Thoughts on China

Well, nobody has complained about the load time for the blog, even with all the pictures I’ve added in, so I’ve added a few more in this post. I figure this is because a) everyone has broadband and doesn’t notice, b) nobody is reading the blog, so they don’t notice or c) those that were reading the blog stopped reading it when it slowed down due to all the pix and didn’t bother sending an email. If this page loads too slow for you, please let me know and I’ll cut down the number of pics I include.

Here are the rest of the pics…

Peking Chicken???

Well, I got a late start this morning and was on the street at about 9:30. At 10:00, I saw a KFC (yes, that means Kentucky Fried Chicken…I guess the Chinese have General Tso’s chicken and the US has Colonel Sanders’ chicken, I’m not sure what it is about the military and chicken, but that’s another story)…anyway, I had to try something I saw on the web before coming to China. My coworkers will know what I’m talking about. It was a press release from KFC China noting that they were going to start serving an item that is basically serving KFC chicken strips in a manner similar to the way Peking Duck is served: with the meat, cucumber (substituting for spring onion) and hoisin sauce wrapped in a thin pancake. Well, here it is:

OK, so that was breakfast this morning. Oh, how was it? It was OK, I suppose, but nothing really memorable. It was kind of like what I thought it would be, but I just had to know for sure…also, if you look at the other pics, the side dish was interesting. It had more mayonnaise than I thought would suit most Chinese tastes, but it was good.

Master-of-the-Net Garden (MONG)

After breakfast, it was off to the Master-of-the-Net Garden. This is supposedly the most cleverly done garden, since it incorporates all of the elements of a Chinese garden in a much smaller area than is normally necessary. It was very nice, as you can see in the pictures, but I thought the Humble Administrator’s Garden was much nicer to be in. This one gave me the feeling of being in a smaller space, which is not what you want if you are trying, at least in part, to give the feeling of being in nature…

Here are some pics of the MONG:

A quick aside…

In a post I did about Hangzhou, I tried to explain the feeling of having a relaxed mind. Well, there was a sign in the MONG that tried to explain the same thing….

I’m not quite sure what “absolute blessedness and serenity free from secular concerns.” means, exactly…but it sounds like they are talking about the same thing, anyway…

Lunch

OK, I stopped by a noodle shop (again, no English on the menu or spoken by the staff. This time, I thought I ordered noodles with pork (猪肉 zhūròu) but got noodles with chicken (鸡肉 jīròu). Understandable, since they sound very similar and I do have a bad habit of getting lazy with my pronunciation of the tones (especially u). Since, in pinyin, the “zh” sounds a lot like “j” and I might have not really pronounced the “u” strongly enough, I can see why I ended up with chicken…

But I also got something extra…which I know I didn’t accidentally order. I couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but it was about a handful of what could be snake, or eel, or I don’t know what. You can see it in the picture below. I tried it and it was good, so I ate the whole bowl…

The Lingering Garden (LG)

One of the things a Chinese Garden designer does is to give you a series of views that are pleasing to the eye. There are many elements they use to direct your attention. Moon Gates (the round holes in the wall that you’ve seen in the pics) are one way they do that. A well done garden makes you feel that you have many more cool views than the space of the garden should allow, since many of the elements in the garden are used in more than one view. It’s like an intricate puzzle that fits together just right, to give the visitor a feast for the eyes no matter where they happen to be. I really liked the LG.

One thing that many Chinese Gardens have is an area with what we know (from the Japanese) as bonsai, miniature trees. The Chinese bonsais are actually quite a bit larger (maybe 3 or 4 feet high) as compared to the really small Japanese bonsais (which are rarely over 2 feet high). The LG had a great collection of these, as you can see in the rest of the pics.

Here, then, are some of the views from the LG:

One final thing I’d like you to see is the attention to detail that is paid in these gardens. The paving of the walkways is not simply done in a red brick, for instance…here are a few pics of some of the patterns in the LG walkways:

Once again, if the page is taking way to long to load because of the pictures, please let me know and I’ll include less in the blog (you can always see them in the more pics link)…

Click here for more images from Humble Administrator’s Garden.

