick. Then his apprentice gave me two teacups to go along with the pot. So, they were very nice!

I was all set to go, when I saw one more shop that I had been to earlier and went in to have a look. I had 5 teapots by this time and was about ready to call it a day. The lady in this shop was very nice and didn’t offer to sell me anything (another difference between the vendors in the museum compound and those from across the street).

We had a nice conversation about, well, what else…teapots! She seemed impressed that I had learned some Chinese and asked what I had bought. So, one by one, we took out what I had bought and she guessed the price on each one…exactly! To each one, she said “不太贵。”, or “Bù tài guì” (which means “Not very expensive.”, or, in other words, “You didn’t get ripped off!”. Then she got to one, which I bought as a second pot at one shop because I had bought one for Y300 and I kind of felt bad for the apprentice, so I bought one of hers for Y200. The lady guessed Y150 on that one and said, “”太贵。”.

It was nice to get an honest appraisal from a knowledgeable person, but she went far beyond that. There were a couple of pots that she didn’t like the packaging on and substituted much better packaging from her own store (for free). I felt like this type of integrity and generosity deserved to be rewarded, so, I thought, I’d buy one more teapot! The one I had looked at in her shop that morning was Y1500 ($200). It was a beautiful teapot, but after telling her that I wanted to buy a teapot from her for all that she had just done, she picked out five Y200 ones and two Y300 ones to choose from. At this point, I thought to myself, I really wanted to get an extraordinary pot, and the one I really wanted was there, and I was half way around the world from my home and wouldn’t be here again…so, after examining the teapots she set out, I went to the one I had looked at in the morning and told her I’d like to buy it.

Well, the day didn’t end there. She packaged it up beautifully, in a silk wrapper and a hardwood box. She then asked if I would like some tea, to which I said “”好的。” She explained how to do a tea ceremony with some 铁观音 (tiěguānyīn, a type of oolong tea). After that, she made a phone call to her husband, who made the pot, and asked if I wanted to come to their house for dinner. So, she closed up the shop and we walked to her house (we actually got a ride part of the way, which she paid for). At her house, I met her husband, who had his studio set up there. Their daughter was home from Suzhou University (the same place the girl I met on the bus to Yixing was attending). So, the four of us sat down to dinner, which included: yes, chicken, but also a type of dofu which I really liked, some mushrooms in a really nice sauce, some pig’s ears, which I have to admit, I wasn’t overly fond of, a type of green vegetable, some boiled nuts which looked to me like big acorns and, to wash it down, a fortified wine that she had in a huge jar with a lot of a type of fruit that had the outer texture of a kiwi, but were smaller and rounder. That stuff was potent! I’m glad I only had one small glass, or I wouldn’t need any aqua dots (a reference to Ann’s comment on another post, if you didn’t see it)!

After dinner, I watched her husband work for a while. I found out he is 50 years old and has been making teapots for over 20 years. One of his designs won an honorable mention at a teapot competition in California and sold for $3500.

We took some pictures and their daughter presented me with a teapot that she wanted to give me. That was nice!

I realize that they don’t make that big a sale everyday, but she had already shown me that she was a nice person before I bought it. Time and again, I have been shown a very kind and caring side of the Chinese culture that is really nice to see!

Finally, her husband walked me back to the hotel and I called it a night, finally getting the picture of the large teapot in the lobby. I had a thoroughly memorable day of teapot buying in Yixing…tomorrow, it’s off to the bamboo forest of Anji…

Well, I finally got it…the experience of a chicken head staring at me from the hotpot (and the feet to boot)…and I didn’t have my camera with me! OK, I’m getting ahead of myself…

I went to bed very early last night, about 7PM, since I was tired after riding a bike around town all day. I woke up at 3AM, played around on the Internet a little, and got back to sleep until about 8AM. Well, all I had to do was get to the post office to send all the stuff I bought in Hangzhou and Suzhou back home. It turned out it was quite a distance, which I walked. I rode the bus back to the hotel and finally got in a taxi for the bus station around 12 noon.

I had read in one of the tour books I brought with me about frequent buses to Yixing from Wuxi, so, stupid me doesn’t even ask for a ticket to Yixing, but a ticket to Wuxi. I met a nice lady in the bus station and we discussed (in Chinese, of course) that she wasn’t traveling anywhere and that I wanted to go to Yixing, and planned to get a bus to Wuxi and then to Yixing. Luckily for me, she worked for C-Trip, which is one of two (the other being eLong) web sites that are really good to get tickets internally in China. She told me not to take the bus to Wuxi (which would leave in 15 minutes), but got one of the managers at the station involved. The manager was a nice lady, as well, and took me to a return counter, got my money back for the Wuxi ticket and I paid the extra to get a ticket direct to Yixing.

