A Year in China

[Jader Pack]

INTRODUCTION

Last summer, I got a work opportunity to spend almost a year in China. I've been there for about half a year now. During that time, I've traveled to a bunch of China's largest cities, gotten married, driven across Tibet, went to Nepal shortly (needed to renew my visa), and spent some time in Sanya (the "Hawaii of China").

I'm uploading my photos to Picasa and editing the emails I sent to my family so as to be suitable for posting here. I'll add as many as I can as quickly as I can and bump the thread when there's new content. I've reserved a whole page for myself because there's A LOT and there's a limit as to how long each post can be.

Hope you enjoy the read!


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NINGBO 寧波

Arrived at Shanghai airport. Our flight was positively miserable. Chinese people seem not to like to sleep on the plane, so they talked (LOUDLY) all night long. Also, about halfway through the flight, one lady opened her window which was facing directly into the sun. It was about 2 in the morning by my internal clock and the absolutely blinding light was very confusing.





I'm glad to be back in China. I think it's liberating the way you don't have to have manners here. In the airport I badly cut some dude off trying to get into the lineup for customs. I intentionally smoked another guy's shins with my luggage cart and stared resolutely ahead of me; he didn't react at all. I saw a girl push an old lady's luggage back on the conveyer belt in order to get her own bag off. People stare at me and I stare right back. They may be rude, but that just gives me license to do the same.

We have a pretty decent $20 per night hotel in Ningbo, a little industrial suburb of Shanghai. Ningbo, though it's seldom heard-of outside of China, is bigger than any city in Canada (6.8 million people here). On the way, we passed a nuclear power plant, drove over the second-longest bridge in the world (35 kilometres) (the longest is also in China, some 70-something kilometres), and wound up in this city. It's a national holiday right now so the roads are deserted, everyone's at home with family.

After dinner, my wife and I went for a foot massage. The girls who rubbed our feet charged us $6 for 45 minutes each, and proceeded to talk in an uncommon Chinese dialect about how we're from abroad so we've got lots of money. The girl doing my feet divined from my pressure points that I sit too much and I don't sleep enough. Two for two. On the way home, a reasonably well-dressed man looked at us, then said loudly (in Chinese) but to no one in particular, "your mother's c*nt."” My wife seems to feel like our part of town is dangerous. I disagree.

Tomorrow we will find a cleaner place for massages. The place we went to was a whorehouse, and the girls were surprised to see my wife and disappointed that we only wanted a foot rub. Price was right, though.

There's an overzealous security guard outside our window in the parking lot who invariably turns every car away, telling them to park elsewhere. Most cars just drive past him as he steps out of his booth waving his arms; he shouts after them as they go into the parking lot then goes back into his booth where he has a little TV and a stove of some sort going on the ground. The room is clean, but the bathroom has a faint s*** smell, I suspect because of cheap plumbing. I just keep the door closed.

Gas powered scooters are becoming rare here, they've almost all been replaced with electric scooters. They're good for the environment, but a constant peril for pedestrians as they sneak up behind you, silently cruising along at 50 km/h. It would be so easy to get nailed by one as they drive on the sidewalks as often as they do on the roads, and they're all carrying a whole family and a box of chickens or something, probably 400+ lbs. You'd certainly perish. They're even a menace for cars; they have no lights even at night (saves electricity and hence enhances range) and they obey no rules at all. At any intersection, regardless of the lights, they're whizzing through from all directions at top speed. Total madness. I am looking forward to renting a car so I can be impervious to this.

My wife's friend picked us up, told us the area where our hotel is in actually IS dangerous, and took us to the nice part of town. No one talked about my mother's c*nt in this part of town, but people still stare at me like nobody's business. People would drive by on scooters and stare at me for as long as possible, nearly hitting things and swerving around like they're drunk just to get an extra couple seconds of staring at me. I'm used to it (it was the same when I lived in China last time) so it doesn't bother me, but it causes a few laughs. I overheard someone shout to his friend, "Hey, come over here and look: a foreigner!" The person then came over and they both stared at me without making any attempt to hide it until I left. I was at a urinal when a guy I don't think I've ever seen told me my Chinese is really good. I saw seven other white people in town, and I did exactly as the Chinese did and shouted "Look, a foreigner" then stared at them.