I knew it would happen eventually, but when I got off the bus in Suzhou and got into a taxi, on the ride to Motel 168 (yes, they left the light on for me…) I felt like one of the droogies in A Clockwork Orange, enjoying the real horrorshow driving of the cab driver from hell…everywhere we went, he left people almost toppled over on their bikes and motor scooters, just like the night scene with the VW bug rolling over to get out of the way…the only difference was that we didn’t visit the Korova milkbar beforehand or engage in ultraviolence afterward…Finally, I got him involved in a conversation about cars and motorcycles (all in Chinese, of course, since he didn’t speak English)…I told him about my big motorcycle and how fast it went, etc…At the end of the ride, which was Y26, I couldn’t find the extra Y1 and he waived that it was OK! It pays to be a droogie!!!

OK, if you understood all that, great! If not, I’m not going to explain a Stanley Kubrick movie while I’m in China. Suffice it to say that this was the most exciting taxi ride yet… Well, I’m staying at Motel 168 in Suzhou. This one has a ratty carpet in the room, but will suffice for Y168 (about $22.50) a night.

So, I caught the 12:45 bus from Hangzhou to Suzhou and arrived about 2 hours later. I got to the motel quickly, thanks to the aforementioned taxi driver and was able to walk to the Humble Administrator’s Garden (HAG). It is poorly named, since the guy had to be ultra rich, and I doubt he was very humble. I got a tour, since I figured there were probably quite a few things I would not see that the guide might point out, and I was right. He didn’t speak very good English, so I helped him with that. He was trying very hard, though, and did know a lot about the garden.

The garden was beautiful. Rather than try to explain it with thousands of words, I’ll include a few pictures here. It is the beauty of the garden that convinced me that I’d add another night in Suzhou!

After visiting the HAG, I walked a lot and ended up eating at the low end dumpling restaurant (where the common people go). I get the feeling I was the only nonChinese to eat there in quite a while. I finished with dinner and walked a lot more, finally coming upon an area that was about 7 blocks by 7 blocks square that was lit up like Nanjing Road in Shanghai and which had a slew of Western stores in amid the Chinese ones. I have to say, I think it’s OK that the Chinese are getting to try different things, but it really didn’t feel like China at all. I didn’t like it, but then, who am I to judge?

Finally, the walk took me home (after numerous solicitations, per usual). In Shanghai, it’s watches, here it’s “massagy” from motorized rickshaw drivers. Some of them were more persistent than other, but my old standby of “Ni ming bai ma? Bu Yao!” again worked almost all the time. If it didn’t, I just kept walking and waived my hand “no” until they finally gave up.

I didn’t take any pictures of dinner or the shopping area for two reasons (that was for Sophie, my Chinese tutor, who I hope does well on the TOEFL test): 1) It would have really been out of place at the dumpling place, where I paid 8RMB for a dinner of 4 pork dumplings and eight more chicken dumplings in a soup resembling wonton soup. In other words, people were already staring at me, wondering why I was in the $1 dinner place. To have me take out a camera and start snapping pictures of my meal might have made them feel like I thought it was a real novelty. In any case, I didn’t feel like it needed to be done. As far as the shopping district goes, just think of the picture of Nanjing Road the other night and you really don’t need to see another picture…

Well, that’s all for now. I really enjoyed the garden and would have spent longer there if it hadn’t closed soon after 5:00 PM. So, I may stay another night here, as well. I’ll keep monitoring the weather at Huangshan, If it won’t be relatively nice weather, I’ll have to hang it up, since it would be a waste. On the other hand, we all know how accurate weather forecasters are and I’m not going to be able to visit here that many times in my life, so I might go and hope they’re wrong if I don’t get a favorable report. Whatever happens, dear reader, I promise you’ll be on the front lines…WOoooooHoooooo Eeeeeeehhhhaaaahhhhh…to quote another Kubrick flick (Dr. Strangelove)…

Link to pix from this post…

I’ve written all the Hangzhou posts on this, my last night in Hangzhou. I’m writing them in Textpad in my room and will go downstairs to where there is wireless Internet connection to paste them into Wordpress (the blog software) and hook up pictures, etc. to them.

My third day in Hangzhou was my best yet. I took the experiences of the first two days and had a good long sleep…not hard after the walk home from the fireworks last night…So, I woke up about 8:00, as opposed to my normal 5:30 or 6:00, and rested for another half hour before getting up. For the second day, I took a shower and then washed clothes in the sink. I got spoiled with the laundry service in Beijing and Xi’an and the washing machine in Chengdu. It definitely takes some time and effort to do laundry by hand in the sink.