In addition to the tour book, I had read a blog where people went to Yixing on a bus and were dropped off on the side of the road and got in some kind of a small bus to go the rest of the way. This was a fairly recent blog, so I thought I’d be dealing with more problems than I did. The bus went straight to the Yixing bus station. I sat next to a 20 year old sophomore who goes to Suzhou University, but is from Yixing. We had as good a conversation as we could have, knowing as little of each other’s language as we did. She confessed that she was lazy and didn’t study her English as much as she could, though she knows she could get a better job if she did speak English. I understand the desire of many Chinese to speak English, but I don’t understand the government’s desire that all Chinese learn English. After all, at least at this point, most will probably never even meet a foreigner. OK, maybe next year at the Olympics will be an exception, but you get the point. If I were her, I’d probably be lazy about learning English, too. There’s nobody around that speaks it natively, so it seems more like an academic language to learn than a practical one.

In any case, the bus ride took about an hour and 45 minutes. Once we got to Yixing, I took out a couple of guidebooks and looked for what hotels they recommended. The Frommer’s recommended a Y420-580 a night place, and the Lonely Planet recommended one for Y300-360 that would be discounted, so I went with the LP recommendation. It is the Yixing Shanghai Hotel.

QUICK NOTE: I’m using 7.5RMB (Y for Yuan) to the dollar for the conversions, which is what it was when I got to China. It’s already at 7.44, and that’s the official rate, which you probably won’t quite get. I knew this would happen last January, when it was 8 to 1. I only wish I could have bought RMB back then…anyway, back to today…

It turns out the hotel is in Dingshan, which is a few miles from Yixing, but is where most of the teapots here are really made (though Taiwan apparently has many famous teapot artists that import clay from Yixing) and also where the teapot museum is. The taxi meter went to Y48.20 ($6.42), but when I handed the driver a Y50 note, he handed me back a Y10 note and waived off any further payment. Amazing! This is how I got to the hotel in the middle of Yixing teapot country. I haven’t taken any pictures here, but I will get one of the giant teapot in the hotel lobby tomorrow morning and update this post with it here:

The reception clerk gave me a rate of Y260 ($34.67), which includes a complimentary breakfast. I’m going to stay here two nights, so that I’ll have a whole day to look around for teapots without having to worry about having the hotel keep my bags, coming back here, etc. That way, the next morning I can just check out and go in a taxi straight to the bus station. As you can see, they have Internet here, etc., etc. After the stories I’d heard about getting here, I was thinking it was a backwater type town where it may be hard to find an Internet connection. Never fear, this is China, where small towns have a million people in them!

Well, that brings me to the dinner I started out with. I went to a restaurant where everyone was enjoying hotpot. Of course, I could not read the Chinese menu. I did get across that I liked hot and spicy, but nothing else. After a few blank stares, she suggested one of the things up top that I guess was an all inclusive type dinner for Y48. I said OK. It started with an orange and some peanuts, which were good enough. Then came the hotpot, which had that nice red color that I knew meant spicy hot, just the way I like it! I was wondering what I got, of course. After she sat the hotpot into it’s cradle and started the propane fire underneath, I saw the chicken head looking at me, and then the foot…and I realized I must have got a full chicken hotpot. I tried everything, and it all tasted like chicken. I saw some show where a guy tried chicken feet in Korea and said they were good. I don’t know what he was eating, because as far as I could see, there was very little meat to be had on the foot (as you would expect). I tried, but I wasn’t into gnawing on cartilage, so I gave up the effort. The rest of the hotpot was good, with bean sprouts and mushrooms, as well as chicken. Finally, I got to the head. I had heard that the Chinese like cheek meat, and that it is supposedly the most tender and delicious part…well, I tried the cheek meat. It tasted like chicken and there was so little of it, I couldn’t tell if it was more tender or delicious than the other parts. Perhaps I’m just too used to Western food, but just give me the muscles of an animal and I’ll be happy. I also didn’t eat the skin, since it was cooked in liquid. I love skin that’s deep fried (aka fried chicken), but boiled skin is just rubbery and kind of yukky to me. I guess we all have our own tastes.

So, that was today. Tomorrow, it’s off to discover Yixing teapots!!! Good night/morning…

Well, I’m going to do a couple of posts with just links to pictures, so the page will load a little quicker. You can see the pictures from this post here.

Once again, like in Hangzhou, you get the hang of the place after a couple of days, which makes it easier to get around. One thing that would be extremely helpful in all these cities is a map of the bus lines that is up to date. I didn’t need that today, though, as I found a bicycle rental place fairly near my hotel that rented me a bike for an entire day for Y10 ($1.33). Granted, this was an older bike, but it did have a bell and a basket and it worked the entire day…now maybe you can see why I was so upset with that lady in Hangzhou at Y15 an hour…

So, my first stop was the Silk Museum. It was interesting, I suppose, but not fascinating. I got there at 8:50 and they let me in, even though they officially open at 9:00. Maybe they just hadn’t set up the working exhibits for the day yet, I don’t know.