Also, I saw a crazy building shaped like a pair of pants. Apparently there's some kind of ball field on top of it but I didn't go see. I saw a dude napping on concrete using a bottle of iced tea for a pillow. A fellow on an electric scooter blasted through a very busy intersection against the light. His strategy was to stare at something in the opposite direction of the traffic that nearly killed him, presumably on the basis that if they realized he can't see them (but they can see him) that they'll yield. Astoundingly, this tremendous risk paid off and he made it home to his family ten seconds earlier than he otherwise would have.

We could not exchange our money for Chinese money today. We went to a bank and took a number (1250). The screen showed some five people in front of us. However, it went from 1245 to 1246 to 5003 (!) to 3200 (!!) to 1247, to 1249, back to 5003 (!!!), then finally to us. The lady behind the bulletproof glass told my wife that she needs ID to change money and that a passport was not ID. However, oddly, my passport would have sufficed (the actual thing and not the photo of it on my iPhone that I have) so tomorrow we'll go with my passport. Rules are rules, even if they make no sense. This is especially true if the person making the rules is behind bulletproof glass and appears to have near minimal job satisfaction.

Today I came to the conclusion that stepping in barf is worse than stepping on ****. Experience is the best teacher.

I got a tour of a clothes factory today, a friend of my wife's works there. They have a fingerprint reader for punching in and out of work. I tried it on my finger and it didn't work (I don't work there). It worked for my wife's friend, though.





The other remarkable thing about this place was the brands they make. The factory takes in cotton and outputs clothing in plastic wrap, boxed and ready to be sent to the US. Probably half of the brands of clothing that we wear was being made here, by the same people in the same factory. I feel a lot less badly about buying the cheapest possible clothing now, as it really is all the same.

We have breakfast at a restaurant called Hao Wei Dang. It resembles a McDonald's. I asked if they sell bottles of water, but they said no and suggested various colas. I declined. After sitting down, I saw a water machine, not visible from the lineup. I asked if I could use it and they said yes. What I don't get is, if they knew I wanted water, why didn't they suggest I help myself to some free water from the machine? Anyways, tasty breakfast, 12 RMB total (about $1.75) for two people. The price makes it taste better.

On the way back to our hotel, a restaurant we were sure was open yesterday was closed and looked as though a bomb went off on the inside. Evidently they're tearing it down.

My wife's friend picked us up in his car (a Ford Fiesta, new, I think). While we were driving, we stopped at an intersection. We got a green left turn arrow which, to me, indicates that we can turn left with impunity. However, the cars opposite us started going too, nearly missing us. Turns out that, at this intersection, the left turn arrow turns on at the same time as the green light for opposing traffic. I think this is one reason Chinese people drive the way they do in Vancouver: they're used to not listening to the lights.

We had a barbecue beside a lake. Overcast day and decidedly smoggy. Tasty chicken cartilage kebabs. They brought some 18ish cans of beer, of which I drank 12. The pictures show the progression of people getting sleepy and dizzy and lying down, but I did white people proud and out-drank all of them combined twice over. There was also pineapple flavoured beer which I don't think had any alcohol in it.











I drove a Chery QQ. It's about half the size of a Golf and costs $4,500 CAD new. It feels like a mid-90s Hyundai, but you can't argue with the price.







Here are some other pictures of my time in Ningbo.

The neighbourhood near our hotel.



The nicer part of town.






Computer store. We bought disposable SIM cards for our iPads. $15 CAD for 4 GB of data, no contract.



In poor parts of China, these funky tractor-cars are all over. They're loud as f*** and their exhaust blows right in the driver's face.


Some typical tasty Ningbo food.





For some reason, our room key stopped working the next day. For reasons I'm not quite clear on, we had to pay an extra 200 RMB to keep using our room. My wife seems to think it was reasonable to pay so I'm sure whatever rule they just made up requiring this extra money wasn't too far out there. I'm not going to go up against Chinese bureaucracy over $20. After, my wife's friend (the one with the Chery QQ) picked us up from our hotel. We learned that this car has seatbelts in the back, but through some strange oversight, does not have connectors for the seatbelts, so they have nothing to click into.