Anyway, I had discovered the bike rental here at the hostel, so I went down and, as I mentioned, was pleasantly surprised to see that they had a “Giant” bike, similar to the one I bought in Beijing, with a bell and a basket, that ended up being only Y15 ($2.00) for the three hours I used it for. This was more like it!

It was pretty foggy (maybe some haze in there, too) this morning, but other than that, it was a nice day to ride. I went clockwise around the lake and my first stop was LeiFeng Tower (which looks like a very old pagoda, but is actually a new building, complete with an outdoor escalator to the base and elevators inside). While it isn’t authentic, it is a cool looking building and the style is well done. I see some people sniping at the Chinese for continually rebuilding old buildings, rather than leaving the original ruins. I can see both sides of this argument. I think it is nice to have this cool architecture around as landmarks in a city, though having an escalator and elevator made it seem not very authentic…

Continuing my bike journey, I stopped at a nice spot with an empty bench and had a nice pipe. One reason I sometimes like to smoke a pipe is that it takes about 45 minutes to finish. For someone who is constantly busy, this allows for a time that you have to sit and just relax. This was a perfect place for developing a relaxed mind, with the willow trees, boats going across the lake and surrounded by a peaceful park.

I think meditation, just clearing your mind of all the thoughts that come up, is a very healthy practice, which I find I don’t do nearly enough. Even on this trip, I find that my mind is always engaged in thinking about something. How nice it was, for this short time, to think of nothing…yet another example of what I was talking about the first paragraph of the first day in Hangzhou…

It was 12:30, when I came around to probably the most famous restaurant in Hangzhou, 塿外塿 菜馆 (Lǒu Wài Lǒu càiguǎn).

So, I waited about five minutes for a table and ordered up a feast! It ended up costing about $31, but it was very good and I’m glad I did. I had what is known as “Beggar’s chicken”, which is basically a chicken, coated with clay and fired (baked). So, it cooks in it’s own juices and the meat literally falls off the bone. In addition, I had fried dofu skins with pork, that were basically similar to cracklin’s (fried pork skins) back in the southern US, in that they were light and fried to a crispy consistency, except I liked the taste of these better than the sometimes rancid (to my mind) taste of cracklin’s. I also had sweet lotus root, pickled vegetable (I’m guessing cabbage), and a hot and sour soup with crab and duck that was very good.

Pickled Vegetable, Sweet Lotus Root and Fried Dofu Skin with Pork

Crab and Duck Hot and Sour Soup

Breaking the Clay the Beggar’s Chicken is baked in (done at the table)

Beggar’s Chicken - Tender and Delicious (but not chewy like pig intestines, 文进 ;^) )

I returned the bicycle and went up to my room for a nice, long nap. I woke up around 6:00 PM and went looking for a place for dinner. I had seen another Indian restaurant not too far away, so I thought I’d try the same meal I had at the other to get a good comparison. Well, I have to say, though the first restaurant was a little more expensive and had virtually no customers, its food was much better than the fare I had tonight. There were a lot of customers in this restaurant, and the service was good (they always made sure my water was filled up), the food was only so-so. So, I give the first restaurant 4 out of 5 stars and the second 2 of 5. Oh, well, I had to try…

I am finally caught up on my blog writing! I still haven’t decided if I’m going to Suzhou or Huangshan tomorrow. After I get done posting these, I’ll get more information and make my decision. Good night (or good day, as the case may be!)…

UPDATE: Monday, Nov 5. 10:00AM - Well, Huangshan is rainy and a high of 10° C (50° F) today and cloudy tomorrow, whereas Suzhou is partly cloudy. Let’s see, I think I’ll go to….well, OK, Suzhou it is! See you there!

Link to pix in this post… NOTE: I have videos, which are much better, but I can’t upload them from here. Also, this is the same link as from the last post, since it was on the same day…

OK, well, after that day, I was a little frazzled, but I had heard for a day and a half that on Saturday evening, there would be a fireworks show. Of course, there’s no real occasion (like in America, where you won’t see fireworks (except at Disney) if it’s not July 4 or New Year’s Eve), but I had to see what a Chinese fireworks display is like, so I couldn’t miss this opportunity. As you’ll see, I wasn’t disappointed…

I asked several people where the display was, but I couldn’t understand their answers well enough to tell a taxi driver. At least everyone I asked knew what I was asking about, so I thought the taxi drivers would, too. The display was going to be held at 7:30, so I went to get a taxi about 6:40. It took a while to get one that was empty. As soon as I got in, I told the driver I wanted to go to the fireworks show, and he looked at me with a blank stare. It’s funny that everyone else I talked to knew exactly what I meant. After he was obviously not going to get me where I wanted to go, I got out. The next cab was completely different! He knew, as soon as I said 鞭炮 (biānpào, or firecrackers), where I wanted to go and took off. He drove very well (by which I mean he got around a lot of traffic and got me there as fast as humanly possible), while we had as good a conversation as my limited Chinese vocabulary allowed. The cab fair for going all the way across town around all the other traffic that was going to the same event was Y15, but I gave him a Y5 tip for doing such a good job.

