douwangle

I am happy to report that I have found a proper restaurant near my hostel in Shanghai, just in time to hardly need it anymore. It served me well last night, though, which is good. The waitress was a little surprised when I perused the menu for five minutes, then called her over to ask in Chinese, “This broccoli dish, what is it? It's broccoli, right?” I was very pleased with myself for being able to read “broccoli,” since most of the food I know how to read are meat.

 

She tried to explain to me what the broccoli dish was, but I only understood that she might had said it was vegetarian.

 

“I'm sorry, I don't understand,” I said. I say that a lot.

 

She apparently didn't speak English, and tried once more in Chinese. At one point I was able to repeat one of the words she seemed to be emphasizing, but I still had no clue what it was.

 

“I'm sorry, I don't know that. It's okay, I'll order this,” I said, pointing at the listing for the broccoli dish on the menu. The waitress looked like she had her misgivings, so I tried to explain, “I really like most Chinese food, so it should be very good.” I don't think that set her at ease, but she took my order for the mystery broccoli and some pot stickers and went away again.

 

When my food showed up, the broccoli turned out to be some broccoli in clear sauce surrounding some mushrooms and some other thing in brown sauce. The broccoli and mushrooms were delicious. The other thing had a texture like undercooked potato and was not as nice, but I had more than I could eat with the rest of my food anyway, so I was quite content.

 

As I was eating, a group of four English speakers came into the restaurant and started ordering food in a totally chaotic manner. The menu was in Chinese only, and the staff didn't speak English, so after a minute of listening to them sounding confused, I hopped up and went to ask if I could help. It turned out that while none of them could read Chinese, the one girl in the group could speak a little, so they felt that they had the situation under control. The guys seemed glad that I'd offered, but the girl looked a little like she thought I was trying to hone in on her territory, which bummed me out. I excused myself to go back to my meal as the girl continued to wrangle with their order. When I looked up later, it looked like most of their meal was chow mein, though I think I also heard her get them some kung pao chicken. To her credit, while her Chinese was extremely limited, she spoke it very confidently and did a good job of getting what she wanted. I'm sure I know many times more than she does, but I sometimes get so nervous that I avoid speaking or nobody knows what I'm saying.

 

I ate until I felt like I couldn't eat any more, forcing myself to leave behind two pot stickers and a small heap of veggies. As I was settling the bill, I noticed a trio of Chinese people at a table nearby drinking a bottle of red wine. I have literally never seen anyone order wine in a restaurant in China. This is partly a reflection of the kinds of restaurants I frequent, where the drink of choice tends to be either beer or low quality baijiu (foul-tasting cheap spirits), but wine really isn't a thing people seem to bother with in China. I'm sure any good wine is very pricey, and the wine drinkers definitely had a look that implied they were doing something important and expensive. I was very tempted to ask how the wine was, since I have been missing wine this week, but I figured I could wait two days for wine in the US.

 

Back at the hostel, I grabbed a beer and headed for the hostel restaurant, where I ran into the four anglophones from dinner. They introduced themselves as Jenna, Nick, CJ, and Matthew. We chatted for a bit, and they seemed pleasant, but because the restaurant was blasting a pirated version of Valkyrie with audio so fuzzy I initially wasn't sure it was in English, we couldn't talk very well. Before too long, I ended up excusing myself and heading up to bed.

 

Today is my last full day in Shanghai! My main goal for the day was to get a certain souvenir for my family (guys, do not get your hopes up, it is not that good), so I headed for the Yu Gardens Bazaar. The bazaar is right outside the Yu Gardens, which I visited early on, and is funny because it's built to look like it's made up of very old buildings while in fact it's entirely modern. It's still a fun area to walk around in, though. Most of the shops sell trinkets for tourists at jacked up prices, and I found the things I wanted pretty easily. I probably paid at least twice as much as I should have paid, but I was proud that I bargained to get the price lowered by a third (but then, I was buying five—can't leave Raph out!), and they weren't expensive. Filled with the thrill of a good buy, I wandered on a little and bought a couple of small framed paintings and a handbag. I bargained the prices for both down a little, though again not to non-tourist levels, but it was fun to talk to people in Chinese. The guy who sold me the handbag was a really young guy who was really friendly and energetic, but when I tried to get him to go lower, he lugubriously said, “Sixty, sixty! It's very cheap! We're friends!” which I thought was kind of delightful. He got the 60, in the end, because he is a much better bargainer than me and I wanted the bag to carry stuff home in. And at least I have made a new friend who isn't trying to take nearly as much of my money as the last ones.

 

After I was done shopping, I decided to go back to the Shanghai Museum and see if it was less crowded than the last time I tried to visit. There's no subway stop near the Yu Gardens, so while I normal person would probably have taken a cab to the museum, I walked. The walk was pretty straightforward, though not at all scenic, leading through busy neighborhoods with clothing stores, mini marts, and lots of dark, closet-sized shops where people sold small arrays of goods or repaired bikes. As I walked, a few drops of rain were falling, but not enough to get me any wetter than I already was walking through the damp Shanghai air. I was glad to reach the museum and get inside out of the humidity.

 

The museum was much calmer today than it was over the weekend, with only a few people waiting to get in. As I walked in, I noticed a sign with pictures of prohibited items and was surprised to see what looked like a bottle of water included on the list. Every museum I've been to in China allows water and usually other drinks and food inside. I even went to one museum in Hohhot that sold popsicles in the exhibit halls, which was lovely. Thus, the idea that I might have to chug my nice new bottle of water before I could go into the Shanghai Museum was shocking and sad. Happily, a closer look at the picture revealed a little flame next to the bottle, which was apparently meant to show that it was a bottle of lighter fluid or gasoline. It was gasoline that was banned from the exhibit halls, not water. All of the other prohibited items were equally dangerous, of the caliber that I would not have bothered to put them on a list of banned items for a museum because I would have assumed everyone knew they were banned.

 

At the security check for the museum, I went to put my two bags on the X-ray belt, but one of the guards stopped me and pointed to my water. He told me I had to carry it through with me, then drink it. “Damn,” I thought, “I guess it's not allowed after all.” I held the water and walked through the metal detectors. As I was waiting for my bags on the other side, another guard pointed to my water and said in English, “You drink.” I nodded and kept waiting, figuring I'd chug the water before I went into the galleries. However, the guard was insistent, and ultimately made it clear that they needed to see me drink a sip of the water. I opened it and took a sip, and the guard nodded and let me recap it and go on into the galleries with my water in my bag. Turns out, they weren't making me get rid of the water. They were checking to make sure it wasn't gasoline.

 

I really wonder if the Shanghai Museum has had issues with people trying to bring in gasoline in water bottles.

 

The Shanghai Museum was quite nice, with large halls devoted to Chinese bronzes, sculptures, ceramics, painting, calligraphy, furniture, and seals. All of the galleries had good explanatory signs in English and Chinese, and the art was presented nicely. I started in the bronze gallery, and was about to go on to the sculpture gallery when I realized I was too hungry to care about art very much. The museum is free, so I thought I might go out and get food, then come back. However, when I peeked out a window, I saw that it was pouring rain outside. After carrying my umbrella without using it for a couple of days, I left it at home today thinking it would never really rain after all. With no umbrella and a cloth bag full of souvenirs that I didn't want to get, I was stuck, so I went to the weird little museum restaurant instead.

 

The museum restaurant was occupied by a few trapped guests like me and a couple of large tables full of people who looked like they were having a banquet. The museum restaurant seemed like a pretty odd place for that, but they seemed content and had gotten their hands on some decent looking food. Everything that wasn't ridiculously overpriced looked kind of bad. I went with one of the least bad-looking cheap things, curry chicken, and sat next to the window eating it. The curry chicken was edible but pretty bad, but it was nice to sit down and watch the rain through the window of the museum restaurant, and at least the food filled me up.

 

I had to go back through security to return to the galleries, complete with another cursory sip of water. I went through the entire rest of the museum after lunch, enjoying the furniture and the paintings, but rushing through the reals because they just didn't mean much to me. When I was finished, the rain had stopped, but the air was still densely humid, which I didn't even know was possible after a big rainstorm. I walked back to the People's Park subway stop, luckily without running into any would-be scammers en route.

 

Now I'm back in the hostel for a bit longer before I head out to try to meet Erik, one of the guys I met in Xi'an who is now in Shanghai, for a late dinner. I'm happy to report that my last day in Shanghai has been a lot nicer than the previous couple, and that, so far at least, I've stayed as dry as possible.

As I left the hostel today, I realized I have been wearing the same shirt for three days in a row. Granted, after a month of traveling, my shirt options are limited, but I did mean to at least give this one a bit of a break at some point. Oh well. After my shower I'll swap it out for another.

 

Today was going to be the day I went to Hangzhou, an apparently charming little town near Shanghai with a big, lovely lake to explore. Unfortunately, the forecast for Hangzhou for both of my remaining full days in China says thunderstorms, so I may not get to go, which is a big bummer. I considered braving the thunderstorms to go today, when they were supposed to be scattered as opposed to not-scattered, but I just didn't want to spend the whole day outside in the rain, at least two hours from my hotel and dry clothes. If by some miracle the forecast for tomorrow changes, I will go. For today, though, I decided instead to go to the Jade Buddha Temple.

 

The subway ride to the Jade Buddha Temple was the worst subway experience I have had in China. The first train I took wasn't particularly full, but people pushed on and off as if they thought they wouldn't make it. At the stop where I had to switch trains, people trying to get onto the train lined up all the way across the doors as they opened so that the people inside had to shove our way out, making the whole process half as fast and twice as horrible as it could have been. One man held his tiny baby in front of him like a shield as he pushed in at the front of the pack, which made me really angry. I got off the train alright, and the man with the baby got on with no more than the usual few minor bumps (the baby shield did not keep people from running into the man because they had to run into people to get off the train; at least they tried not to bump him hard), but I couldn't believe he wasn't more careful.

 

I was going to change trains at that stop, but I couldn't find a way to the other line that didn't involve turning in my ticket and needing to buy a new one. I resigned myself to the extra three kuai and set off for the transfer. The transfer station was at the Shanghai Railroad Station, and it was completely packed, with lots of people toting large luggage. One guy with several bags dangling from a bamboo pole over his shoulder (in Shanghai, in 2009) temporarily blocked all foot traffic by turning perpendicular to the flow and just standing there for a moment. I'm not even sure where the throngs of people pouring through the transfer passageway came from, since my own train wasn't that full, but it was mobbed. The crowd moved along slowly, with a few impatient folks pushing past one person only to have to push past the person beyond them. Other people cut through the flow of bodies at odd diagonals, yielding to no-one unless absolutely forced to. I found the whole thing immensely frustrating, but tried to go with the flow as well as I could, noticing partway through the long transfer tunnel that my hands had unconsciously tensed into fists.

 

When we made it to the stop for the other line, I still had to buy my new ticket to get back on the subway. I headed for the ticket vending machines, pushing my way through the packed station, only to stop in mild horror when I saw the ticket lines. Usually, when I've bought tickets for the subway in China, I've had to contend with five or so people arranged in rough lines in front of two or three vending machines. While there may be a little bit of confusion and the occasional cutting, it's generally a matter of less than a minute before I get to the machine and buy my ticket. The ticket lines under Shanghai Station were something else entirely. While there were multiple machines running, each had a rangy line of five or more people in front of it, and additional people fanned out to the sides, looking like they would seize any chance to leap in front of the people waiting. Everybody involved looked grouchy, and the lines showed no visible movement. Unwilling to stand in that mob just to get one stop closer to my destination, I decided to walk.

 

The problem with walking is that Shanghai Station is off the northern edge of the map in my guidebook. I knew that one street nearby would get me back on the map and to where I was going, but once I got up above ground, I couldn't find it in the confusion outside the train station, and the only map to be had on the walls nearby was in Chinese only. As I was beginning to comb the area looking for a street I would recognize, I nearly ran into an available cab. I started to walk around it to keep looking, but saw that I had been offered an easier option and took the cab the rest of the way to the temple for 11 yuan, relieved to be free of the throngs and vowing never to return to Shanghai Station if at all possible.

 

Outside the Jade Buddha Temple, a few people were milling around and apparently bickering over something. As I looked at them and wondered if they were going in and if I should wait for them to move before I tried to get in myself, a slick-looking man greeted me in English and told me where the ticket booth was and tried to chat with me as I ordered my ticket. When I was done, he told me my Chinese was very good, although all he had heard me say was “Hello, one please.” (Actually, there's not even a “please” when you say it in Chinese, but the translation looks weird without it.) I didn't know how to say in Chinese that he'd hardly heard me me anything well enough for it to have the impact I wanted, so I ignored that. He soldiered on and invited me to his tea house “right near here, to relax after your visit.” Because he was still speaking English and I didn't know any Chinese that was emphatic enough, I switched to English and said “No, I don't want to. I've been to tea houses.” I'm not sure if he picked up my dark and jaded tone, but he did stop trying to talk to me right away, so that was cool. I left him and the knot of loiterers behind and made my way into the temple.

 

I didn't write up my visit to the Lama Temple in Beijing (yet!), so I can't compare the Jade Buddha Temple to it and expect anybody to understand. However, I will quickly say that the Jade Buddha Temple is much, much smaller and less elaborate than the Lama Temple, but nearly as full of incense smoke. I was surprised by how little there was to see inside. A front hall contained two golden Buddhas, with personifications of North, South, East and West along the walls. The Buddhas were the usual, but the four guardians were a particularly nice set, very expressive and individual. I picked my way around Chinese visitors leaving offerings of incense as delicately as possible to get a good view of the hall. Unfortunately, I wasn't sure if photos were allowed, so I didn't get a shot of the awesome Guardians.

 

The second hall in the temple had some more Buddhas. Since there were no explanatory signs anywhere in the temple, I can't say for sure what they were, but three Buddhas in a row usually means they are the past, present and future Buddhas, so I assume they were those. Behind the Buddhas was a carved mountain with lots of small carved figures on it, which seems to be a frequent feature in these temples. Other temples with explanatory signs have identified the figures as Arhats, but I'm not exactly sure what an Arhat is other than that it looks like a person and sometimes has flash mobs on mountains.

 

Beyond the second hall, a building that looked more like a regular old building and less like a temple building sported signs about the jade Buddha. There are actually two jade Buddhas at the Jade Buddha Temple, a reclining one and a sitting one, but only the sitting one is worthy of its own admission fee. I paid for my additional ticket and made my way into the ordinary-looking building, past a few gilded temple accessories in cases (with no signs in English and only a couple of tiny cards in handwritten Chinese, I had no idea what they were for, but they were quite pretty) and some framed photos of people with captions in Chinese. The photos showed notable people visiting the Jade Buddha Temple. While most of them weren't very notable to me, I'm pretty sure that one photo with a caption dated from the 80s showed Nancy Reagan.