We went to visit my wife's friend's parents, who live with him in a two-bedroom ~700 square foot apartment of rather nice quality. The whole building is made of cement, as most Chinese buildings are. All of the walls, ceilings and floors inside the apartment are solid concrete, not wood or drywall. Many apartments in such buildings feel like a garage, but this one was fairly well decorated and felt cozy.

Apparently my wife's friend's mom is a big fan of a Canadian communist who acted as a doctor for China during WW2. Immediately as I walked in the door she handed me a pair of bananas (I had stopped at a fruit store the other day looking for bananas but they had none; since then everyone seems to think I'm obsessed with bananas and give me bananas at every opportunity; I've probably eaten 15 bananas since that event). She talked about the Canadian communist. The dad was also interested in all of this, and he wore his track-pants hiked up over his belly, just below his chest.

We showed this fellow's parents some pictures of Saskatchewan and they nearly **** their pants. They were extremely interested in the plainest, most boring things (just as I am about the same sort of thing in China, I suppose). They were AMAZED at the blue skies and that there were people swimming in the lakes. A wave break also impressed them deeply. I suppose everyone just wants to see stuff different than what they're used to; I think the concrete jungles of China are far more interesting and fun.

Afterwards, we went to a little hole-in-the-wall place (pictured) where I enjoyed a litre of beer and some tasty soup.



We later went for some tea. Just outside the tea shop, a store was apparently changing ownership. The previous store had a glass sign concreted into the wall, and there were half a dozen workers smashing the glass from atop a ladder of sorts and making a terrible mess on the street. Some cops showed up and started shouting at them, and a crowd gathered. More workers showed up and started yelling at the cops. Then more cops (or maybe security guards, I'm not clear) showed up and started yelling at the workers, and at anyone who was standing around watching. The workers continued to smash the glass sign and work, while yelling at the cops at the same time. One of the workers called his employer to verify that they were supposed to smash the sign, but refused to hand the phone to a cop fearing the cop wouldn't return it, so that didn't really prove anything. After about half an hour of shouting, threatening, insulting, cops shaking the ladder to try to get the workers to come down, and glass-smashing, the workers' employer finally showed up. He yelled at all the cops for a bit, then yelled at the workers for a bit, and finally (after about ten minutes), produced a paper which seems to clear everything up (why he didn't produce the paper immediately is beyond me). The workers had finished their work anyways and started to leave, so the cops did too.



I'm annoyed by the "great firewall of China," as it's making it very difficult to access many of the internet services I use. News is unaffected (i.e., I can read about any of the verboten subjects), but I simply can't access harmless services like Picasa, Google Docs (!) or DropBox. My suspicion is that this is less about restricting information (who's fomenting insurrections using Google Docs, anyways?) and more about promoting Chinese companies over foreign companies (for example, promoting Renren over FaceBook, or Baidu over Google products). It's extremely annoying for me, but I've complained about it to my wife's friends and they don't seem to care (and they're not brainwashed, as they seem perfectly willing to complain about other things).

Also included is a picture of a cigarette shop. Cigarettes are very important in Chinese culture. What cigarette you smoke says a lot about you, and the prices for a pack range from a couple of Chinese dollars to $50 CAD or more (though, I suspect, all the cigarettes are the same tobacco, simply different packaging). The stores are funny, as they sell expensive cigarettes in display cases available for anyone on the street to window shop, as though it were jewelry or something.



Oh. Today, our bathroom smelled pleasant. This made me wonder what someone nearby was flushing down the toilet, as it usually has that **** smell like you sometimes get whiffs of in poor countries. I also experienced one of the things about Chinese bathrooms that I really miss from my days living in China. Since the whole bathroom is concrete and tile, you can hose it down with hot water from the shower when it gets dirty. It's a very fast, very effective way to clean a bathroom and I made myself very happy doing so today.


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“DEMOLISH” 拆

China's got lots of old buildings. As they're rolling in cash right now and starved for land, they are in the process of demolishing old buildings (some of which are as recent as the late 1900s, though others are hundreds or thousands of years old).