The show was a little delayed, but once it started, it blew all of the fireworks shows I’ve seen in the US away. I haven’t been to some of the major ones there, like the one in Louisville, but I have been to a lot and they all paled in comparison to the amount of black powder that was used for this show. It went on for 50 minutes and their were fireworks on each side of the bridge, on a river. As the bridge obstructed my view of the ones that were nearer, I concentrated on the show to the south.

The entire 50 minutes was like the grand finale at a typical show in the US. I only saw two other foreigners there, though the crowd was huge. Hangzhou is a good weekend getaway for people from Shanghai (a city of 20 million people), so it isn’t hard to conceive how this might lead to a large crowd at a fireworks show!

Anyway, I walked all the way back to the hotel, realizing that any attempt at any type of transportation would either be jam packed or stuck in traffic. It was a long walk, but it was nice to have the exercise that I normally don’t get and it was a pleasant walk…so the mixed day ended with a nice fireworks display!

Link to today’s pix… (Note: this is the same album as the pictures of fireworks in the next post)

Well, today had some really nice times, mixed with some unpleasantness. I wanted to go to Longjing, the town that is in the middle of the Longjing tea growing area. I was told by a hostel employee to take the K4 bus as far as it went and then the K27 bus from there, as far as it went. Well, somewhere along the line, the directions didn’t pan out, as there was no K27 bus from the station where the K4 bus ended…I walked for quite a while, then rode another bus for a while, until I ended up in a poorer section of town where I was obviously out of place. I finally found a taxi who took me to Longjing. He said he was from there and had a friend who grew and processed the tea. We went to her place, where I bought quite a bit of tea (I’m sure it was overpriced, but I know it is expensive tea and the quality of this tea was very good).

Anyway, I said that I wanted to take some pictures of tea plants (again, in broken Chinese). The driver took me over a hill and I got out to take some pictures. After this, I asked him to take me to the tea museum, when he said that he could not. I did not speak this in broken Chinese, and I had pages from a guide that had the tea museum spelled out in Hanzi (Chinese characters). Well, first the driver drove me to a jade place (I thought, what am I paying this guy a taxi fee for, if he won’t take me where I want to go)…I said, in very plain Chinese, my most practiced phrase, anyway…不要 (bù yào, or “I don’t want”). Then, he took me by a silk place, again with the meter running. At this point, I was getting angry, but realized that anger does more harm than good. I was going to get out of the cab and find another way to go, but I realized that I had no idea where I was and that there weren’t many taxis there, so I told him 不要 one more time and asked him again to take me to the tea museum. This time, for some unknown reason, he complied. So, he ripped me off for some taxi fare and I’m sure he got a tidy sum from his “friend”, the tea lady. But, I had some very good tea and was at the tea museum none the worse for wear…

The tea museum was a pleasant place and there was no entrance fee! There were two students, majoring in English at the local university (a boy and a girl), who volunteered there to give tours to English speakers. So, not only was it free, I got a free guided tour, as well! While it was interesting, I knew most of the information already, having studied a lot about tea on the Internet. There was, of course, a tea field just outside, so I got some better pictures than I was able to get from the side of the road when the cab stopped.

I went from the very generous Iraqi, to the rip-off cab driver, to the very generous tea museum…well, you get the pattern…and, unfortunately, the day was not done yet!