 

The jade Buddha was on the second floor of the building, in a room with an ornate ceiling with tiny gilded figures seated in niches. It was set on an altar 20 feet beyond a railing that kept most visitors back from the altar and the three prayer stools in front of it. Quiet music that I found at once restful and slightly cheesy played over hidden speakers as people moved through the passageway between the railing and the wall, some stopping to bow to the Buddha or buy offerings of lamp oil. Despite the distance and the odd music, the jade Buddha was captivating. It was carved from cloudy white jade, with accents made from gold and jewels. The jade had been polished to a shine. The Buddha's eyes had been painted black and the lips red, and the expression carved onto its face was serene. The statue wasn't the most lifelike I've seen by far, but the hands, feet and face gave a sense of expressiveness that was unique and pleasant.

 

Two female attendants in button down shirts behind the railing in the jade Buddha room were selling offerings of lamp oil to visitors. Visitors would hold the oil in its bottle and bow three times to the Buddha, then hand it to the attendants, who would pour it into a chalice on the altar. Many of the visitors bought lamp oil. Others crammed bills into an offering box in front of the railing. I stood and watched for a very long time, glancing between the visitors and the Buddha on its altar. One group of three visitors was allowed through the barrier to offer incense to the Buddha from the three low prayer stools in front of the altar. I watched them bow holding the incense and wondered who they were or what they had donated that had gotten them through the barrier. A few minutes after they left, two monks came in, an older one and a younger one. The old monk stood by as the young monk sank to his knees and then bowed so deeply he nearly flattened himself into the floor. The attendants brought him a stick of incense and he bowed three more times, going from standing to folded up on the floor with each bow. I thought he looked very humble and pious as he did so. Most of the other visitors just bent at the waist to bow, though one older woman also bowed with her knees and forehead on the floor and stayed there for a minute, very still. The space between the railing and the wall was narrow enough that people could hardly get by her, but luckily the room was never crowded.

 

I watched a couple of French-speaking families surreptitiously take a video of the motionless Buddha figure, despite the fact that it was clearly forbidden in English, Chinese, and pictograms. When they filed on, I was left alone with the attendants, I would have been happy to look at the jade Buddha and enjoy the quiet room for a bit longer, but I had stood there so long that I felt like they were beginning to look at me funny, so after a few more moments, I wandered on as well, feeling refreshed after not having been swarmed or elbowed for some time.

 

After the first jade Buddha, the second one was a letdown. The reclining jade Buddha was a much smaller figure and was located in a second-floor souvenir shop at the back of the temple. It sat in an attractive case, surrounded on all sides by jade, ceramics, and calligraphy scrolls for sale at exorbitant prices. Prayer stools stood in front of it, but I couldn't imagine anybody praying to the small Buddha as the shopkeepers looked on and a Chinese pop song saying “Kiss me baby” in English played over the speakers.

 

Downstairs from the reclining jade Buddha was another, much larger reclining Buddha figure. It looked like a much larger model of the small Buddha upstairs, and I didn't think it was made from real jade. However, people were kneeling in front of it in the shop where it reclined, even as a calligraphy seller ten feet away hollered out to me in English about how beautiful and antique his wares were (he was painting one “antique” as he spoke—I hope he just doesn't know what the English word means) and I carefully ignored him.

 

It was a pretty long walk from the temple to the subway stop where I had planned to get off, and a couple of times as I walked to it, I thought I was lost. However, in the end I found it with no problem and got back on the train. I decided to change trains twice instead of once to avoid having to change at Shanghai Station again. The trip was more or less without incident, though at the first station where I had to change trains, I was surprised to see crowds of people backing up at the top of the escalator down to the platform. As the crowd moved forward, I saw that the issue was that the down escalator had been closed for cleaning in the middle of the day on a weekend, forcing hundreds of people to walk down the stairs instead. As I made my slow way down the stairs, blocked in by people on all sides, I watched a crew of four uniformed escalator cleaners nonchalantly rubbing down the metal bits of the stopped escalator with rags.

 

The only Chinese food I have found in my neighborhood is the cold noodle stand, and I can't have that every day. Instead, I had McDonald's french fries and chocolate cake from a bakery for my lunch. I will Chinese food with vegetables for my dinner once I get this posted, I swear.

 

I'll end the post with some very quick revised impressions of Shanghai. I retract anything I said about people being about the same as in Beijing and Xi'an. In the past couple of days, people in Shanghai have struck me as more pushy and impolite than in the other Chinese cities I've visited. I've also run into attempted scam after attempted scam, which is something that can happen in Beijing, but I never once actually had any issue or even ran into someone trying to catch me. People here have been making me as mad as people in Beijing did in 2005 (but did not this visit), which either means that people in Beijing have gotten better or that I have gotten more tolerant but the Shanghainese are even worse than the people in Beijing. I actually think it's a bit of both, based on the fact that I remember people in Beijing being more impatient and inconsiderate in 2005 than there were on this visit, but also that there is not a lot of reason why people in Xi'an would have been significantly Olympicized but they didn't bug me. Part of this impression may just be where I've been and my mood, but I do think there's at least some truth to it. It bums me out that the richest and most developed city in China is so full of selfish assholes, and I certainly hope that this doesn't mean that more of China will be like this as the country gets richer.

 

One quick note in case anybody misunderstands my intent: I don't think that Chinese people in Shanghai or any other city are inherently bad or unpleasant people. I just think that based on their recent history they have reason to feel like they need to make their own way in the world and that hesitating to grab something due to compassion for strangers can actually hurt them, and that they have no incentive to be good to people they don't know. In this environment, there's a really strong sense of every man for himself, which is upsetting to people who have been trained to think that that's not acceptable. Unfortunately, as long as a few people behave badly, it's really hard to make the larger group change. I know that I am a decent and compassionate person, but encountering even a few truly unpleasant people in a sea of neutral people make me feel like I am surrounded by millions and millions of people who don't feel compassion for me and are as likely to hurt me as help me, which zaps my sense of general empathy pretty fast. I remember feeling exactly this way when I was living in Beijing in 2005, and I don't like it, but I also feel like doggedly trying to follow the rules I've been taught will just mean I get hit by mopeds and elbowed off subway trains. Of course someone who lives their whole life in this environment will absorb it to some extent.

 

This still doesn't mean I want to spend a lot more time in Shanghai. I will stick with Beijing, where people are just as likely to run me over, but will at least only try to sell me overpriced stuff rather than pretending to be my friend to take my money, and where people line up to get on the subway at least half the time. And where I can always find a good plate of yu xiang eggplant if I want it—what the crap, Shanghai??

Today has been a bit of an epic of frustration, though I can't say it's been all bad. I will tell you why, but first just a bit about yesterday.

 

Yesterday, as planned, I moved from my hotel to the Shanghai City Central Hostel to save money and try to meet more new friends. The name “City Central” is an extreme misnomer—the hostel is actually quite far from the middle of the city. However, it is mercifully close to a subway stop, which ends up meaning that it's more accessible than The H was. The hostel itself is more like a budget hotel that also has dorm rooms, from the look of things. Lots of the guests are much older than me and are likely staying in the private rooms, with maybe half the people I've seen looking like actual hostel guests, and even most of those looking like they aren't in to mood to meet and greet with other travelers. This is a bummer because half the reason I came back to a hostel is to try to meet people, but now I think I might not meet anyone I get along with here. The facilities are pleasant, though, and it's cheap and even includes breakfast (though it's not as varied and nice as the breakfast at the H).

 

Once I had checked into my room and met my very quiet but not unpleasant roommate, I considered going out to look at the city, but decided to grab a snack first. I wandered around the neighborhood, which mostly seems pretty normal and residential, not as Shanghaiesque as the downtown, until I found a cold noodle stand. I got some cold noodles with peanuts, cucumbers, bean sprouts, a tasty sauce, and something that looked and kind of tasted like bits of diced sponge. Except for the sponge, it was really delicious. It was also probably exactly the kind of street food tourists are not supposed to buy, but it's been a day since I had it and I feel just fine, so I may have some more this afternoon.

 

As I walked back to the hostel wondering if I was up for some more touristing, it started to rain. As far as I was concerned, that sealed the deal, so I stayed in and read and wrote for the afternoon. I even stayed in the hostel for dinner and got a margarita pizza from the cafe for about twice as much as I usually pay for a regular meal. I feel a little lame about it, but it was so easy and cool and dry to stay in, and felt so hard and wet and horrible to go out.

 

I went to sleep early but slept badly because my hostel bed is very nearly as hard as a board and I felt like my bones were clanking against it all night. I woke up and got my free breakfast of you tiao (but cold ones! not ideal!) and a steamed bun with veggies, then headed out for the day.

 

My first stop was the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium, which I picked because I was still grumpy about ruminating over whether I had been tricked the other day and which sounded like a simple pleasure that would cheer me up. Also, despite the rain yesterday, it is so appallingly humid today that basically felt like I was swimming anyway, so might as well go look at fish. In fact, the aquarium was lovely, and was the best part of my day. They had lots of really neat fish, with fish from China and an exhibit on why we should save sharks from overfishing (with gruesome photos of “finning” alongside a tank where kids could pat tiny little sharks—the families mostly ignored the content and went in for the petting zoo, but I suppose that helps the shark protection agenda, too) followed by lush exhibits of fish from all over the world. The highlight of the visit was the long moving walkway (called a “travelator,” which I love) that went through various tanks full of big and neat-looking fish. I was lucky enough to get to the big tanks during feeding time, so I watched two divers swim around with the fish, pausing to dispense food and wave at the visitors through the glass.

 

The only downsides to the aquarium were the other visitors and the gift shop. The other visitors were mostly young Chinese families, though a saw a few couple there on dates as well. The problem with the visitors is that they were loud and inconsiderate, constantly getting in each other's way. Some of the kids ran around screaming with no attempts by the parents to get them to quiet down. Some of the parents placed their kids right in front of every single fish tank and then slowly took pictures while everyone else walked around or waited to look at the fish. One family took multiple photos on the travelator, walking backwards on it to stay in one spot and blocking everyone who was coming through, despite the fact that there was a non-moving bit right to the side of the belt. Leaning too far over some of the tanks set off an alarm with a recorded voice asking people to stand back. When I set it off once by accident, I quickly blushed and retreated. A few tanks later, a couple perched their son on the edge of a tank, completely ignoring the resulting alarm as they took pictures of him teetering over the water. As for the gift shop, it was the most cynical thing I ever saw. To exit the museum, visitors had to go through the gift shop, as well as a very expensive fast food cafeteria and a game room with grocery store-style coin-op rides that had nothing to do with the aquarium or even aquatic life. Only about half of the stuff at the gift shop had anything to do with the aquarium, either. The rest was just random, overpriced toys, including LEGOs, art supplies, and large stuffed animals of a weird cartoon sheep that is apparently very popular here. I pitied the parents who all had to drag their tired, pampered only children through this gift shop as I wended my way out.

 

When I got back outside, the weather was so totally oppressive that I briefly considered just heading back to my hostel to hide from the humidity. However, my time is limited, and I wanted to try to fit in a visit to Jinmao Tower, which is supposed to have great views of the city. I set off walking toward where I thought it was only to get rather lost in the muggy streets of Pudong. None of the street names on my map matched any of the ones I was seeing, but I walked on for a bit trying and filing, with rising ire, to find the second-tallest building in Shanghai. Finally, after a few arduous minutes (seriously, you would not believe how humid it is here), I spotted the tower behind some buildings, back near where I had come from. An small cloud was speared on the tower partway up, which is a sign of the humidity more than the tower's height. Growling a little, I headed for it. Unfortunately, as I got close, I was blocked off by the makeshift walls set up around the construction that has taken over Pudong. To get to the tower, I would need to walk the long way around, back by the subway station. My resolve failed me, and I got on the subway instead, heading for the Shanghai Museum where I hoped I could be inside and stay cool.

 

To get to the Shanghai Museum, I had to go through Renmin Park, which is where I met Ling Ling and Carly the other day. As I walked into the park, a different guy and two girls came up to me and started talking to me in a pattern that I recognized all too well, but in a considerably less convincing manner than the girls had the other day. I chatted with them for a moment before excusing myself to head to the museum. They actually tried to talk me out of going to the museum, but of course I was not going to go to another tea house, so after a minute I prevailed and left them looking a little miffed behind me. It was interesting to me to see how much worse the new girls were at the scam—of course, my eyes have been opened by experience, but that wasn't the only difference. Ling Ling and Carly had interesting stories about teaching kindergarten and eating water lilies and stuff, but these girls were very dull and just told me I was beautiful and that I spoke good Chinese, which most of the Chinese people I have met have said, including at least a couple who weren't trying to sell me anything. I left feeling a little relieved—uncertainty bugs me, so I am glad not to have to wonder any more. Also, while I am annoyed I got scammed, I am glad that at least I got scammed by people who were interesting. Of course, if I had met today's girls first, I would probably still have my $75, but things could be worse than they are.

 

As I headed for the museum, I ran into a group of Chinese girls taking a picture who asked me to take one of them. As I handed the camera back, they started chatting with me, asking where I was from and telling me I spoke great Chinese. They suggested we go to a tea house, and I figured that I might as well, so off we went.

 

No, I'm kidding. Really, though, I did take a photo for some girls, and they did start chatting with me and said they were from Xi'an and asked me about my trip and what I planned to do. When I said I was going to the museum, they recommended against it because it was very busy, but I said that I had to go today or I would never get to go, so after a second, they told me how to get to the front entrance and I was on my way. As I walked away, I looked back at them, only to see one of them watching me go. She managed a perky little wave, but I'm sure she was really just waiting for me to leave before they set up another pretend photo.

 

At this point, something clicked into place in my brain. All the people who have approached me like this have said they are tourists. It worked really well on me once because I have an idea of what tourists are like and I inherently trust and identify with travelers. I assume that the girls from Qing Dao and the family from Xi'an from the other day (who invited me to an acrobatics show, by the way, but I declined because I didn't want to go to an acrobatics show, not because I had any idea at the time that they were not really a family from Xi'an) are not dangerous and savvy locals, whom I know not to follow around. I'd also never heard of scammers posing as tourists, so I never thought to worry about them. It's very clever. But there is one thing I should have thought of that would have kept me safe: I know about Chinese tourists. I have run into (sometimes literally) tons and tons of them in Beijing and Xi'an. They are not nice to strangers and they do not want to be my friend or invite me to things. They travel in packs and keep to themselves and elbow me or talk about me if I get in their way. Maybe this sounds harsh, but it's true and it's fine—most tourists don't travel to make friends, especially with strangers in the park who are not from the place they are visiting. I should have thought of this, but because I am traveling alone and because other backpackers will very naturally strike up a conversation just like this with no ulterior motive, I never considered it. Now I know, though, and so do you!

 

PRO TIP: If you want company and some Chinese people decide to be your friend all of a sudden and invite you somewhere, counter-invite them somewhere free for a hour or two and see if they still want to be your friend. If they do, still do not go to a tea house.