These buildings, even though they lack plumbing, insulation, heat (other than burning coal or fuel inside a room with the windows closed) and in many cases, electricity (other than an extension cord run from the nearest power line), are occupied, but the government still demolishes them. In China, everyone is essentially a tenant of the state as one cannot actually own land, so this is legal. People in ancient buildings like this simply find the character 拆 chai4, which means "demolish," written in red paint on their wall one day, which serves as their notice to vacate. The building is gone shortly thereafter.

The area near the lake in Ningbo has a hutong-like neighbourhood which is all fenced off; it's probably about to be levelled. Ningbo also has a couple of new or restored ancient-looking neighbourhoods with the ancient (looking) buildings occupied by Western stores one could find in any mall in Canada. Not sure if that quite captures the atmosphere of a hutong, but it's better than nothing I suppose.

What's a hutong, you ask? Wikipedia has the answer. It's essentially an old-style Chinese neighbourhood, with streets designed for pedestrians and maybe the odd human-powered cart or rickshaw, typically built almost entirely of stone.

Oh, one other odd thing. My wife wants to mail some vitamin pills (good ones from Canada are hard to get in China) to some friends in another city. We stopped by a courier today, but the courier (whose office was absolutely packed with boxes of various kinds) refused to take it. Reason? Fish oil pills have liquid inside them, and they won't mail any liquids even if they're in capsules contained in a sealed container. It must be nice to have so much business that you can arbitrarily turn more business down with rules you just made up.

Some pictures of soon-to-be-demolished buildings I've seen on my trip.















This fellow seems to have found the character 拆 written on his wall, but simply prefaced it with 不 bu4, resulting in the sentence 不拆 bu4 chai4, or "don't demolish." It seems to have worked, as his home is still there and he's still living in it though the area is surrounded with newer high-rises.

[Jader Pack]

HANGZHOU 杭州

Hangzhou is much, much nicer than many of the places in China I've been to. There are a number of white people living here so you don't get stared at, people are a lot more friendly and polite than they are in most areas, and the whole place is full of trees and bike lanes and what not. Seriously, very nice place.

Here are some pictures of Hangzhou:



















There are bikes you can rent for free with ID. Unlike Beijing, where they are all chained up by the rental places who refuse to rent them to anyone (claiming they're all broken or they're closed, for example) you actually CAN rent them. Tomorrow we plan to be up at 6 and we shall cycle around famous West Lake.

This is the kind of Chinese city I'd want to live in. The air in Ningbo was worse than Beijing, but here it's perfectly acceptable. Not perfect, but not enough to ruin this place. Oh, and I can not say enough good things about traveling in China this time of year (September). It's mid-20s all day, high teens all night, and humid enough that I never feel cold even in a breeze.

To get to Hangzhou, we took a bus, which was a bit too crowded even for me, and then a taxi. People also smoke on the bus, which is brutal. Mostly, the problem was our bags. It's just not as fun and interesting when you're fending off pickpockets and thieves. Now that the bags are safe and sound in the room, we should be able to relax a bit more.

Some of the things I saw on the way: The taxi driver's check engine light and ABS light were on, indicating the car needs service. However, the taxi driver had put this out of mind by putting black tape over the lights. While waiting for the taxi (about a hundred person lineup) at the Hangzhou bus station, a fellow decided he'd had enough. "Forget it" he declared in Chinese, then started pushing ahead of everyone. Not wanting to deal with the bother of stopping him, people just let him go. To show his gratitude for their indifference, this fellow also viciously insulted everyone he passed.

So then we arrive at our room in Hangzhou, which is (unexpectedly) in a stadium. We were told we are in room 161, which is just around the corner. The corner, of course, was the circumference of the stadium, so we had to walk all the way around the stadium to 161.

What greeted us in the room was blessed cool (we are well shielded from the sun, being buried deep inside a stadium), a view of what appears to be the security guards' break room (pictured; they nap and smoke and chat in there), and the loud and penetrating sound of someone saying "wei, wei, wei," over the stadium's loudspeakers, evidently testing them in preparation for the disabled persons' Olympics that will undoubtedly wake us up tomorrow.

The view from our hotel room in Hangzhou. Immediately on the other side of the window is the guards' break room, complete with sleeping guard.


The next day, things started off a bit rough. This hotel room, as I mentioned, is inside a stadium. They're rehearsing for an event, and it's loud as all hell. The night before, they went at it all night and well into the morning, so we both slept poorly.