Then, I rode to Canglang Pavilion. I had to ride around a while to find the entrance! Anyway, it was nice, but not very well taken care of as compared to the gardens I have already seen. You can definitely see differences in the staffs of the different places. Some are proud of their garden and keep it up well and others are just there filling space, as was the case at this place, unfortunately.

Well, then I had a very long bike ride looking for a place that I had found on the web called Suzhou Embroidery. I never did find their showroom and they didn’t return an email I sent them yesterday. It’s too bad, because it looks from their web site like they do high quality work. I just want to see it before I pay for it. Oh, well, that chewed up about 2 hours of the day. As it was already about 2:15 PM, I wanted to go to the Humble Administrator’s garden again, since it was by far my favorite and I got a guided tour there which, even though I was the only one, didn’t allow me the freedom to just enjoy the surroundings. Again, I lost my bearings a little (though I brought a compass and a map with me…) and ended up driving by my Hotel, which is on the very northern street inside the old city boundary. At least it was fairly near.

So, back I went. By the time I got there, it was 3:00 and the garden closes at 5:00. It was much more crowded this time, with a few tour groups, etc. But, it was still amazing and I got to explore a lot of areas that I didn’t really get to see the first time, so I’m glad I went back. If you’re planning a trip to Suzhou, I highly recommend the Humble Administrator’s garden as the one to spend the most time in. It blows the others away, in my (humble) opinion!

Finally, I left there and went to return the bike. Since I had it for 9 hours, it worked out to a little over Y1 (13½¢) an hour. I call that reasonable!

Since I skipped lunch, I was extra hungry. I asked a gentlemen if he knew a good restaurant (in Chinese, of course) and he pointed across the street. I asked again if it was good and he shook his head yes. Well, somebody had puked on the sidewalk in front of the place, which was set back a ways and up a few steps from the road. When I went up to the door, one of the people inside was coughing. These weren’t the signs I was looking for! But, being adventurous, I went ahead just the same. Of course the restaurant menu was all in Chinese, and they, too, didn’t understand my pronunciation of pork, or chicken. I finally had to resort to the pantomime, which they understood, but found pretty amusing. Then, they asked if I wanted 牛肉 (niúròu, or beef). I said that today I wanted chicken or pork, and also wanted dofu and liked hot and spicy. So, here is what I ended up with. It was very good. I also got a bowl of rice and a big bottle of Suntory beer and only paid Y30 ($4). The tea they served with the meal wasn’t very good, though, and it tasted like the teapot had been used for rice wine before.

Final Comments about Suzhou

The good

The people here are friendly and will bend over backwards to help you. I bought a few snacks at a place yesterday, while I was looking for the cleaners that I had dropped some clothes off in the morning. I asked the attendant there (there were other workers there, as well) where the laundry was located (I had a card with the address and even a little picture map, but had been given different directions and had been walking around for about an hour trying to find the place). When she asked the lady at the cash register and I was directed to where I had already been three times, I explained (again, all in Chinese) that I had been there three times. So, she took the card and told me she would help me find it. Even though she was speaking Chinese, we went on a wild goose chase for over half an hour. I told her that there was a phone number on the card and I’d give her some money (since I left my cell phone at the hotel) if she’d call the place. She didn’t want money, called the place, and then led me there. Another guy led me a good five blocks to find something and two others offered, but I declined, not wanting them to go out of their way.

In addition to the beautiful gardens, the city has taken a cue from them and put nice little touches from them in the parks and sidewalks around the city, such as the picture of the bonzai trees in the median strip on one of the new super roadways, and some patterns show up on some of the walkways in the city.

the bad

There are tons of scooters and electric bikes here, and I don’t think one of the owners understands that you need to get your brakes fixed when they start screeching from metal on metal contact. The sound is deafening and akin to fingernails on the chalkboard. As you go around the city, it’s almost constant and it is so screeching loud that I’m sure it affects the hearing of the residents here.

and the ugly…

The entire city is dirty. I mean filthy dirty, like it is covered in a layer of grimy dirt. The pictures I’ve shown of the walkways in the garden are what they would look like if they were clean. I clicked on the “I’m feeling lucky” button in Picasa to get them to show up so nicely. In reality, they, too, were covered with a layer of grime. While other cities may have had a few issues with this, Suzhou could really use a good rain with detergent!

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Well, it’s 8:30 in the morning and I need to take a shower, pack, and take a bus to Yixing. Talk to you later…