 

Unfortunately, one thing that the girls claiming to be from Xi'an said was true: the museum was packed and there was a line out the door. I gaped at the long line for a moment, then gave up and went home, unwilling to stand in the humidity for however long it was going to take to get in. Luckily, I have a little bit of time on my last morning in town to handle overflow activities, so I will probably try to do the museum then.

 

Now I am back at my hostel. My roommate has left, so for now, I have the room to myself, which is okay. I would rather have no roommate than a roommate who doesn't talk to me, but I would rather have interesting roommates that none. At some point soon I'll need to venture back out to get some dinner, but I feel like I am losing the motivation to go find places to eat on my own. That said, I know how sad i will be to have no good Chinese food when I am back in the states, so I'll need to just force myself to find things for now so I can eat as much as possible.

You may have noticed that my last update about Shanghai didn't actually include me doing anything very Shanghai-related. I've been extremely sleepy recently, not sure if a few Chinese germs have finally breached my immune defenses, or if I'm just tired from lots of walking and thinking, or if it's some combination of both, but it sure did feel good to crash in my hotel for an evening. After a couple of hours of wakefulness caused by my silly nap, I woke for the second time around 8 on Thursday morning, feeling a bit disoriented bacause there was no outside light in my room.

 

The free breakfast at my hotel included Western-style breakfast like eggs and sausages and toast, but I'm not a huge fan of those things. They also had a little cereal, but it was limited to kinds that get soggy so fast they aren't really worth eating. Luckily, half the food was Chinese breakfast food, which I like very much. A lot of Chinese breakfast food is food that you might have for lunch or dinner, too (in fact, I think the really traditional Chinese breakfast is leftovers from dinner with rice or rice porridge), but it tends to be pretty light, mild stuff. I had some fried rice, some tasty bok choy, a steamed bun full of veggies and maybe something else, and a cup of juice and a cup of coffee. Yum!

 

After breakfast, I headed out for the day. On the trek to the subway station, I passed a girl wearing a shirt that said “BOYS NEED YOGA TOO!” Not sure what the agenda behind that statement is, but I enjoyed it.

 

I took the subway to People's Park, which is a big park in the center of Shanghai that is supposed to be very nice. I had no firm agenda, though I was thinking I might go visit the nearby Shanghai Museum, which has a lot of neat-sounding Chinese art. However, as I headed into the park, a Chinese girl who was also walking in greeted me in English, and when I responded, she and her friend came over to talk to me. They introduced themselves as Ling Ling and Carly. I introduced myself as Joanna, of course, and while I think they did hear me properly, they started calling me “An Na,” which is the Chinese translation of Anna and not a name that any Chinese people have, though I hear they think it is very pretty. They asked where I was from and told me they were from Qing Dao and were visiting Ling Ling's sister in Shanghai. When I mentioned that I spoke Chinese, they switched to mostly Chinese, heavily sprinkled with English when I didn't understand things. Their English was definitely better than my Chinese, but I was content to use what they used except when my Chinese failed me.

 

Ling Ling and Carly wandered on into the park and I followed. As we chatted, Ling Ling (who was the much more talkative of the two), pointed to a man five paces ahead of us whom I hadn't noticed before because he was far enough ahead that I never would have guessed he was with them. She said that he was her sister's friend and was showing them around the city. The next stop was a tea house, and she asked if I would like to come. I said maybe, but that I wanted to see the park first, but since that was their plan anyway, I wandered on through the park with them. We stopped by a pond with water lilies and orange carp and Carly told me all the parts of the water lily that you can eat (several, apparently, but I'm not sure quite what they are except that one is under the leaves) while Ling Ling told me that the Chinese for “goldfish” is “jin yu,” literally “gold fish.” She also said that she was an English teacher for kindergarteners.

 

Ling Ling and Carly asked me lots of questions (“Do you have a boyfriend?” “Do you like little kids?” “Do you like Chinese food?” “Do you speak any other languages?”) while the man wandered on in silence ahead of us and we followed. At first I thought he was annoyed or just generally antisocial, but maybe he was just focused on navigating because once we got to the tea house he started trying to talk to me. Unfortunately, while he was very pleasant and patient, his accent was strange to me and I had a really hard time understanding him. He didn't speak nearly as much English as the girls, and what he did speak was so accented that I struggled with it as I did with his Chinese, so Ling Ling ended up having to translate what he said to me about half the time.

 

As for the tea house itself, when we arrived, we were ushered into a tiny room with a small table with chairs around three sides. A huge set of shelves stacked with tea boxes covered one wall, and a lone, framed picture of the Qianlong Emperor hung on the other wall. The table held a wide wooden platform with a drain in it, with small teapots and teacups set to each side. In front of the platform a bunch of jars of tea were arrayed in a line. Once we had gone inside and sat down, a pert little woman in a green silk jacket stepped behind the table and started talking to us.

 

As with the man in our group, I understood basically nothing the pert little woman said. Maybe it's some kind of Shanghainese accent? I don't know, but Ling Ling ended up translating most of it into mostly-English for me, which was helpful. The woman showed us a menu and I was shocked by the prices, which had each type of tea costing more than I usually pay for a meal, but I figured I could pay it if I had to, and I didn't want to leave. I also couldn't read much other than the prices on the menu, so I sort of nodded and passed it along the row. Once everyone had had a look, the little woman behind the table began brewing some tea. The brewing process was more complicated than when I make tea (put tea in container, add water) and involved her pouring a fair amount of water and maybe tea down the drain in the platform on the table and moving tea from container to container.

 

We tasted six types of tea in total, with the pert little woman narrating each in fast Chinese such that I caught only bits of it and Ling Ling and Carly translating into a mix of English and slower Chinese for me. Between the language barrier and the fact that I know nothing about tea, I can't remember all of them, though I remember some. One was green tea with ginseng, one was a fruit tea that was red and sweet like juice, one was a black tea with rose, I think, and the final tea was a flower tea where a ball of dry leaves and petals dropped in water bloomed as it got wet into a tiny leaf basket full of flowers. All of the different teas were delicious, and it was interesting to drink them and hear about the purported health benefits of each type of tea—one type was meant to be good for the vision, one for the mind, one for dark circles under the eyes, and so on. There were also special actions for each type of tea. For one type, we were meant to put the cup in front of our eyes, another was meant to be held a certain way, and at one point, the tea house attendant took out a funny little figurine that looked like a three-legged frog with colored pins stuck in its back and poured some tea over it. We were supposed to touch the pins for good luck, with each one bringing a different type of luck. Ling Ling said one of them was for children, but she didn't know which one, so she pawed at all of them a few times just in case.

 

I was surprised that my companions kept talking to me and asking questions even when the attendant was talking about the tea. She seemed a bit miffed about it, but mostly just kept on talking. I guess they could understand most of what she said without trying too hard, unlike me, though, and they kept telling me highlights of what was going on.

 

Once we had tasted all the different teas, the attendant brought out some boxes and a price list so we could buy some tea. The other girls each picked a medium tin, which cost a couple hundred yuan to fill. I picked a small tin, which was cheaper but still very, very expensive by Chinese standards. I couldn't believe they were so nonchalant about spending that much money. When the bill came, just my share of the tasting and the small box of tea came to 500 kuai, with theirs even higher. That's about $75, so nothing I couldn't afford, but really a lot of money for China. For comparison, I spend 15 to 30 kuai for dinner at an unfancy restaurant and 120 kuai for dinner at a fairly fancy one. Of course, the cost of things varies a lot more in China than in the US—while with food and other cheap things, one or two kuai have the buying power of a dollar in the US, for top-tier things, things will cost as much in China as they do in the US on an absolute scale, with about 7 kuai to the dollar.

 

In the back of my mind as we settled up the bill was the memory of the tea house scams that are apparently prevalent in Beijing. The scams play out thus: a Chinese person approaches an American traveler and claims to be an art student. They invite the American to an art gallery show or tea house and tell them it will be free, but then present them with a huge bill and threaten police action if they don't pay. I really don't think this is what was going on in my case, since the whole thing would have had to be a very elaborate hoax, and it wouldn't make sense to show me the menu with prices clearly printed on it if they wanted to trick me into paying for things I didn't want. They also gave me their contact info, and while I suppose it could all be part of the scam, it seems like an unnecessary addition if it was only for show. Above and beyond that, they seemed really nice and genuine, though I hear people always do when they are scamming you, too. At any rate, it's just the cost that had me wondering a little. Everything else pointed to them being legit. Since it's over and done with, though, I suppose it's just as well not to worry about it and focus on the interesting, though expensive, experience.

 

As we finished up at the tea shop, Ling Ling and Carly gave me their email addresses and Carly's phone number and told me to get in touch if I was ever in Qing Dao, or if I ran into any issues in Shanghai. I gave them my info as well and said they were welcome to look me up if they came to Michigan (I think I am off the hook on that one, but it would be neat if it happened). As we walked through the city, the man (poor man, I wish I had caught his name) rattled off places he thought I should visit in Shanghai. He mentioned that there was a foreign bookstore nearby, and when I said I wanted to go, we changed course and he led me there. As I browsed books on learning Chinese, Ling Ling noticed that it was time for them to go meet her sister, so they asked if I would be alright by myself and then headed off, reminding me to get in touch if I ended up in their area.

 

Once they had left, I bought a book on Chinese radicals and set off walking towards the Bund, which was meant to be a very interesting and scenic part of the city. Unfortunately, because of the massive amounts of construction along the river, there wasn't a lot to see and the area was hard to navigate because the parts by the river were barricaded off. I took a photo for a family from Xi'an who were visiting Shanghai and chatted with them in Chinese a little bit. They asked me to take off my sunglasses, and when I did, they gasped a little and said I was very beautiful. When I asked for a recommendation of where to go, they suggested the Yu Gardens, so I wandered on down towards that area. I was getting hungry, so I picked up a fried chicken wing en route from a street vendor. I don't even really like fried chicken, but it was fine. Look at how travel broadens the horizons!

 

The Yu Gardens are a walled off park with ancient buildings that used to belong to some rich imperial official. They are set in what is now a very touristy part of town, with lots of little shops in buildings built recently to look very ancient and quaint. It was strange to see a Starbucks next to a Dairy Queen next to a dumpling restaurant, all in a Chinese style building with swooping eaves. I was still hungry and wanted something cheap after spending so much in the morning (the more I think about it, the more I think it really might have been a scam, which is bumming me out, but of course I have no way to know, and anyway, what can you do), so I found a dumpling place. The menu was all in Chinese, but that was fine for me because I have eaten a lot of dumplings in my time and know how to order them. I think it meant I was the only foreigner to come in there in a while, though, which was kind of neat. One guy very obviously did a double take and then pointed me out to his wife as they walked past me sitting there eating my dumplings.

 

After my lunch, I went on to the Yu Gardens. Despite being surrounded on all sides by extremely busy, touristy shops, the gardens themselves were surprisingly calm and pleasant. They were also beautifully designed, with a very nice blend of of buildings and nature. The buildings were more sedately colored than the ones I saw in Beijing and actually looked fairly different, though still very Chinese. The surrounding grounds were obviously man made, but somehow contrived to look mostly natural. We were allowed into many of the small buildings, most of which had been furnished with period furniture to give an idea of how the garden buildings would have looked when they were in use. Every direction I looked in the gardens, the view was pretty, and in most cases any random vista was composed as well as a painting. I took a massive number of photos, and I hope that at least a few of them capture how pleasant it was. I highly recommend them to all people who find themselves in Shanghai. Just as I was finishing a full round of the gardens, a large tour group of American teenagers showed up and started clogging up the tiny garden passageways. Thankful that they hadn't come any earlier, I fled.

 

Because my hotel was so far from the subway, it made as much sense for me to walk and take the ferry back as take the subway, so I set off towards the river from the Yu Gardens area. On my way, I passed through some much less touristy areas with people selling household items and cheap snacks instead of Haagen Dazs, which was refreshing. As I walked by a park, an older man on the other side of the park fence called out to me, “Hello?” I looked at him. “Hello! Yes! Good!” he continued, and he gave me a feisty thumbs-up. It was a little bit lecherous, but it was also funny. I reached the river a ways south of where I had been earlier, but it was still blocked off. The only views to be had were views of mostly-demolished buildings near the river bank, which reminded me of the intro to Shanghai's property seizures during my visit to Harvard. I wondered if people used to live there, and where they were now.

 

Luckily for my trip home, access to the river ferry was still open, so I went down to the ferry stop and got a plastic ferry token for .5 yuan, which is basically not even money at all. I tossed the token into the fare collection box and wandered out onto the dock, only to be joined shortly by a mass of Chinese people on motorcycles, mopeds, and bikes. One man, on a partially-enclosed three-wheeled contraption, stared at me so hard as we waited that I moved back a bit to be out of his line of sight. I'm pretty sure he was also talking about me to his friends, but I think it was in Shanghainese because I didn't understand a word.

 

When the ferry showed up, I watched the doors open and a horde of motorbikes stream off in a rather startling manner. Once they were off, the boarding gate opened and the various small motor vehicles waiting with me revved up their engines and streamed onboard. A few other pedestrians and I picked our way through the throng and I got a seat on top of a box of life jackets. It was cool on the water, and I got a good view of Pudong from the boat as we made the short crossing. On the other side, the bikes roared on out, streaming around me as I walked up to the street. One guy on a moped almost hit a woman walking because he was impatient, but he stopped just short and all was well.

 

Despite my lengthy sleep, I was really tired that evening. I almost couldn't get myself out of the room to eat dinner, but by late evening I was hungry enough that I knew I should just go. I wandered for a bit and nearly got hit by a moped that roared up to me honking, just because everyone honks so much in China that I never assume it applies to me or should be taken seriously anymore. When I snapped out of it and saw the moped just a few feet away, I was really frightened for a moment, but the guy dodged me just fine. I glowered after him wondering why he couldn't stop properly. He glowered back at me as he zipped away, probably annoyed that he'd had to slow down.

 

Everything I passed looked either untenably sketchy or stupidly overpriced, but I finally found a pretty cheap Taiwanese fast food place. I got Taiwanese fried noodles, which are basically the same as regular fried noodles, but tasty and with enough bits of vegetable to feel like they have a little nutritional value. They also gave me a bowl of mild but tasty soup. with seaweed and strips of egg that I thought were noodles in it. The egg was tasteless and I ignored it, but the soup was nice, and I ate most of the seaweed. After I finished, I headed back to my room to work on an update, but fell asleep before I finished it.

Hello from Shanghai, where the air is thick and the buildings are tall, but mostly covered in scaffolds!

I came here from Xi'an, which turned out to be a mostly-lovely city that I will talk about more in backdated post at some point (or so I tell myself). I won't say much about Xi'an for now other than to say that in many ways it was a lot like Beijing, but a bit more so. Shanghai feels very, very different.