I took the bus back to town from the tea museum (fooled you, you thought I’d catch another rip-off taxi, didn’t you…). I put my stuff up in the room and walked a ways from the hostel, when I thought I ought to rent a bicycle. Well, all the rentals had these very small tires and were really too small for me. The one I found that was big enough and in good shape, the lady wanted Y20 ($2.66) an hour for…that’s highway robbery! As you may remember, I BOUGHT a decent bike in Beijing for Y348. So she could buy another bike after only 18 hours of rental!!! I talked her down to Y10, which was still expensive, but I just wanted to ride, so I went ahead. She took down the last four numbers of the serial numbers of the 4 Y100 notes I gave her as a deposit. Well, the bike ride was fine, though the bike didn’t have a bell (a definite must have with the traffic here). But, when I got back after 3 hours, the lady said it was Y15 an hour. The lying snake! She pointed to some characters she had written on the receipt and insisted that she told me it was Y15. Well, none of the characters were numbers, that I could see and I argued with her. I didn’t really care, at this point, about the issue of losing face, as she was blatantly trying to rip me off. Unfortunately, she did, since I didn’t have change, I gave her a Y50 note and she only gave me back Y5 change. I would have gone to the cops, but I had no idea what she had written as she told me 十元 (shí yuán, or Y10) an hour, but I just chalked it up to a learning experience. Anyway, as I was about to leave, I noticed that she didn’t give me back my deposit, even though I had produced the receipt. I asked her for it and she said she gave had already given it to me. Being mad and flustered, I thought that maybe she had, so I emptied out every one of my pockets, but none of the Y100 notes matched the serial numbers she had written (at this point, I was glad she had done that, since she insisted she had given me the deposit). To make a long story short, she finally found the four bills in her counter and gave them to me. I felt like doing a lot of things, but, I put on a smile, put all of my emptied pocket items back where they belonged and walked away…In the end, it had cost me about $6, but it was the thought that counted…and it still steams me when I think of that lady…especially when I found out the next morning that the hostel I stay at rents nice big bikes, with a bell and a basket, at Y10 for the first 3 hours and Y5 an hour after that!!!

So, on day 2 in Hangzhou, I had some good and some not so good experiences. I still hadn’t made it all the way around the lake, or seen many of the sites, or eaten Beggar’s chicken at a famous restaurant here, so I booked one more night at the hostel…

Link to the other pix of today…

As I sit at the desk in my hostel room, or rather cubby hole (which is nice and cozy as compared to too small), and try to collect my thoughts about Hangzhou, I realize that many thoughts simply cannot be conveyed. As communication takes place, the sender encodes their thoughts and experiences into words (and pictures, etc.). But the receiver only has their experiences to try to make
sense of the message. If the thought is too abstract, or the experience so different from what the receiver is used to, it may be hard to communicate at all. Don’t get me wrong, Hangzhou is not abstract or difficult to relate to other things, it is the impressions and memories from sitting on 西湖 (Xī Hú, or West Lake in Hangzhou) that are difficult to relate. So, for now, I’ll simply relate my experiences and leave my thoughts for another time…

I arrived in Hangzhou late in the morning on Friday, after a pleasant hour and a half train ride from Shanghai. I got a taxi from the train station (which, as you can imagine after a packed train unloads, took a little bit of time, but the process was very smooth and went fairly quickly). I decided to stay at the Youth Hostel which is a few yards from West Lake. It took a little to find it, but I got their and found they only had dorm beds. I figured it wouldn’t matter and went ahead with booking it, but no sooner had I said “OK”, than another worker came up and said that a room had just opened up. So, for Y180 ($24), I would be staying in a private room with bathroom right on 西湖!

Well, I put the bags in the room and immediately went out to walk around part of 西湖. After exploring quite a while, both on the lake shore and in the park that surrounds the lake, I came across a hill that I, of course, had to climb (I think I must have a little of my father in me. There wasn’t a mountain that exists that he didn’t want to climb). Well, besides another really nice area, I came upon a tea house on the hill that had a wonderful view of the lake and had a very nice, old style. Two couples were sitting at outdoor tables drinking Longjing (the most famous green tea in China, that is grown near Hangzhou) and I asked in no-doubt stilted Chinese where I may get a cup of tea. They pointed to the house down the hill a little way and the gentlemen accompanied me and told the attendent inside to set me up. So, there I sat, with a wonderful view of West Lake, a nice glass of Longjing and bowl of peanuts. How peaceful…how wonderful…It is these types of thoughts that I was referring to in the first paragraph…in fact, there’s a saying in China that goes 上 有 天 堂, 下 有 苏 杭 (shàng yǒu tiān táng, xià yǒu sū háng, or “Above, there is heaven, below there is Suzhou and Hangzhou.”)