I took a plane to Shanghai. The Shanghai airport seemed rather big, but didn't look especially interesting or different from the nine other airports I have been on this trip (except for the ones in Vanuatu, but they are the different ones, of course; also, yeah, nine: San Francisco, LA, Nadi, Port Vila, Pentecost, Brisbane, Singapore, Beijing, and Xi'an). However, to get from the airport to the city, I got to take a neat thing called the Maglev train. The Maglev train is a train that is apparently levitated by magnets that can go exceptionally fast. My guidebook says it is the fastest you can travel without flying. While it can hit maximum speeds of 450 kilometers per hour (which is a lot even in real units--279mph), for some reason, they limit the speed to 300 kph these days.

I waited for the Maglev train in the airport, surrounded by mostly Chinese people. I watched a man who looked like he was in his 60s and was accompanied by a woman not much older than me. Both were Chinese, and they looked like a couple, though as I eavesdropped on them it sounded from his tone like he thought he was imparting very sage advice about something. When the train pulled up, some of the waiting passengers took pictures of it, which leads me to think that a lot of them were tourists like me. People in Shanghai are not any better than people in the rest of China about lining up, but the train wasn't full, so everyone got a seat.

While I thought the Maglev train might feel scarily fast or otherwise dangerous, it actually just felt like a regular train, more or less. The acceleration was gentle and the ride was very smooth (thanks to magnets, I guess). The main differences between it and normal trains that I noticed were that the speed, indicated on a lighted board at the front of the car, hovered between 300 and 301 kph, and that the track was banked on corners, which made the turns feel more like flying than riding a train. It was also blessedly quick--it took maybe 10 minutes to get from the airport to the city. After I had hefted my bag off the train, I paused to get a picture of the train before it zipped away. As I did, one of my fellow passengers paused to get a picture of me. I genuinely have no idea why a dude would want a photo of me in my hiking backpack taking a photo, my face almost entirely obscured by the camera, but now there is at least one dude in the world with just such a photo, and I hope it will serve him well. Honestly, I wish he had asked before taking the photo, but at the time I was too surprised to ask him not to, plus it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

From the train, I went on to the subway (very similar to the one in Beijing, right down to the ads on the little built-in TV screens), then a rather long walk to my hotel. The hotel isn't near any subway stop, but I was feeling too cheap after an expensive plane ride to bother with a cab, so I walked.

The upside of walking is that I got a decent little tour of Pudong, the area of the city where my hotel is and where a lot of the fancy skyscrapers are. Shanghai looked very different from Beijing and the other parts of China I have been to. The buildings were tall and modern and very shiny, and huge, glamorous ads were posted everywhere. A lot of the major intersections had tunnels and bridges for pedestrians, and when they didn't, most of the cars seemed to follow the traffic laws I am used to and I felt moderately safe crossing the street. though there were still moments when I had to try to hustle, backpack and all, out of the way of an oncoming moped.

The people also looked different from the people in the rest of China (as represented in my experience by Beijing, Xi'an, Hohhot, and some glances out train windows), and I still think this after another day here. Overall, I find that the population of Shanghai looks closer to Chinese-American than regular Chinese to me. While I know that these people are as Chinese as the ones in Beijing, and indeed, most of them hardly speak English (if anybody tries to tell you everyone in Shanghai speaks English, they are having a laugh at your expense), I was surprised to notice that I feel like I have more in common with people in Shanghai when I look at them, and that they feel more familiar than people in Beijing. It's not just a question of them obviously having more money, though this is the richest city in China. It's also the fashion choices people make, which in Shanghai are more similar to what I am used to in America. It's possible that having more money would make it easier for people in Beijing to look American, but based on what I've seen there, I'm not even sure they'd go for it if it were easy. Personally, I'd be sad if they did, because I really like the way a lot of people in Beijing dress.

Of course, there are still people around Shanghai who dress like people in Beijing, but they tend to be older or else obviously less well-off. A fashion staple for some older Chinese women is a suit with pants and a shirt made from the same type of material but in tragically mismatched patterns, and today I was somewhat comforted to see a woman shuffle by rocking the look complete with zebra patterned pants and a flowered top. However, she and her type are still rare enough here that I thought, "She looks like the ladies in Beijing!" The counterpart to the mismatched lady suit for middle aged men is what I think of as the belly shirt--a regular shirt rolled up to the top of the belly, ostensibly in an effort to keep cool. The wearer of a belly shirt will usually be found sitting outside a small restaurant smoking and eating something unhealthy, or standing on the sidewalk and gazing idly up and away. I have seen a couple of men in belly shirts in Shanghai, looking all the stranger in contrast with the surrounding bankers and businessmen.

The difference in look has made it more surprising to me that, under the surface, people in Shanghai are pretty much the same as people in other parts of China. I expected everyone here to speak enough English that they would rather not hear me butcher Chinese, but in fact, people are noticeably relieved and impressed when they see that I speak Chinese. Some shopkeepers have even looked slightly panicked when I come in, or ignored me completely, apparently believing me to be beyond their reach entirely because of the imagined language gap, only to talk quite happily when I greet them in Chinese. People here are not any more into lining up than people in Beijing and Xi'an, and a dude elbowed me in the stomach today, not because he meant to, but just because he didn't care that another person was in elbowing range. The streets do seem a bit safer and more orderly than in other cities, though I get the feeling that people obey traffic rules under duress and ignore them when they feel like they can, like the person I watched purposefully speed through a red light today, nearly mowing down some pedestrians with the right of way. On the upside, people here, like in other parts of the country, are generally very pleasant once you start talking to you. Also, while I thought they would be totally jaded about foreigners, in fact, people seem to find me almost as exotic here as they did in other places, though nobody has stopped me to get a picture with me yet (which is fine!).

Well, that was a tangent! At any rate, I walked to my hotel, very surprised at how modern Shanghai looked. It doesn't look like a modern Western city, either. The style and scale of the architecture gave me more of an impression of being from the future, or maybe from an imagined future where things are cleaner, shinier and simpler than they are likely to actually be. Shanghai is basically Tomorrowland filled with Chinese people. While there are still a few gritty and authentic bits around, I worry that they may be endangered, especially with the city apparently in a frenzy prepping for the World Expo in 2010. In case anybody was planning to forget about the Expo for ten seconds, the whole city is plastered with images of the Shanghai World Expo mascot, a horrible blue thing that looks like the lovechild of Gumby and toothpaste. At first, I was purely enraged by the blue thing, but now I have decided I love to hate it, which makes it easier to stay in Shanghai.

Another way in which Shanghai is like Beijing and Xi'an is that it gets fabulously hot in the summer, and the heat and humidity mix with the ambient pollution to make an unpleasant, grayish haze that covers the sky much of the time and makes views, and especially photos of the views, look dull and washed out. it also makes for some wicked hot walking. As a bonus, when I reached the street where my hotel was, already damp through two shirts with sweat and glistening pink in the sun, I swapped North and South in my head and spent a good ten minutes looking for my hotel on the wrong side of an intersection. A nice restaurant employee finally set me right, looking a little bit perplexed when I exclaimed in Chinese over how stupid I was, and I made it to the hotel.

The hotel I'm staying at is called The H Hotel, and it's very nice. I got a deal on Expedia where it costs $48 per night, and it's definitely worth it as a change of pace from hostels. The only downside of being in a nice place is that the staff looked mildly disgusted by me when I stomped on in, wrapped in an aura of backpack and sweat, but I think they forgave me once I showered and got a few bits of laundry done.. My room is quite small and doesn't have a window, but it's cute, well-designed, and very comfortable. The price of the room also includes buffet breakfast, a mix of boring American stuff and tasty Chinese stuff.

I put all my stuff down, cleaned up, and sent off my laundry, then decided I should see a bit of the city. I set off walking more or less at random, with the thought that it might be nice to see the river. However, it was extremely hot out, and I was very tired from my previous long walk. I walked towards the river, but hit a big, sunny street where some men were making very loud repairs to the sidewalk instead. Having explored a bit more now, I'm not even sure that you can get to the river in most places right now, due to the frantic construction for the World Expo. Giving up on the river, I hurried by the construction men and their weird diesel machines and turned back in towards the smaller streets. My guidebook indicated that there were no tourist attractions within easy walking distance, and I was very hot and tired, so I headed back towards my hotel to regroup, thinking I might go back out again later to try some of the small, cheap restaurants I was passing, some of which advertised xiao long bao, a delicious kind of dumplings that are very popular in Shanghai and which Raph loves ardently.

Since it was the middle of the afternoon and not a good time for a full meal, I bought some milk and croissants at a corner store to tide me over until dinner. However, once I had gotten back to the hotel, eaten my snack, and sat down on the bed, I realized I was completely exhausted and decided to sleep for a while. I woke up from my ill-timed nap at midnight, groggy as hell and with no recollection of where I had seen the restaurants I wanted to try. Luckily, I was able to get back to sleep eventually, but I never did remember where I had seen the cheap and tasty-looking dumpling places.

I was pretty sure that my day of beer would mean that I was on a college student sleep schedule for the rest of my trip, but in the end, I crashed pretty early last night and woke up at 6 this morning, convinced that it was about noon. Even though it turned out that it wasn't, I was awake, so I got up and read email and chatted with Raph for a bit before heading out of the hostel a little past seven. The hostel elevator was still out of service because of that time those guys got stuck in there (I waited to see what happened the other day; they got them out pretty fast, and the guys were none the worse for wear), so I had to go down the stairs. As I walked by an open window in the stairwell, a strange racket broke out in the apartment building across the way. It sounded kind of like a whole lot of tiny dogs had suddenly gotten exceptionally angry about something, but because I don't think anybody in Beijing has enough tiny dogs to make that much noise, I think it might also have been one or more insane pet birds. I don't think I can ever be sure, though, but now at least you can wonder with me.

 

The plan for the day was to visit the Mansion of Prince Gong, which my guidebook described lovingly as a beautifully preserved mansion typical of imperial China, with pleasant grounds and lots to see. I'd never heard of the place outside of my guidebook, but I think I've been to all the really well-known spots in Beijing between my two trips, so I figured I should check it out.

 

The Mansion of Prince Gong is not near any subway stop in Beijing, but it is less far from the Gulou stop than any other, so I went there and set off on what I knew would be a bit of a walk. Luckily, the weather was still fairly cool, and the walk was interesting. I was chagrined to see breakfast carts lining the street I started down because I had already grabbed plenty of less interesting breakfast on my way to the subway, but the neighborhood was different from what I have soon so far, which has mostly felt either touristy or sketchy with almost no middle ground. The area around Gulou just seemed regular and residential.

 

The map in my guidebook indicated that I should walk down a big street leading away from the Gulou stop, then into a series of hutongs, which are Beijing's small, residential alleys. Sadly, many of the hutongs are so small that they aren't labeled on the map, none of them follow any discernible grid or pattern, and some of them aren't even shown on the map at all. Undaunted, I plunged into the hutongs with my map in hand, picking my way past stagnant puddles and food scraps in the streets, dodging bikes and the occasional lumbering car, and mostly ignoring the quiet stares of the residents, who clearly found Lao Wai and her guidebook to be a little out of place in their neighborhood

 

I've realized that my description of the hutongs might make people who haven't been to China think they are nasty or scary. I suppose there are people who would think this, but I don't think they'd be likely to end up in a Beijing alleyway to be bothered by it. Really, the main differences between hutongs and other streets in Beijing are that the hutongs are smaller (about the width of one car and one cringing pedestrian side by side) and, in general, tourists don't go there. The puddles, the bits of trash, and the need to dodge anything on wheels applies to all but the poshest, most touristy big streets as well and, if one was ever likely to be mugged or hassled in Beijing, which one is not, it would be in the big streets. The people who live in the hutongs aren't rich, but they aren't distressingly or desperately poor, either. As far as I can tell, the are pretty average urban Chinese people.

 

At first I did pretty well, navigating through a neighborhood of old Chinese courtyard houses that had been converted into tightly packed multi-family residences and small shops until I reached the edge of Hou Hai, a big lake in the north of the city. After wandering in the gritty hutongs, I was surprised to see that the lake was lined with bars plastered with signs for American and European beer and decorated in the weirdly affected Asian style of so many buildings targeted at foreign tourists. Along the shore, on sidewalks crowded with bikes for rent and piles of bricks (I don't know why), a few men played traditional Chinese music. Like the singers in Temple of Heaven Park, they played different tunes within hearing distance of each other, so the sounds of a flute and one of those squeaky string instruments mingled unharmoniously as I walked by.

 

I crossed the lake on an ornate little footbridge, then tromped on into the hutongs on the other side. Unfortunately, I was walking through a part of the map where all the alleys were too small to have labels, and despite my earlier success, I quickly took the wrong hutong and got lost. Before long, I noticed that the turns in the street I was on didn't match the unmarked lines on my map, but because I was sure of what direction I wanted to head in, I decided to wing it and hope I could find my way through the neighborhood in another way. I stopped at every intersection to see if I could find the new hutong on my map, but they were all too small to be named. The hutong residents watched me silently as I wandered by, in some cases more than once. At first, I wondered why they didn't try to help me, but then I realized that they probably didn't speak English, and they certainly weren't going to assume that the dorky American who was wandering around in their street like a fool spoke Chinese. Because streets kept twisting and dead-ending without warning, I ultimately traced a large square through the neighborhood. When I realized I was nearly back by Hou Hai, I decided to just go back and try a bigger street, which would mean a little bit more walking but less chance of getting lost. However, when I walked on a bit further, I found the hutong I had meant to take in the first place. I had just turned too soon, into an alley too small to show on my map at all.

 

The couple of wrong turns that followed were entirely my fault for reading the map wrong, and were easier to sort out than the hutong snafu. I reached the Mansion of Prince Gong just after 9, after traveling for well over an hour. At that point, it was already getting hot, and I was already getting tired from walking.

 

I bought my ticket and headed in. It turns out that the mansion is made up of a series of free-standing buildings surrounded by a complex of courtyards. You can wander through most of the buildings. Or at least, in theory you can. In practice, it turns out that large Chinese tour groups led by women with megaphones roam the area in a slow and disorganized manner, making it difficult to get to most places you might like to go. I had to swim upstream through one of these groups to get into the first building, which turned out to house a few artifacts from when the house was in use by Qing dynasty nobles and a bunch of very old-looking photos of people living in the mansion. Two problems with this: the building had been redone to serve as a gallery, so while the outside looked like a lovely Chinese palace building, the inside looked like it could be any old room. Also, with the exception of a cursory little plaque explaining what the building had been used for, all of the signs and captions were in Chinese only. I can't really read Chinese, so I had no idea what any of the things were. I wandered through the building morosely, scanning the captions to see if I could read them and picking up a couple of characters far too general to clarify anything. I gazed at the photos to see if I could guess what was going on, but they didn't mean much to me since I had no idea who any of the people were. After a minute or two of this, I decided to move on and see what else I could see.

 

The entire rest of the mansion had been redone on the inside, to serve as either galleries with all-Chinese signs or souvenir shops and snack stands. I wandered through a couple more buildings and tried as hard as I could to appreciate them, but it kind of sucked. Disgruntled, I moved on to the gardens, noting as I went that the majority of the place names on the signposts directing people through the mansion had been transliterated rather than actually translated, meaning they were essentially useless.

 

I think the gardens are meant to be the real attraction at the Mansion of Prince Gong, and parts of them were quite nice. There were a bunch of little man-made mountains constructed out of big, craggy stones, and unlike at some places with these things (they were apparently extremely popular among Chinese royalty, because a lot of places have them), we were allowed to climb freely on them. There was a pond with cute ducks in it. There were some cute Chinese children who shouted, “Hello!” to me and smiled cutely, and some nice Chinese women about my age who all got their pictures taken with me. (Have I mentioned this? Sometimes people here just come up to me and ask, usually in mime, to get a photo with me. They are usually but not always young women. I usually think they want me to take a picture for them at first, because people ask for that, too, but then they hand the camera to a friend and tug me aside and I'm like, “Oh, okay.” Because I don't know what to say in Chinese [or any language] when someone wants to get a photo with you because you are exotic, they very often leave the encounter never realizing I speak any Chinese. I don't mind doing this at all, but I am continually amazed that there is anyone in the world who wants to get their picture taken with me like that. I also wonder what they tell their friends when they show off the photo of themselves standing next to a grinning, slightly embarrassed American whose name they never learned.)

 

But back to the gardens. The big problem with them was that they were even more full of megaphone-toting tour groups than the buildings were, and the groups often sprawled across the garden corridors so that I had to carefully elbow through as they stood around listening to their guides. Also, the ponds smelled bad. Not horrifyingly bad or anything, but bad enough that I didn't really want to stand near them, even to admire their beauty or their ducks. Also, all of the small buildings in the garden except for the grand theater had been turned into shops or bathrooms. The grand theater was still a theater, but we weren't allowed into it because only people with special, double-priced tickets could go in to watch a little show. I watched a couple of Chinese people argue with the ushers about this as people streamed out of a performance instead. Parts of the garden were also closed off to the public for use as storage for maintenance supplies or for the few businesses and restaurants that had set up shop inside the mansion's outer wall, facing the street

 

I spent about an hour in total at the Mansion of Prince Gong, and left feeling mostly dissatisfied. As a final parting shot, I stopped in the bathroom on my way out and found that the one stall with a Western-style toilet had had its door ripped off the hinges and was unusable. That, plus the all-Chinese signs and the maps where the names of places were transliterated rather than actually translated, will teach Americans to try to come to the Mansion of Prince Gong. Not that I actually think anybody was trying to piss me off, mind you. I just think that the mansion isn't set up to be nice for foreigners. What does piss me off, though, is that the guidebook didn't say anything about how unaccessible the place is if you don't know a lot of Chinese, which I figure is the case for almost all their readers.

 

By the time I got out of the mansion, it was well and truly hot outside. I navigated back through the hutongs with nary a false step, rebuffing rickshaw drivers who lined the route inviting me to go for a ride. Yeah, right, dudes—I don't even like taxis, there is no way I am going to rent a ride recreationally. I walked instead, feeling myself sweat and wishing I hadn't gotten out of the habit of wearing sunscreen and a hat after of a few gray days in a row. In comparison, the not-too-crowded subway ride felt very refreshing.

 

Now I am back at the hostel, hiding from the heat and wondering how I am going to stop stinking like a backpacker before I meet a college friend of my mother's for lunch tomorrow. I figure if I can smell myself, that is probably a pretty bad sign for him and his poor family.

Today, I feel gross, not because anything in China has made me sick (which is kind of surprising, actually—I haven't been sick at all since I got here, maybe because I've been finishing a course of antibiotics that I got in Vanuatu), but because I have an insidious hangover. Here's why:

 

Yesterday, I went to the Lama Temple in the morning. It was very interesting, and I have paper notes from the visit that I will type up later, but for now suffice it to say that I went to the temple, then came back to my hostel around lunch time. As I was walking in, a thin, toothy fellow on the front steps hollered out “Hi there!” to me. I wandered over and said hi to him and his two companions. They introduced themselves as Justice (I think that it's probably spelled another way, but that's how he said it), the skinny guy from Germany who works as a welder in Australia; Will, a husky black guy from Chicago who's about to start an MBA; and Brimmen (oops, he just added me on Facebook and I was spelling his name wrong--it's Brimman, but I wrote it too many times to bother with fixing it now), an English teacher/rugby player from the Bay Area who lives in Japan. Justice grinned a lot and spoke fluent English, but with a really odd combination of German and Australian accents punctuated by such Australianisms as calling people “mate” which was all the more confusing to me because he only told me he lived in Australia after I asked about the accent. Will chatted happily with the others, but sweated and chain smoked as he did.

 

At first, I assumed the three guys were traveling together, but I quickly learned that they had all met in the last 24 hours. It turns out that Justice and Brimmen had met the night before at the hostel and gone out drinking together at the bars on Sanlitun, a big street full of expensive bars for foreigners. They bought each other the most foul-tasting shots they could think of and were so roaringly drunk that when they got back to the hostel, Justice left his pants in someone else's room and ended up wandering the halls wearing only a shirt. Justice and Will met shortly thereafter when Justice, half-naked and incoherent, stumbled into Will's room and passed out on the spare bed there. Half-asleep and in the dark, Will assumed that Justice was his assigned roommate and was wearing pants. The next morning, he woke up and left quietly, noticing that Justice was not in fact wearing pants, but, because his shirt was long, blissfully unaware that he was not wearing underwear either. He only learned the truth later on, when Justice, having retrieved his pants and wanting to apologize, found Will in the hostel lobby and started talking to him. Luckily, everyone involved thought this was the funniest thing in the world and had gleefully bonded over it, so the three guys were sitting on the front steps telling it to everyone who would listen, with Justice standing up and acting out how he had tried to keep himself covered as he went to get his pants in the morning.

 

Since I had no plans and the weather was too blah for sightseeing, I sat down on the steps with the guys and chatted with them. After a while, with several returns to Justice's pantsless adventures, they mentioned that Will was getting married that afternoon to a woman from the Congo whom he had met while living in China. He was very nervous about it, though it had been planned for some time, thus the sweating and the smoking. “And I don't smoke,” he said, smiling ruefully as he lit another cigarette. He was waiting for his fiancee to get some paperwork from the Congolese embassy, then they would get the papers translated and sign some forms for the Chinese government and be all set. Will said we could come watch, and we all said we'd like to. Justice volunteered himself as best man and me as bridesmaid, though apparently the actual “ceremony” would consist entirely of a couple minutes' of paperwork.

 

Because he had a while to wait, we all decided to go get some lunch at a restaurant near the hostel. As the guys stood up from the steps, I was kind of shocked to see how tall Justice and Brimmen were—I could tell that Justice was pretty tall when he was hopping about miming holding his netherbits, but it turned out that he was about 6'6” and Brimmen was 6'4”. Especially after being in China and feeling quite tall for a week, I felt like a tiny child walking next to the two of them. Will, thank goodness, was of normal height.

 

I suggested that we go to the restaurant I had gone to the night before because it was cheap and delicious. Will's Chinese was better than mine, so he did most of the ordering, though I chipped in some as well. I was really excited to get shuizhu yu, which is fish boiled in chili oil, as well as to have people to eat with so that I could have more than one or two dishes. Brimmen surprised the rest of us by eating both of the fish heads from the shuizhu yu with unfeigned relish. Everything we got was really tasty, and it was very nice to have company for lunch. Unfortunately, at the end of lunch, Will got a call from his finacee saying that the Congolese embassy couldn't get her the papers she needed, and that she might need to spend a lot of money or even go back to the Congo to get them. They decided to see if they could get married without the paperwork, though it seemed unlikely.

 

We went back to the hostel steps to wait for her to come meet him. Because Will was extremely anxious, we got some beers at the the shop next door and drank them as we waited, peeling off the labels as the perspiration melted the glue that held them on.

 

Will's fiancee, a petite, beautiful black woman named Jolie, showed up before we finished the beer. We introduced ourselves briefly, then they left to try again to get the paperwork they needed. Brimmen, Justice and I waited for them to come back, chatting on the hostel steps. We finished our beers, and Brimmen finished Will's as well, so we got some more beers. We also went to a snack stand in the street next to ours and Justice and Brimmen got crepes filled with egg, two kinds of brown sauce, scallions, pepper, and a crispy fried thing. I ordered a doughy pancake filled with cabbage because cabbage was the only filling I understood among the three options. I ordered all the food in Chinese because the guys didn't speak Chinese, and the friendly but fast-spoken boy behind the counter didn't speak English. He said my Chinese was very good, even though I only understood about half of what he said. We took the snacks and beers back to the hostel steps, where we snacked and talked and Justice hollered out cheerful greetings to every passing hostel guest and one rather stunned Chinese man on a bicycle delivery cart. I found out that Brimmen did a lot of sailing and had been to Vanuatu as well as most of the other islands in the area, which is very different from most people, who haven't even heard of it. I also found out that Justice had decided that pantslessness was a revelation and planned to go around half-naked more often in the future, which I guess is also different from most people. It was very pleasant and vacation-like to just sit on the steps and talk and wait.

 

Will came back alone. With a blank look on his face, he told us that they hadn't been able to get the papers and that the stress of that, plus Jolie's complicated personal situation, was so much that he didn't think any of it was going to work out. On the way back from the embassy, Jolie had gotten out of the cab and just walked away. He said that he didn't even feel angry or sad, just like he had no control over the situation. I guessed he would probably feel angry and sad pretty soon, but didn't figure it was wise to say so. The other guys guessed that he would feel better if he had some more beers, and they did say so, so we bought twelve more 600ml beers (for six US dollars in total) and headed up to Will's room to drink them and commiserate.

 

Will had a double room to himself (which was lucky for Justice!). The room was like my quadruple room, but half the size and with no window, so that it felt weirdly timeless inside. Will apologized several times for a nonexistent mess. We sat in the room and discussed what Will should do (the guys: forget about the stupid girl, she is no good; me: I can see both sides of this, and since you clearly like her very much, maybe it's worth trying to deal with the complicated situation a little more). Later in the evening, she called him, and they planned to meet and talk today, which seemed like a good sign to me. Will and Brimmen both play rugby, so they talked about that a lot, convincing me that rugby players are insane, face-stomping lushes, though Will and Brimmen were both quite nice. Justice taught us a drinking game where you count without saying numbers that include a seven or are multiples of seven, which proved to be harder than you might think.

 

At various points throughout the afternoon, Justice disappeared and came back with additional people, including Anne from France who did not drink but apparently didn't mind that everyone else was drinking; Delphine and Alex, a Swiss couple who had recently gotten engaged at Everest base camp; Robert and a girl whose name nobody ever caught, a couple from Norway; and another Robert, who was from Atlanta and who, according to Brimmen, only talked to the girls. The Norwegian girl was very bad at the counting game. Anne was very good at it, though she had the advantage of not being drunk.

 

The entire afternoon went by as we sat in Will's windowless room. In the evening, we all went and got dinner at the same place we got lunch, which I think the staff thought was pretty odd. The dinner was even more delicious than the lunch, though, and I had fun advising the Europeans on which foods were spicy and what was in what.

 

After dinner, we went back to Will's room with even more beer. At one point, I went up to my room to grab something and was surprised to see that my German roommates had gone and been replaced by some very young-looking Korean girls who spoke good Chinese but very little English. I invited them to come down and hang out, but warned them that it might not be too fun for them because everyone was speaking English, so they declined. When I got back down and mentioned that the Germans had been replaced by Koreans, American Robert asked too many times why I didn't get them to join us, ignoring my repeated explanation that they didn't speak English and didn't want to come.

 

The original three guys had planned to go out to a bar at some point during the night, but because we were having a great time chatting with the other hostel guests and drinking cheap beer, they never made it out. At some point after midnight, we ran out of beer. The Swiss couple headed to bed and American Robert and the Norwegians disappeared at some point, but Anne and the guys and I went out to get some more beers. Our usual shop was closed, but a little way down the street, a shop the size of a large closet sold beer and snacks. Some new people were sitting on the steps of the hostel, so we sat down with them and talked. The only one whose name I remember was Jack, a jolly-looking, blond haired Swedish guy who lived in Scotland and, improbably, also played rugby. He was traveling with a pleasant guy from Texas and a fairly horrible philosophy student from Denmark who instantly dragged me into an overly-heated (at least on his side) argument about American politics, despite the fact that he didn't know enough about the system to make coherent points and I didn't want to have the argument at all. I extricated myself pretty quickly, thank goodness, and didn't talk to the Dane again after that.

 

As we all talked on the steps, the lights on businesses around us blinked out one by one. Down the street near the convenience store, though, a few men were sitting in the street on tiny stools next to a little stove where they were cooking little lamb kebabs which they ate themselves and sold. Brimmen, who apparently, like the mighty brontosaurus, needs to eat continuously to fuel his massive form, got hungry at some point and asked me to help him order a kebab, so we walked down and asked the guys if we could get a few. To my mild surprise, they were extremely welcoming, and had us sit down on the tiny stools with them as the kebabs cooked and talked to us in Chinese. Brimmen doesn't speak any Chinese, so they mostly talked to me, with me translating a couple things back and forth for him. I told them where we were from and how long we were in China, and that I was planning to go to law school and study Chinese in the fall. I loved having the chance to talk to people in Chinese, but I was worried that Brimmen would get bored because we mostly ignored him. I paused a few times to ask him how he was doing, and he just grinned and said, “I'm just fucking loving the language!” which I thought was pretty cool. Sitting on an eight-inch tall stool, he was basically entirely folded up, and it looked really funny to see this big, grinning American guy, his cheeks pink from beer, perched on a tiny stool on the edge of the street, surrounded by Chinese guys eating kebabs. I probably looked a little pink and funny myself, sitting in the middle of the circle of men like I was holding court and speaking Chinese in bursts as I thought of what to say. When the kebabs were done, they charged Brimmen one yuan (fifteen cents) for four small kebabs, which is a great deal even by Chinese standards.

 

Back on the steps, some French people showed up on their way back from the bars and I spoke French to them for a bit. Two of them went to bed, but one, Dorianne, stuck around chatting rather tipsily to practice her English. Beer bottles lined up on the edges of the steps, and at one point one of them toppled off and broke. Shortly after, Jack also toppled off the steps laughing and unfortunately landed on the broken bottle and cut his arm. Citing rugby-style toughness, he wanted to shrug it off, but the Dane, in his one noble action of the night, dragged him inside and made him wash it up. He then came back and got into an argument about philosophy with Brimmen, who was also a philosophy major. They went at it for a while making no progress whatsoever and becoming rather agitated until I decided to step in. I pulled Brimmen aside to point out that debating the Dane was futile just as the guy apparently asserted that there was no gravity before Newton described it, which left Brimmen nearly collapsing in unkind but not entirely unwarranted laughter. He abandoned the argument, and we wandered back into the hostel to talk to Jack and the Dane screamed after him, “You don't know shit!” which made the whole thing even less pleasant than it already was.