张文进, note in the picture below that you don’t always have to use very little 茶 to be “professional” ;>)

Well, after refreshing the water a few times and paying the Y20 ($2.66), I went on my way. It was getting later in the afternoon by this time. A couple of boatmen asked me if I wanted a ride, but because it was Y80 an hour and 就 我 一 个 人 (Jiù wǒ yī gè rén。, or “I’m just one person.”), I didn’t go. A little while later, however, I saw a boat (resembling a Venetian gondola, for four passengers) that had three passengers and they wanted to know if I wanted to go. At Y20, I went ahead.

There was a foreign male and two women who both appeared to be Han Chinese, but one was wearing a head cover (not covering the face, though) that is typical of the Middle East. Exchanging the pleasantries of “Where are you from?”, etc., it turned out that the man was from Iraq. I thought about how ironic it was that an American and an Iraqi would meet on a boat in China…not quite as strange as “Lost”, but nonetheless… Anyway, he is a Kurd, who seem to get the short end of everything over there. The Sunnis and Shiites fight for power and control in Iraq, while Turkey wields an iron hand in the north. We had a good conversation about the situation there and we agreed on a lot of things. It was an enjoyable boat ride, and, at the end, he refused to let me pay my share. We took pictures and parted ways…

Scott in the boat on West Lake, Hangzhou

My new Iraqi friend…

After that, I walked a little more, took a few pictures of the sunset and then thought about what to eat for dinner…

Well, as I was looking for yet another Chinese restaurant to try, I happened upon this…

I thought, with only two Indian restaurants in Tallahassee, why not try it. It turned out to be very good (in my opinion). I had the lamb curry, garlic naan, and (please forgive me, Allwyn) I forgot the name of the other dish, that was basically cucumbers and the like in yogurt).

Like I said, everything was delicious and everyone was in full costume. Most of the employees were Indian, though they did have a few Chinese ladies dressed up in Indian garb…

Overall, it was a very enjoyable day…

Well, this will be noticeably shorter than yesterday’s marathon. I didn’t do near as much and what I did do, I did rather haphazardly. Here’s a link to all of today’s pictures.

First, I woke up late after all the walking (and food) the day before! There was a lady (who turned out to be a music student in Shanghai from Singapore) that had helped me out with my travel plans on the Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree (Australian) site. We went to lunch and she gave me some more advice on my remaining time here in China. I was kind of disappointed, though, as I wanted to eat at some cool, Chinese restaurant…but her throat was sore and she said the last thing she needed at that time was Chinese food. So, we ate American food, of sorts. I had something that resembled a Greek Gyro and she had a sandwich that had the meats of and Italian sub with cheese melted on top, and lettuce and tomato underneath (sorry Allwyn, no pix of the food). It was an interesting conversation. When it was time for her class, we said goodbye.

Don’t buy Traveler’s Cheques for use in China

I walked around for about two or three hours. This included stopping by the Bank of China to change a lot of traveler’s cheques…traveler’s cheques are a horrible idea if you’re going to China, by the way. First, I paid 2% for them. Then, you can only change them at the Bank of China (there are a lot of different banks here, all of which seem to be named by the industry that they serve: Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank, etc.). Anyway, except for the first time, it has taken a minimum of 30 minutes after taking a number to be waited on. This is especially irritating when there is an ATM that takes American cards, but I bought so many traveler’s cheques, I wanted to use some of them.

By now, it was about 3:30, and I hadn’t done anything to speak of…I was not being very good at this self guided tour stuff. In fact, I hadn’t looked at any of the tour guides I brought with me to see what I wanted to do before going into the city. (NOTE: I learned my lesson and have looked at them for Hangzhou and for the rest of the trip). Anyway, I had to try the “tourist tunnel” to Pudong, because I saw some wild videos of what it looked like on YouTube. I took a few videos (which I can’t get to upload to Picasa and YouTube is blocked here, so I’m not going to bother with…just search for Shanghai Tourist Tunnel or something like that on YouTube and you’ll see videos of it). It was pretty cool, but it was also pretty cheezy. Some of the effects were really neat, others looked like a high school haunted house display. I also got the add on tickets to two displays: a deep sea display which was completely forgettable and a display of artifacts about sex from China’s history. This was completely interesting to me, since I’ve really never seen anything like these pieces anywhere else in my studies about China. There were Buddha’s having intercourse (apparently a sect of Buddhism is dedicated to using desire to free yourself from desire). The exhibit kind of reminded me of the erotic art of Pompeii, that we never saw going through the exhibit in Italy when I was 8 years old. It is a part of culture that seems to be taboo to discuss, but here it was as one of the add on attractions for a cool/cheesy tunnel ride to Pudong…

I walked around for a short time, taking more pictures of the Pearl Tower, which I think looks cool. The Lonely Planet writer, thinks it looks cheesy, but I think it looks cool. Maybe he rode the tourist tunnel back right before he wrote his essay…

Well, after that, I walked around Nanjing Liu (Road) and looked for a place to eat. I ended up eating some spicy chicken. I’m glad I hung around until after the sun went down, because at night, the street is lit up like a cross between Times Square and Vegas.