 

Will had dragged off to bed and Justice had disappeared, wearing pants as far as I know, by the time I finally decided to go to bed around four. I was completely shocked that I was up so late, and that I had spent the entire afternoon and half the night drinking beer, but I was really happy to have had such a fun hostel experience. After waking up just before 7 like clockwork for days, today I slept until noon.

 

I've been taking it extremely easy today. The fourth girl in my room is a tiny nineteen-year-old half-Thai, half-Chinese girl from Sweden (this hostel turns out to be extremely international). She is in China by herself until her boyfriend comes this weekend, and she is both jet-lagged and seemingly a bit overwhelmed by being here. She speaks almost no Chinese, so she asked if she could come with me when I went out. I said she could, but ended up feeling bad because I don't think I was going where she wanted to go or being very exciting, but I wasn't up for doing anything but totter around a bit and buy a snack because the more than twelve hours of slow but continuous drinking yesterday had left me rather hungover. We walked down Wangfujing for a bit and I did help her talk to a couple of Chinese people in the stores. Even in heels, she is almost a head shorter than me, so it felt extremely funny to walk around with her after spending hours with towering men yesterday. I showed her a restaurant with an English menu and then headed into the hostel to lie down and type. When we left the hostel and again when we came back, I saw will and Jolie sitting together on the steps and talking. He had to leave for the US this evening, but I hope they were able to work something out before he went.

 

My roommate, who never told me her name or asked for mine, took a nap for a bit while I wrote and showered, then woke up and asked if I wanted to get food, but I really didn't. I thought for a bit that she was actually afraid to go around by herself, but she ultimately did get up and go out to buy some practical shoes (she only brought high heels!) and some food. I'm really glad that I don't need to feel like she will just sit here sadly if I don't take her out—she's a nice girl, but we don't have a lot in common, and I am not in the mood to do much today.

Final note: I had to come down to the hostel lobby to get on WiFi and post this, and someone is stuck in the elevator here. The staff are working on getting someone to come open it up, but it's unclear how long that will take. I feel very sorry for the stuck people. 

I know there's another short gap in things here. I had a really interesting day today, so I wanted to type it up while it was fresh. My commitment to catching up on past entries later stands.

 

Things are going well in China, and all the better because I was relying on my cell phone to tell me what day it was, but it seems to have somehow gone wrong, because it said today was the 18th, while both my computer and the internet say it is still the 17th. I feel like I have been given an extra day in Beijing, and I think I will need it, because I still have a lot to do, and I haven't bought anything but food and admission tickets since I got here.

 

This morning, I woke up at 7, which seems to be the time I have settled into waking up, and which suits me just fine because it means that I have a couple of hours to do things before it gets too hot. I wandered down to the hostel lobby in my pajamas to use the free WiFi and chatted with Raph and sent a few emails to people before heading back up to my room. On the way up, however, who should I run into but Andy, my Great Wall tour guide from the other day, here to pick up a couple of hostel guests for a tour. We both did a double take, because neither of us expected to see the other here (I was at a different hotel when he picked me up for the tour, and had no reason to think this hostel would book with his tour company out of the bazillions of available options), then chatted for a moment about why I had switched lodging—in English, because, as you may recall, I think Andy thinks I don't really speak Chinese, and I didn't want to be a pain about it. His tour guests were waiting, so we only talked for a few seconds before he herded them off to the car. I was kind of sad to see him go, since he is basically the only person I know in Beijing at all and he seemed pretty nice when he was dragging us through jade factories. Lesson for the day: traveling alone is a fairly lonely activity.

 

After my one friend in the world left forever to do his job, I got dressed and headed for the Temple of Heaven. My decision to go there was partly based on the fact that it was one of the few major attractions in Beijing that I had never seen, and partly based on the fact that it is near a subway stop and thus very easy to get to. I don't know if I have already mentioned on here how big and stair-centric ancient Chinese buildings tend to be, but in case I haven't: really big; exceptionally stair-centric. The Temple of Heaven is actually particularly huge, so I knew I wasn't going to get out of walking today, but at least I could replace the getting-lost-on-city-streets part of the walking with extra wandering-in-beautiful-attractions walking.

 

I knew that the temple had big grounds. What I didn't expect was to get off the subway and walk up to a gate marked “Temple of Heaven Park.” English signage was limited, so I spent a few minutes deciphering bits of the Chinese signs before I was sure that the Temple of Heaven was indeed inside Temple of Heaven Park. It turns out that the entire temple grounds are a huge public park, with the buildings that are the tourist attraction requiring a separate entry fee.

 

For me, and any visitor in their right mind, the fact that the temple is in a public park is an awesome bonus. Chinese people, especially old Chinese people, LOVE parks. In fact, the capslock doesn't really express the love strongly enough. I would need to use swirly fonts or maybe one of those glittery GIFs to fully express how much old Chinese people love parks. And me, I love that old Chinese people love parks, because it makes for some super awesome people watching. Unlike American old people, who tend to try to take it easy as they get older, a lot of Chinese old people, for reasons that I do not understand, have a powerful will to keep on truckin'. Inside the park, I saw vast legions of elderly Chinese people, ranging from the fit and barely retired to people who hunched in wheelchairs, doing a wide variety of activities. A few middle aged people were mixed in here and there, and young families wandered around and joined me in people watching, but for the most part, the story of the day was old people doing interesting stuff.

 

Near the entrance to the park, there was a ballroom dance lesson going on, with music playing and a man counting steps, “Yi, er, san, si! Er, er, san, si!” through a megaphone as couples stepped left and right. Some other people were practicing a synchronized swordplay routine to Chinese classical music, swinging the swords slowly and gracefully through the air at about the pace of Tai Chi. One old woman didn't have a sword and had substituted what looked like an umbrella in a cloth case, but was moving in time with the others with no hesitation.

 

On the Long Corridor, a part of the visit to the temple that was also open to the rest of the park, there were several things going on. In one section of the corridor, old people were playing cards, perched on the low, wide corridor railings or in wheelchairs next to the railings. This was clearly a regular activity—most groups had some kind of cloth strapped to the flat railings as a playing surface, and each piece of cloth was cut to size to fit the foot-wide railing. Some people also had what looked like a sponge to wet their fingertips and help them grip the cards better. The card games looked truly intense, too—players would slam down their cards defiantly with various bold-sounding interjections that I didn't understand, and lively discussion ran on over the games. Further down the corridor, a few people had set up loud, staticky speakers, and were singing into them as old fashioned Chinese music played. The poor speaker quality, plus the rather piercing tones of the songs gave me goosebumps on my face as I walked past, but each singer had a small crowd of admirers sitting on the railings and clapping. The singers seemed unperturbed by the fact that they had set up their speakers within easy hearing range of each other so that their different songs blended together a bit, for even greater discord.

 

Just off to the side of the corridor, some kind of performance was going on. A woman made an incomprehensible (to me) announcement into a microphone, then began to play a harmonica into the mic with surprising skill. As a horde of elderly people watched from the corridor and both sides, a chubby, gray-haired woman in an amateurish gypsy costume danced out onto the cobblestones in front of the harmonica player. Smiling like she was in on a joke, she performed a dance that looked to me like it was originally meant to be performed by someone young and slightly sensual, twisting her hands into graceful shapes as she moved. When she had finished, the crowd clapped enthusiastically, and the harmonica fired back up for two women in what looked kind of like cowboy costumes with bright red boots, who trotted onto the cobblestone stage as I walked on and let another person push into the spot where I had been standing.

 

Still further on, I saw the first of several enthusiastic games of dominoes that I passed. As with the card games, some players were in wheelchairs, though one old man showed me that this might not always mean what I thought it did when he tottered by, pushing his own wheelchair in front of him and hollering indignantly at everyone nearby to get out of his way.

 

After fifteen minutes of wandering by people enjoying the park, I finally reached the main attraction in the Temple of Heaven, the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. The building is big and impressive, but unfortunately, like a lot of major attractions in Beijing, you can't go inside it, plus it is vast and rather dark inside. I leaned in over the railing, surrounded by Chinese tourists, to try to get a good look, but it was a bit unsatisfying, which is the same experience I had with the main buildings of the Forbidden City. Luckily, there were signs around the area describing the interesting process of offering sacrifices to heaven, which involved killing, shaving, cooking, and then burning animals. Around the main building, smaller, slightly lighter buildings held tablets bearing the names of the gods to whom the Emperor would offer sacrifices at the temple. Because Chinese didn't really change between the 1400s, when the temple was built, and the introduction of simplified characters, I could read a lot of the characters on the tablets, though in context I wasn't sure what they meant. A sign inside the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests had indicated, in Chinese only, that something would happen every 20 minutes after 9:00, so I wandered back from the tablet buildings at 9:20 to see what was up. Unfortunately, it was just a docent talking about the hall in quick Chinese, of which I understood only one or two words per sentence, not enough to be worth it for either information or listening practice. I moved on as people crowded in to listen (and a few people continued to talk so loudly that they almost drowned out the docent on her microphone).

 

There are a few other main parts of the Temple of Heaven that people visit: The Red Step Bridge, the Imperial Vault of heaven, and the Round Altar. The bridge was somewhat marred in its ancient simplicity by being lined with metal safety railings and, for reasons entirely beyond my ken, many large posters with bad cartoons about how to avoid industrial accidents. No, I'm not kidding, or exaggerating. In fact, you are probably picturing too few work safety posters. There were 20 of them or more, huge ones mounted on red screens all along the length of the bridge. I saw a couple of parents with young kids point them out in tones of, “Isn't this neat,” and I certainly wonder if the kids were fooled. The Imperial Vault of Heaven was even harder to see into than the Hall of Prayer and not improved by a setup that meant people needed to file past the opening in a line, with people pushing by each other if they thought others were too slow. One girl pushed by me as I fiddled with my camera, so I stood in front of her at the door. I wouldn't feel bad about this even if it had worked, but in fact, she just pushed by me again. Happily, I am taller than every woman in China except for Yao Ming's wife, so I could still see just fine. The Round Altar (also called the Circular Mound on the signs there, but never the Round Mound, which is what I was remembering until I looked it up) was interesting to me because the cobblestones around the edge of the enclosure where people don't often walk were mostly overgrown with crabgrass, which thins to nothing near the altar itself for a neat, half-deserted effect. The altar itself is a three-story platform like a giant stone wedding cake. I would have liked it better if my legs didn't still hurt on stairs after the Great Wall, but really, it wasn't that tall, or that amazing.

 

After rounding out the major tourist sites, I set off across the park for the outer buildings, passing more park activities as I went. I saw women playing badminton on a path, groups of people doing understated, synchronized dances to very peppy pop music, people doing various types of calisthenics, and groups of middle aged people playing with a feathered toy that worked more or less like a hacky sack. One old man marched by me, singing continuously as he walked.

 

I also made a stop at the bathroom, which is a good opportunity for me to talk a little about bathrooms in China in general, and this one in particular. Public bathrooms in Beijing do not have toilet paper in the stalls, though in many cases they do have toilet paper holders, which makes me think the government may have bought a million rolls of toilet paper for the Olympics, then just stopped stocking the stalls once they ran out. At any rate, I can say for sure that almost no public restrooms had any toilet paper when I was in China in 2005. These days, instead of paper in the stalls, they sometimes, if you are lucky, have one jumbo roll dispenser on the wall outside the stalls, which you can take some paper from on your way in. The bathroom in the park was the jumbo roll kind, but as I walked in, a small crowd of women was milling about talking about how there was no more toilet paper left. To universal delight, an attendant came in with a new roll, and people crowded around to get some. An old woman to my left even kind of lined up for it, so instead of pushing in ahead of her, I let her grab some ahead of me, once a woman who cut the entire line had dived in and gotten hers. The old woman proceeded to unroll many, many feet of toilet paper. It was an entire armload of paper, more than I use in an entire week, and certainly more than I can imagine she would know what to do with once she got into the bathroom. It took her so long to unroll it all that, after watching in awe for a moment, I decided to just use the kleenex I carry around with me and left before she finished.

 

Another good thing about Chinese bathrooms these days! This has to have been for the Olympics: they have installed one western-style sitting toilet in every public restroom I have seen, leaving the others as the squat toilets that the Chinese prefer (they rightly consider them more hygienic because you don't have to touch them with your skin, and because they do not fall over when they try to squat like most of the whities I know, they go ahead an use them). When she saw me in line, the restroom attendant let me cut the line to use the sitting toilet because she knew I would want it and nobody else would. One of the other ladies called me “lao wai” (literally “old foreigner,” though it doesn't really mean I am old, just foreign) as I walked past, but I was quite happy to skip the wait and the precarious squat toilets. It didn't bother anybody to let me go ahead, either—in fact, as I came out, there was a slight collective motion away from the empty stall, with women muttering, “That's the sitting kind!”

Final good thing about Chinese bathrooms these days: in 2005 you had to pay to use them. Now you do not. The cost was very low, but it was always a hassle to have to rummage for change, and I do not miss that at all.
 

Anyway, business done, I wandered on to the Hall of Abstinence, a small palace on the temple grounds where the emperor would fast before offering sacrifices. The additional entrance fee of 10 yuan ($1.50) was pretty trivial, but enough to keep a lot of people from bothering, so it was nice and quiet. While the buildings inside the hall's moat and walls were in good shape, the moats were filled with overgrown grass and a few wildflowers, and crabgrass grew in lively tufts on each side of the inside paths. About half the explanatory signs were in Chinese only, which meant I couldn't read them (I can read some basic stuff, but don't have any vocabulary for tourist sites [except the character for “palace,” which is also used in “kung pao chicken”]), but the ones in English were pretty interesting, and it was nice to wander around the mostly-deserted little palace, looking at the crabgrass and wildflowers and listening to the Chinese classical music that is piped into many sections of the park via speakers disguised as lanterns and the strains of incongruous accordion music wafting over the walls as someone played it outside. I was allowed inside some of the buildings in the Hall of Abstinence, too, which made me happy. I also just enjoy imperial Chinese architecture, so it was fun for me to look at the buildings and how they were laid out.

 

After a brief and un-noteworthy stop in the Diving Music Academy, now a museum of ancient Chinese musical instruments, I headed out of the park and back to my hostel. I got a late lunch of kung pao chicken at a restaurant on the same street as the hostel, then wandered back to shower and rest. I find that I want to shower more in Beijing than I ever have in my life—it's hot enough most days that I get sweaty walking around, plus I think the air pollution makes me feel dirty faster. Today wasn't too hot, but the sky was a pale pearl gray with a combination of humidity and smog that had me feeling damp and horrible.