After I got tired of the hucksters, I found a place to buy a train ticket for the following morning, went back to the hotel, and slept…

Well, it’s been a couple of days since I posted. I’m starting my first night in Hangzhou, but I want to go back a couple of days to talk about touring Shanghai…  First, though, here is the link to the rest of the pictures from this day.

My friend and colleague, Zhang Wenjin, was afraid her parents and I might have problems, since they don’t speak English and I’ve studied Mandarin for only a year. While did have a few problems communicating, I think we did a great job of understanding each other. For most things, I knew enough to get across what I wanted to say, even if I really mangled the grammar… Also, as with almost all the people I see here, a smile is a great communicator!

ASIDE…There are not many people that I’ve seen here in China that won’t return a genuine, honest smile. There are a few, but most people who at first look at me with curiosity or even what looks like distrust quickly break into a broad smile when I smile and say 你好 (Nǐ hǎo, which means “hello”). It’s nice, because in big cities in the US (for example, New York City), if you smile or otherwise try to communicate with anyone, you’re immediately branded as either crazy, or a threat, or both! To be fair, in New York City, if you do that you probably are crazy, a threat, or both, and it’s not like everyone there looks alike and the strange looking foreigner pops up and says “Hello!” in English…but it’s true, nonetheless, that people here are very quick to smile…

Zhang Wenjin’s parents first took me to the Jade Buddha temple. There are “no photo” signs in the jade Buddha room, but I have to say that is the most serene sculpture of the Buddha I have seen yet. I don’t think that serenity would have been conveyed to an electronic image, even if pictures were allowed. I’m really glad we went there.

Next, we went to Yu Gardens, which was basically an old style shopping district that had more tourist bus flags and foreigners (like me) taking pictures than any other place in town.

Every time I think about complaining about tourists, etc., I always have to look in the mirror and remember that I’m there, too. It doesn’t really change the fact that it takes away from the cool atmosphere, but it does mellow me right out!

While we were at Yu Gardens, we basically ate our way through the place. I don’t know how Chinese stay so skinny, since they all seem to be able to out eat me! In any case, I didn’t want to eat anything until I was full, because then I wouldn’t want the next thing that came along that I “had to try”. To give you a brief list, I had most of a package of dofu (a snack), smelly dofu which did not smell that bad to me and did taste very good (that must have been a very strong derivative to have people on a plane throwing up after a package came unsealed, which was a news story I had found upon first hearing of “smelly dofu”).

Well, we had a famous place’s dumplings, which are made in Shanghai so you nibble off a corner, drink the soup which is inside the shell, then eat the shell with the pork stuffing.

I had a whole order of these, so I was starting to get full…we then went to another place where we had two types of steamed buns, one with a sweet red bean paste mixture and another a salty pork mixture inside. They were very good, but I had a hard time finishing them. We then went to a tea house on the top floor of one of the buildings. It was a sizeable place (it would seat about 400, I imagine) with all rosewood furniture and a stage where it appears they put on some type of Chinese opera show. We were the only ones there and had tea for about 20 or 30 minutes.

Then, it was on the road again. To this point, while we walked through the temple and Yu Gardens, we had mostly been riding. Now we started walking more. We walked through a shopping district or two, where I got to practice my “Bu yao XXX” to my heart’s content and then a LOT more…

ASIDE…Shanghai has, by far, the most and most obnoxious people trying to sell you watches, DVDs, T-shirts, etc. I’m glad the two girls in Beijing (remember?) taught me 不要,谢谢你。(Bù yào, xièxie nǐ, or “I don’t want it, thanks…”)! There, people stopped after I said it one, two, or occasionally three times. In Shanghai, however, they weren’t one product vendors. If you said no to the watches, they’d switch to asking about the next product. After saying 不要 about 5 times, they’d ask what you do want. Normally, before it got to that, I’d say…我不要,你明白吗? (Wǒ bù yào, nǐ míngbai ma?, or “I don’t want it, do you understand?”) To my surprise and relief, they would always say yes and back down when I used this line. I guess they were testing to see if I was parroting the 不要 phrase, and were surprised that I could follow up with something else, but they always said they understood and then backed off. I was waiting for the mutation that would act like I was speaking Chinese badly and continue to hassle me, but it never came…