 

The highlight of my afternoon since I got back was when a guy came to repair the foozball table while I was surfing the net nearby. The guy was white but not English speaking (he spoke to his foozball repair buddy in a language I didn't understand), but he spent the whole repair job speaking lightly accented but truly excellent Chinese, understanding when the booming Chinese hostel proprietor rattled off what was wrong with the table and replying without any hesitation. I was totally fascinated, and really wonder how this guy ended up as a fluently sinophone foozball table repairman. Unfortunately, the staff here do not know, and I was too chicken to ask the guy. As part of the repair job, all the balls got let out of the table, which meant that there was a free game to play. I ended up playing doubles with three Chinese guys, which was fun.

 

Plans for the evening are limited to finding some dinner, then studying Chinese and figuring out what I want to do for my last few days here

So. I made a travel blog on Blogger to write about my trip to Vanuatu and China. In Vanuatu, all was well, but I was too busy to write much, so I planned to post most of my experiences once I got to China. However, once I got to China, I learned that I was on one side of the Great Firewall and Blogger was on the other.

I've made this new blog on LiveJournal, which is currently not blocked. The name, "Dou wang le!" means "I forgot everything!" which about sums up the current state of my Chinese. Let's hope this blog works out a little better than the previous one. Entries will be backdated to the days when they actually happened, and will show up sporadically as I have the time and energy to post them.

Comments are welcome, and I hope you will enjoy my travel journal.

Cheers!
Joanna

Okay, screw it. I wanted to get everything posted in the order that it happened, but I was too busy with my family in Vanuatu to post on time, and even to type up my notes, and now it's too intimidating to finish ten days' worth of notes before I post anything new, so I'm not going to do it. I have sketch notes for the whole trip so far, so I won't forget things, and I will post backdated entries when they are done. For now, though, let's do my first two full days in Beijing.

 

Background (to be fleshed out later, I hope): the plane trip from Vanuatu to Beijing took 23 hours. I arrived at my Hotel at about 5:30 on the 12th, and a combination of jet lag and plain tiredness had me asleep by 7. I got woken up by two calls from the tour guide for my Great Wall and Ming Tombs tour, which I answered to get details about the tour (I would be picked up at 7 by a man in a white Mercedes Benz bus with a certain license plate number), but each time I was easily able to roll over and go back to sleep. This means that at 4:15 on the morning of the 13th, I was wide awake and didn't want to sleep anymore, though I was still a bit tired. I muddled around in my room for a bit, then at 6 or so, I decided to go out and see if I could find any breakfast.

 

The neighborhood where my hotel was is not very nice or very transparent to a mostly-non-Chinese-reading foreigner. It was also so early in the morning that not a lot of things weren't open yet. I was questing for a food called you tiao (a fried stick of dough, literally “oil stick,” but I'll stick with the Chinese in this case), which is sold by street vendors for breakfast and is a favorite food of my mother's and mine. Sadly, the sketchy alleyways around my hotel had no street vendors in them, and the couple of snack restaurants I passed looked too challenging for me because they didn't have you tiao on the posted picture menus (you know, like the ones at bad Chinese places in the US) and I didn't feel up to asking after them in Chinese. I was pretty sure that if I walked farther I would reach a place with you tiao, but I had to be at my hotel at 7 to get picked up for my tour, so I ended up going home empty handed and eating a broken granola bar that I stole from Google for my breakfast.

 

When I stepped out of my hotel, there was a big white van parked in front with the driver absently shaving his face. It had actually been there when I went in to eat my granola bar 20 minutes earlier, so I wondered if it could be my bus. However, the driver saw me looking at the bus in a meaningful manner and called out to me. I asked in Chinese if he was going to the Great Wall, and he said he was, so that was that. Just in case, I checked the license plate as I hopped in, and all was well.

 

As I had suspected, the fact that the bus was a Mercedes did not mean that we would be riding in great luxury. However, the bus was pleasant enough, and even had seatbelts, and the fact that I didn't use mine is because I couldn't figure out how to work it, not because it was obviously broken. I was the first one on the bus, so I spoke to the driver in Chinese a little bit. He said I spoke very prettily, which was very nice and seemed sincere, but struck me as a bit crazy because I was stumbling along with a less than kindergarten vocabulary. Chinese people are still really surprised and impressed when I speak Chinese, though—I guess I thought they might have gotten over it between 2005 and now, but in retrospect, it makes sense that the Olympics would make them more, not less, impressed with sinophone Americans.

 

At our next stop, we picked up our tour guide, who was a very young looking Chinese man, probably my age or a bit older, really, but so youthful looking that I can't be sure. His English name was Andy and he was very friendly and spoke great English. He climbed into the front of the van and started talking to the driver in heavily Beijing-accented Chinese. (People in Beijing have a habit of adding an R sound to the ends of their words where people from other parts of the country don't. It makes their speech sound sort of rough and growling. It's so ubiquitous here that I picked it up a little, for a few words, when I was in Beijing in 2005, and Raph still makes fun of me. One minute of listening to these guys, though, and he would never laugh at me again!) We also picked up three American guys who climbed into the back of the van, politely but quietly.

 

At the last stop, we picked up two more guys. As they walked to the car, I muttered, “Lots of dudes on the tour!” and the guys in the back chuckled. The new guys introduced themselves as John (an IT trainer in Beijing on a business trip) and Greg (his friend who came along fopr fun) and said they were from Oregon. The other three guys never did introduce themselves to me, but I eventually picked up that two of them were Michael (a law student) and Javi (a flight attendant), and that they were from New York. I never got the third guy's name, but he was Micheal and Javi's roommate and was a pleasant fat man the outline of whose money pouch was clearly visible as his belly pressed it against his NYC t-shirt. Everyone looked to be close to my age.

 

As we got moving, Andy began a funny little lecture about Chinese culture. He asked if anybody spoke Chinese, and I said I did, a little, but I don't think he really ever believed me. Part of the lesson involved some simple characters, and I had forgotten several of them, so that didn't help. The lecture was interesting, though, mixing bits of Chinese history and culture with character meanings and a few sights in the city as we drove by them. Highlights before we left the city were seeing the burnt out CCTV building (and it is REALLY burnt out—it looked horrible, but I was interested to see it), and when Andy said “In China, we eat everything with two feet, except for people, and everything with four legs, except for the chairs. Especially people from Canton, in the South.” National and regional stereotypes: confirmed!

 

Tours in China are part tour and part tourist trap—the tour guides are paid to take their captive audiences to jade galleries and silk factories, where they are given a brief tour, then taken to a showroom where they can buy tragically overpriced goods. Andy, at least, was transparent about the racket as we made our way to a jade gallery: after explaining that he had to take us there, he added:”If you like it, you buy; if not, it's part of the culture,” which I saw as a reference to more than just the practice of carving jade. The jade gallery was actually not bad. The tour was a bit cursory, but a lot of the overpriced jade goods were pretty to look at, and I took a few photos while one of the guys on the trip examined cufflinks. I chatted with Andy, who mentioned that he had found my Facebook profile and complimented the picture of me in a Viking hat, which surprised me, though in the end I think Andy is nice and it is not creepy. After a few minutes, Andy released us from the showroom and we were on our way to the Ming Tombs.

 

I don't actually have a ton to say about the Ming Tombs. While there are 13 of them in one valley near Beijing, only one of them has been opened, and there's not too much to see in it—while the building above the tomb is elaborate, the tomb walls as they are today are just bare stone blocks, and I have no reason to think they were ever decorated. Furthermore, the funeral goods were all in boxes, which have been replaced with replica boxes, but were probably never that cool to begin with. Andy supplied some neat facts about how bad the emperor who was buried there was and how his people cursed and betrayed him, so I was glad to have the guide, but the site itself was not as fun as many others I have visited in China.

 

After the Ming Tombs, our lunch was at another jade gallery. Andy apologized in advance and didn't make us hang out on the tour this time, and we had lunch in a big restaurant attached to the showroom after Micheal had bought his cufflinks. The lunch was made more interesting by the fact that Javi was so allergic to fish that he might die if fed it (not a good idea to come to China in that case, but he said he had an Epi-Pen, at least), and by Michael buying everyone a bunch of beer. Luckily, Javi did not eat fish or die. The food was nothing spectacular, but I enjoyed it because it was my first full meal in China. At some point during the meal, it became clear that all of my van-mates, who were traveling in two separate parties and had never met each other before, were gay. I am not sure how they figured that out—maybe gaydar—but they all knew before I did. It was funny being the odd woman out after that. They were still nice and bought me beers, but they would occasionally stop themselves from saying something with a look of, “Mustn't Offend the Straight Woman.” Guys, I'm from San Francisco—I can take it!

 

The Great Wall followed lunch and a bus ride during which I drank beer and wished I had something to add to the discussion of which New York gay bars were the sketchiest, though I did also get to talk to Michael about law school some, which was nice. The guys also talked about their pets, “the gayest little dogs!” for the New Yorkers and a cat and a golden retriever for the Oregonains. I said I wished I had a pet and Michael said I should get cats in law school so that I can have company. I'd love to, but we'll see about that.

 

But yeah, the Great Wall. We visited the Mutianyu section, which is the only section I have visited (tours to other sections cost a lot more when I looked this time around, and I was feeling broke, so I decided just to go back to Mutianyu—in retrospect, that was silly, but at least the tour was good). It was thundering a little and looked like it might rain, so Andy told us to be sure not to use cell phones. Apparently they attract lightning strikes—the Ming Tombs were also covered with signs saying not to use cell phones during storms, too. The men decided to take the cable car up, but, despite the weather, I wanted to walk, so I walked alone.

 

Hiking up to the Great Wall is a significant trek. You have to climb a crapton of stairs through the woods before you reach the wall itself, and the first bit of the walk is lined with merchant stalls where people rather aggressively hawk cheap souvenirs. My walk was a little easier this time than last time because the light rain that started to fall kept me coolish and had some of the shopkeepers scrambling to keep their wares out of the rain. It did not, however, stop the old lady who hollered after me, “Miss! You ride camel!” The camel, you see, is okay to go out in the rain, and was sitting on the ground, chewing some cud and looking as pissed as possible, not because of the rain but just because that is how camels roll. I plunged up the stairs, tossing back, “I don't want it, thank you,” in bad Chinese to every merchant who tried to sell me something in bad English.

 

Even in the rain, it was still quite hot, and I had to pause a few times on the really very long stone staircase on my way up. Luckily, the thunder passed and the rain stopped just after I made it up out of the trees and onto the Great Wall. I took a photo of myself looking pink as a piggy in front of the breathtaking panorama.

 

Pictures are better than words to describe most of the experience of being on the Great Wall, so I'll spare you a fair amount until I get my photos uploaded somewhere. However, there were a few things worth noting. One is that the first person I talked to on the wall was a young man who saw my Red Sox hat and called out, “Boston! I pity you!” but then amended that to say that he is a Yankees fan and I probably pity him these days. I can't say that I was thinking about baseball rivalries on the top of the Great Wall at all, or that I have been following sports since I left the states, but I kind of nodded along rather than chide him for it (I would have been gentle, I swear). We chatted a bit more and I learned that he and his companions were from Georgetown and were in China for an international health course, which sounded pretty sweet, if you're into that.

 

Remember when I said there are a lot of steps to get up to the Great Wall? Well there are a lot to climb to the top of it once you are there, too. In fact, a lot more than there are just to get up. I was worried that the guys in the cable car would beat me back by a lot if I didn't hurry, so I kept up a brisk pace along the wall, my leg muscles hating me for stopping my fitness regimen months ago. Luckily, it felt kind of good to get some fresh air and exercise, and the views of the mountains, the wall, and the scattering storm clouds were a nice sight every time I stopped to rest.

 

I freaked out some Chinese tourists who were sitting on the Wall as I passed. It was a group of young men, and soon after I went by I heard one of them say something about Americans or an American. I looked back to see what they were talking about as one of them asked, “... dongle ma?” (“did ... understand?”), and one of the guys, who was watching me, cried out, “Dongle!” which in context means, “She understood!” Not that I really did, though, except to know they were talking about me. I wonder what they said!

 

As I neared the highest part of the wall, I was sure I would pass the guys who took the cable car, but I never did. I began to be pretty sure they had gone the other way, but then, on my way back down, I passed them going up. Turned out the cable car couldn't run in the storm, so they got stuck. Suckers! of course, I bet they are all half as sore as me today. I climbed back down while they took the cable car back, as well. On the way down, I ran into two old Chinese ladies who, unlike everybody else in China, seemed to assume I would speak Chinese and just started talking to me. They used a lot of words I didn't know, but were very friendly and very good at rephrasing things so that I could get it eventually, so we chatted for a minute about climbing the wall.

 

The men ended up being late for the bus, while I was on time, more or less. I spent the time waiting for them trying to cool down with some bottled water that the driver gave me (and nobody else—I think he liked that I had talked to him, which was nice). When the guys got back, they gave me a bottle of beer (in addition to the two cans they had already given me) and drank some beer themselves. Unfortunately for me, all the beer and water meant that I had to pee about five minutes after we left, and I spent the 80 minute drive to the silk factory literally squirming in my seat as Andy disapproved of my decision making from the front seat and refused the guys' offer of his own beer. We drove by the Olympic stadia on the way back, faster than initially planned so that we could get to the silk factory and a bathroom. I snapped a couple of terrible photos of the Water Cube and will need to decide if I want to go back and see them again and get better photos or not. I also spent the ride talking to Javi about being a flight attendant, which sounds like a pretty sweet gig. He says he doesn't even need to like people to do it, and that he knows what to do if there's a bomb on the plane, though it's a secret.

 

The silk factory was trying to sell us silk comforters. They were nice and reasonably priced, and I was actually tempted, but don't want to lug a comforter around for the rest of my trip, so didn't go for it. Michael bargained more than he should have for some silk sheets, to my minor embarrassment. In the end, he didn't buy (and I can't really blame him—the sheets were expensive, though non-negotiable) and I was glad to be let out. The guys planned to meet up later, and while I could probably have gone if I had wanted to, it didn't seem like the thing to do, and I was still tired and jet lagged. I got dropped back at my hotel instead, thanking Andy and the driver as they drove away. I was too tired to want dinner (not to mention I think jet lag has wrought havoc on my feeding schedule) and, after a shower, went right to bed.

Most of what we saw on the road from the airport to Port Vila looked pretty rural and underdeveloped. Jane said that when she first got here it looked somewhat “poor and scary” as a place to bring kids to from across the world. It certainly wasn't very developed or rich, but I didn't think it looked scary. Then again, I don't have kids! Many of the buildings we passed were made out of cement blocks, and all kinds of unusual plants grew wild on the sides of the road.

 

We passed through downtown Port Vila, which is just a few blocks by a few blocks of larger buildings (the tallest around five stories) full of very international shops. Port Vila is inhabited by French, English and Chinese people, as well as the native Ni-Van people, so there were shops catering to all these groups. Some of the shops in the very center of town clearly catered to tourists, who mostly come from Australia and New Zealand, but many sold food and essentials to the natives and expats who live here.