Next Wenjin’s parents and I walked along the Bund…

ASIDE…the Bund is a group of buildings on one side of the HuangPu River that were built around 1900. I have to admit, I don’t like seeing these foreign buildings here, because they are only here because the Western powers were jerks and, after unjustly declaring war against China, forced it to open up “treaty ports”. These were areas that the other nations were ceded and where the foreigners’ laws applied. In fact, in Shanghai, there were signs that said “no Chinese or dogs allowed” in front of some of these areas. I can’t imagine how these people, who invented gunpowder, felt at having it turned into superior weapons and used against them. In fact, every time I hear the US government talking about the “war on drugs”, I just think to myself they have no idea what they’re talking about. It was actually China that fought a real war against drug imports by Great Britain (called “the Opium Wars”) and lost…the British then took control of Hong Kong and forced the Chinese to import massive quantities of opium, which naturally destroyed a good number of people’s lives. Sorry to recount such things, but it makes me ill thinking about what has been done to the Chinese people by foreigners (in addition to other Chinese) over the last 150 years, or so. I’m glad to see they are finally looking forward to a bright future!

We then went on the regular train under the river to Pudong, which is where the Pearl Tower, that building that looks like it’s right out of a 50’s science fiction flick, is.

We rode the very fast elevator up and then a second one, eventually getting to the height of 350 meters.

The characters that compose “Shànghǎi”, 上海, literally mean “above (or over) the sea”. At 350 meters (1150 ft), we were now, literally “shàng hǎi”!

We did a lot of walking around town after this, seeing where the Shanghai version of Tiananmen Square will be, complete with multiple halls for different types of arts…it looks like it will be very beautiful, indeed.

Finally, we ate dinner at a table where we were seated with another couple. The gentleman, who introduced himself to me as “Frank”, spoke some English, so we were able to communicate fairly well, even with the limited knowledge of each other’s languages. We ate chicken, which was simply chopped up with a cleaver, cooked and then served cold, a dish of mushrooms, and a container of fish that was cubed, breaded with spices. After we had finished some of this, each of us got a big bowl of veggy wonton soup (wonton soup where the wontons have vegetable filling). I could not eat everything, as I was too full!

We made our way to the train station, then to a taxi. Wenjin’s parents dropped me off at the hotel and continued in the taxi to their apartment. What a great, but exhausting day!

I arrived in Shanghai yesterday afternoon. Wendy’s father (张文进的爸爸, or Zhāng Wénjìn de bàba) met me at the airport and we rode the airport bus and then took a taxi to their home. I wasn’t prepared for the huge feast that her mother had prepared! Wow! Well, pictures are better than words….

and the famous Shanghai crab, in just the right season!…

Here we are eating the dinner…

and here is the family, including Wenjin’s parents, her older brother (哥哥 or gēge) and his wife, along with their daughter, Jennifer, who is doing very well at learning English!…

I’m going to go around Shanghai today with Wenjin’s father, then will see more of the town tomorrow before heading to Hangzhou on Friday.

Well, this is my last day in Chengdu. I went to, you guessed it, Dufu’s Thatched Cottage and Wuhou Temple. These had some nice gardens, but weren’t the historical treasure troves that were in Xi’an and Beijing. The Wuhou Temple was celebrating three men that declared themselves brothers who ruled one of the three states that existed in China in the first three centuries AD. It seemed like most of it was fairly recently built, though.

There was a recreated old style shopping street next to the temple, which is the first place I’ve seen anything calling itself anything like smelly tofu. The English name was “Tofu that has odor”. So, I tried it. It was rolled in some type of spice and then red pepper (after I shook my head, that “yes, I like that”…well, it didn’t smell bad at all, so I think it couldn’t be the real thing. I’ll try again in Shanghai.

Dufu’s cottage was a nice garden with some some of Dufu’s poems (he was a famous Chinese poet in the Tang Dynasty (618AD-907AD)). There were a lot of his poems carved in wood, done by fairly recent calligraphers. After seeing the Stone Forest in Xi’an, though, this was not very impressive to me.

But, it did have some nice gardens…

Tomorrow, on to Shanghai. See you soon