 

Jane and Andrew live a few minutes outside of downtown in a residential area where both expats and Ni-Van people live. The nearest business is a small place called Ronnie's Nakamal with a hand painted sign that sells kava, a traditional beverage made out of a root that grows in Vanuatu. Andrew said it tastes foul, but we should go try it at some point. Since it is traditional, I agreed.

 

We got back to Jane and Andrew's house and Andrew got me a passion fruit juice made from passion fruit from the local market. We sat and chatted for a bit. Shortly after Jane mentioned that they have a lot of earthquakes here because they are on the Ring of Fire, the room started to shake. The shaking was not violent, but it was quite strong and continued for maybe a minute, with things in the room visibly swaying, though nothing fell. At first, Jane just remarked merrily that this was one of the earthquakes they had talked about, though she said that it was the strongest she had ever felt. As the shaking continued and stayed strong, she wondered if we should go outside. Being rather jetlagged and surprised by the whole thing, I had never considered that, but it sounded like a good idea to me. However, just as we thought of stirring from our seats, the quake subsided, with just a few smaller aftershocks. We later learned that the quake had measured over a 6 on the Richter scale, and had been centered somewhere off the coast of the island. In three years in San Francisco, the biggest quake I ever felt was about a 3 and very short in duration. The quake left me feeling a bit nervous that it might be a sign of bigger things to come, but in fact nothing followed except for a few much smaller shakes that I didn't even feel.

 

After the quake passed, Jane had to head back to work while Andrew and I picked up my cousins from school. Ruth and Anna attend Port Vila International School, a private school most of whose students are the children of expats. Since classes are primarily in English, a lot of their classmates are Australian. The main other group of expats is French, but French kids tend to go to French language schools, and the fracophone and anglophone communities don't mix much. PVIS includes kids ranging in age from preschool through junior high. My cousin Ruth is 11 and is in Year 6 (5^th grade), while Anna is 4 and is in the preschool, unfortunately named “Pikininis,” which is apparently not offensive in Vanuatu. Though it's a good private school, the PVIS building looks pretty similar to most building in Vanuatu—a single story tall, made out of cement, I think, the entryways roofed over but otherwise open to the air, with pale walls, shutter windows, and a dirt driveway. The cement-floored lobby of the Pikinini building was unlit and open to the air, but decorated with bright-colored children's craft projects which hung from the walls and even the ceiling and with little backpacks with trendy children's characters on hooks on the wall. The classrooms were big and bright and decorated with the usual posters teaching spelling and nursery rhymes, so the overall impression was of a regular Western preschool inserted in a Vanuatu-style building. Not surprising, I suppose, but it was an interesting contrast. After preschool, PVIS students wear uniforms, so the kids playing in the schoolyard wore matching navy blue shorts and polo shirts, and some of them had wide-brimmed Australian style hats as well. We let Anna out through the child safety gate and fetched Ruth from the primary school on the other side of the building.

 

The activities for the afternoon were tennis for Ruth and ballet for Anna, so after we got them home, they changed and we headed over to the tennis club. While Ruth's tennis class jogged around the outdoor courts, Andrew and I sat and chatted on a shady deck outside the tennis club building. The table next to us was populated by French expat moms whose children were also in the tennis class, one of whom was enthusiastically regaling the others with the story of some daily annoyance (I could tell more by the cadence of her speech than by the actual words—she spoke very fast, but in a tone I associate with frustration). To Ruth's chagrin, her tennis class was taught almost entirely in French. While she is learning French right now, she claimed that she didn't understand any of the French tennis lesson, and wasn't placated when I told her that it would help her learn French. Later in the car, though, it was clear that she had picked up at least a few words, so hopefully she'll feel better about it later on.

 

When Ruth's lesson was finished, we went to fetch Anna from her ballet lesson. The ballet class shared a room with the tennis club's weight machines, and it was extremely strange to see a circle of little girls in tutus practicing their curtsies to classical music on one side of the room as men a little younger than me grunted away and clattered weights ten feet away.

 

When we got home, Anna, who taught herself to read completely and eloquently at the age of four, read me “The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses.” She also read a few songs that were reproduced at the end of the story to a tune she made up as she read. We had homemade steak with rice and green beans for dinner, with location-appropriate gin and tonics as well as a nice red wine on the side. As we ate, a small gecko wandered nonchalantly across the top of the dining room wall. The extreme tiredness of 24 hours of travel really hit during dinner, and around 8 o'clock I tottered off for a bit of a lie-down that turned out to last the entire night.

Not too busy yet. I'm off the airplane in the Nadi airport and it's surprisingly fascinating. The walkway from the gate was open to the air with just a roof overhead and concrete underfoot. At 5:15 a.m. it's still pitch black in Fiji, but I can see palm trees out the window in patches of light from the airpot's outdoor lighting system. I'll be4 here for six hours, so will get a better view out the window at some point.

 

All of the shops and food stands in the airport apen arround 6, and the employees are just raising the metal shutters and booting things up. The airport is pleasant, but not new—many of the chairs in the sitting area are a little stained. It smells like Asia or Hawaii (yes, they have a smell, which I find kind of pleasant but impossible to describe except that I think it may come from the food). The shops look expensive, and are clearly geared at tourists, of course.

 

The first and second “What the fuck?” moment of my trip came in quick succession. Months ago, so long ago that I had actually forgotten that I had heard about it until my aunt told me I had complained to her about it twice, the time for my flight to Vanuatu was pushed back nearly three hours, from 8:30 to 11:10. However, when I got to the airport, there was no 11:10 flight listed, just an 8:30. Feeling disconcerted, I went to find an airport employee to ask about this. I found one engaged in a concersation with a middle-aged man with an accent from somewhere in the American south. He was complaining that his seat for one of two connections had been changed and that he knew this because “I had the same seat for both flights.” She looked a little nervous as she explained that due to weight balancing, they sometimes needed to move people around in the plane, which explanation he deflty parried with, “Well, I had a reservation. I wrote it down. I don't understand why you take a reservation and then change it.” When she offered to see if she could get him his original seat, clearly just to placate him, he muttered, “It's just a semantic thing,” (no, it is not) and kept grousing about his reservation. What the fuck?

 

Understanding that there was nothing further to be done for him and that he would apparently rather stew than get his old seat back, the woman turned to me and asked if she could help me. As politely as possible, I explained the discrepancy between my boarding pass and the posted departure time. She disappeard for a moment, then returned to tell me that my boarding pass was correct. It was the departure board that was wrong. The time had not been updated, even though the new time had been set months ago. What the fuck?

 

Several other American travelers have wandered by me wondering aloud about this, so I've been trying to exlain it tot hem while also covering my ass in case the info I got was wrong. While I think it's very odd, I can take it in stride—the lack or hurry to update the time fits well with the things my aunt and uncle have told me about folks in the South Pacific. And, to ease any remaining anxiety, the departure board has just been updated with the correct time.

 

In additional Adventures in Ugly Americans, as I was typing up the story about the man and his reservations, the same man, who is a member of a large group of Americans who might be a young-leaning elder hostel or just a rather tacky tour group, was standing behind me ogling the duty free shop with his companions. Someone must have wondered if they could buy things at the shop without changing money, because I heard Mister Reservations declaim loudly that “They take the US dollar anywhere in the world.” Oh, Mister Reservations, I really hope you believe that, because it will cause you some richly deserved swindling and hassle once you reach your final destination!

 

Still no light outside, which is strange to me because I thought Fiji was very near the Equator and expected it would get light early, but here it is 6 a.m. and still pitch black. I have five more hours until my flight, but maybe half an hour of battery life, alas. Can't decide if I want to grab some food or wait until the flight, when they will feed us. Also not sure if I can get food without changing money, which might be a dealbreaker if required.. After all, they may not take the US dollar everywhere in the world, but sometimes they do in touristy airports.

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Wrote a bunch of stuff on paper in this space that i will try to type up and add later.
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On my final flight into Vanuatu, I was seated next to a young man from Montreal. He had very long hair in a ponytail and asked in French-accented English what church my family was with. I explained that they were with VSO, not a church, and turned my Richard Dawkins book over in my lap, just in case. He never said that he was with a church, but I assume he was because he assumed I was, and most white people who spend a lot of time in Vanuatu are missionaries. He said he had been to Vanuatu twice before, on months-long trips, but that this time he was just going for a short trip to get engaged to his ni-Van (native of Vanuatu) girlfriend. He told me that in some villages, if a woman wants to marry a man, all she has to do is run to his house and he has to marry her if he doesn't run to another woman's house before she gets there. He also needs to pay her family for the privilege. If a man wants to marry a woman, he can run to her house, too, but he still has to ask her father for permission before it's official.

 

The lunch on the final flight was terrible: a chicken sandwich with highly processed little rectangles of chicken and so much mayo that it had begun to dissolve the cheese, and chicken flavored cassava chips. Luckily, I was not very hungry, and I ate very little of it.

 

From the air as we descended, Vanuatu looked very different from anywhere I had seen before. The ocean looked tropical, though less blue than sometimes because it was slightly overcast, and the land was mostly forested with thick, deep green plants. A winding river snaked through one part of the trees, and a few houses dotted the landscape. St least one of them was thatches with grass. As we passed over a bay, my seatmate pointed to a cluster of houses on the far side and told me, “That's Port Vila.” It turns out that the capital city of Vanuatu has only about 40,000 people, barely more than my suburban hometown.

 

The Port Vila airport is tiny. Our smallish plane from Fiji was the largest one there and looked like the only one with no propellers. Waiting friends and family waved at us from a screened-in gallery above the main airport area. Jane and Andrew were there waiting for me and waved as I walked down the steps and across the tarmac (there were no gates). Because I had no checked bags and nothing to declare, I was through customs and immigration in 9 minutes after we landed (Jane timed me). About a third of that was waiting for the immigration officer as he struggled to tie on his swine flu mask and eventually gave up and let it dangle around his neck. Luckily, I don't think anybody on our plane had swine flu.

Raph came with me to SFO and saw me off, which was very good of him. I was sad to leave him, but was fine once I got through the line. I'm sure I'll miss him this month, but really, the busyness of traveling will likely keep me from thinking too much about how I won't see him very often now. I hope that's how it will be, so that I can have a good trip and keep from being too miserable over the new distance.

I was worried that I wouldn't be allowed through security with my big hiking pack and a bagful of single-serving peanut butter packets, but in the end all was well, and the TSA screener even commented to me that “That's a good way to bring peanut butter on the plane!” Once through security, I bought some toy cable cars for my little cousins in Vanuatu as a souvenir of San Francisco. I will need to ask my aunt and uncle which of them will prefer green and which will prefer blue.

My first flight from SFO to LAX was totally uneventful, except that it was delayed. At LAX, I had to change terminals and check in and go through security again. I thought that this would be completely trivial, but to my surprise, it turns out that LAX is a major gateway for travel to Asia and the Pacific. In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense, but I simply never considered it. While the domestic terminal where I landed was your basic large airport terminal (though a bit glitzier than most), my first view of the international terminal was a chaotic mass of milling people, mostly Asian, and mostly families. A huge knot of people stood outside the entrance smoking, which was very odd for me coming from San Francisco where almost nobody smokes, and inside huge lines of people with laden baggage carts waited to check in for all of the Asian and Pacific Island airlines. The lines were long and unruly, not like American lines at all (I know that sounds funny, but Americans are much more into lining up nicely than people in places like China or Italy—my teachers in China used to merrily tell us frustrated students, “Oh, Chinese people don't line up!”), and the check-in area was so crowded with milling families that I had to pick my way carefully around children and bags to get to the Air Pacific counter. Since I hadn't expected this at all, I was briefly overwhelmed. Then I reminded myself that I was on my way to China, where I will soon be surrounded by even more, larger crowds of Asian people who like to smoke and do not like to line up, which made me feel more, rather than less, overwhelmed until I realized I was being a wimp and hopped over some small luggage and wended my way to the ticket counter.

The security line looked hectic but moved fast. I was behind a Filipina mother and her daughter, the latter of whom was carrying a PS3 in a Victoria's Secret bag and seemed to be on the verge of tears for reasons that were not at all clear to me without understanding their language. The TSA agent looked at my short hair and my long-haired passport photo, commented that I had cut my hair, and asked if I played basketball. Apparently, she had once played basketball and had cut her hair very short at that time. I hope that she interpreted my confusion with the friendliness I intended.

The international terminal at LAX is being renovated. I dislike public spaces that are under construction, and I particularly disliked this one because most of the restaurants seemed to be closed. My only dinner option was a hot dog, which turned out to be quite a bad hot dog. The crowd waiting for my flight to Fiji was very international, with a concentration of Australians and Pacific Islanders as well as plenty of Americans. A group of teenagers hogging the power outlets were speaking what sounded like French so heavily accented that I could only catch a couple of words. I hear that there is a sizable francophone community in Vanuatu, and I'm interested to see if they speak like that, and if I can understand them if I can eavesdrop from closer up!

The flight from LAX to Nadi is so empty that I got an aisle seat with an empty seat beside me, while a few folks snatched up entire rows to stretch out in. For a very long, international flight, it has been the most painless I have every experienced. Air Pacific is based out of Fiji and is crewed by friendly Fijian people in tropical shirts (can't call them Hawaiian since they are Fijian, but it's the same idea). The food is plane food, but decent, and they fed us both right after we got on and a couple of hours before landing. The strange chicken sandwich they handed out at the beginning of the flight was not the best food in the world, but at least served to drive the bad hot dog further from my memory and my palate, and I loved it for that. The morning coffee was surprisingly good. The major downside of the flight was the most petulant baby I have seen in recent memory who cried for much of the flight and woke me up a few times. He is the kind of baby who doesn't talk, but still seems big and old enough to know better than to cry all the time and sounds whiny rather than needy when crying. I'm sure that in his primitive little babymind he thinks he was justified to cry so much, but personally I am inclined to think that he is just a little bitch. On the upside, the fact that I could be woken up means that I was able to sleep in the first place, which is a rarity for me on planes. I give the full credit for this to my new inflatable neck pillow, which is the loveliest thing I ever brought on a plane. Mine is a particularly fine specimen, very easy to inflate and deflate, and covered with a soft, fleecy cover that makes it pretty comfortable to use. Thanks to this glorious thing, I think I got a full, though occasionally disturbed, night's sleep on the flight. Once I have internet again, I will need to get a link so that I can tell everyone to get one.

Now we are about to land, and I'm sure they will make me shut down my computer at any minute. Behind me, someone is whistling along to the Fijian elevator music they play during takeoff and landing, much to my barely-controlled rage.

Never mind about them making me turn off the computer—we just landed in Nadi, Fiji, so I guess they didn't bother with that this time around! Need to pack up now in prep for disembarking, but will update more when I have more to report.

I've written nearly two pages just about my first two flights! Will I write ten times as much once I am actually doing things, or will I be too busy to update at all? (Note: it ended up being the latter, but I will be trying to make up for that for the next while.)