We left the hotel around 8 AM to go buy high-speed rail tickets (we like to live on the edge) to Shanghai. The ticket office is just outside the stadium property. Last night, they set up a security perimeter around the stadium because of the rehearsals and impending event. There was a entrance and a guard literally two feet from the place where we buy the ticket. We stepped outside the perimeter and bought the tickets, but I noticed that the guard was unusually interested in this. After, we decided to go back to the hotel for free breakfast, but the guard refused to let us in, acting as though he had never seen us in his life. He had his eyes on us the entire time and knew exactly where we came from.

So we went to the main entrance. No luck. The guard there told us the only way to get in was on the other side of the stadium. There was zero reason for this, as nothing was happening between the main entrance and the door to our hotel, 100 meters inside the perimeter.

Life in Canada is like being on the ocean in a boat. Sometimes (like when you're trying to find a job as a fresh law school graduate during a recession) you get tossed around in the waves, but most of the time, you can control what happens in your life just as you can sail a boat anywhere you please. Life in China is much more like clinging to a piece of waterlogged driftwood in a raging river full of boulders. Things happen that are beyond your control and you're better off just going with the flow. In keeping with that principle, we walked all the way around the whole stadium (it's a big one) and went in the back entrance of the perimeter, then walked around the stadium again back to the front entrance where our hotel is. That took about half an hour.

Then we left the hotel again, prepared not to come back all day. Our plan was to rent one of the red bikes we'd seen all over. However, it started to look like Beijing, where there were thousands of bikes but no one would rent them. Each stand told us the next stand down the road could rent to us. We walked literally for one hour before actually finding the fabled stand that could rent the bikes to us.

The bike rental system here is really neat once you're in. You get a card with a balance on it after paying a 300 RMB ($50) deposit. Then you find a bike depot in the city. They're all over and range in size from 20 bikes to hundreds. Find a bike in good shape (by my reckoning, 25% are unusable and another 25% are flawed) and wave your card over its stand. The bike is released. If you return it within the hour, it's free. Every hour thereafter costs one RMB (a sixth of a dollar). You can go anywhere and you can lock the bike to anything (where depots are not close enough) using an included lock and key. When done, return to the nearest depot. If it's full, you presumably have to go to the next nearest depot (a block away or so). Any empty stand will accept the bike (securing it) and stop your account from being further charged.

Much of the city, like Beijing, is suitable for biking. It's flat-ish, and there is universally at least a shoulder for cyclists. Most roads have a physically separated lane for bikes. The only danger is crossing intersections, which you just have to get used to. Basically, you inch out onto the road and play Frogger until someone doesn't want to risk hitting you and stops; then you can advance to the next lane. There are also a number of lake-side roads and trails you can bike on that are free of cars.

My wife and I circled West Lake twice over the course of the day. We had a decent lunch and a great dinner, and spent about 11 hours exploring. Most of what I saw was awesome.





There's an artificial trail crossing the lake that is about 30 meters wide and about 4 km long, lined with trees and where cars can't go. It's a very nice cycle and we did it twice. Oddly, the second time there were guards everywhere telling everyone to walk their bikes the whole 4 km, which was stupid and ruined our second crossing.

There are less busy roads going alongside the lake on the west of the lake, very pretty.

There are dozens of restaurants all over the south of the lake that are a lot of fun and that serve cold beer for weary cyclists like me.

We found an ancient part of town in the east. It had narrow, hutong-like alleys and lots of neat stores and tea houses. It also had a huge castle with stunning views at the top of a mountain and a hill-top area with thousands of seniors all playing various card games all day long.

Then there was a bit of a miserable bike ride back to the depot where we can get our deposit back, with non-separate bike lanes and lots of traffic. Then we walked home, stopping briefly for a great dinner of fried tofu, various veggies, and a potato dish that was suspiciously like french fries. Also, some beer.

The security perimeter was still in full effect so we just went to the back this time. However, even hotel guests were apparently not allowed in. This was one of those times when, if you're drowning, you thrash. My wife and I both yelled at and insulted the cops, and they let us in.

Now we're back in our room and it's f***ing bedtime but they're rehearsing louder than ever.


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CHINESE HOTELS

My parents commented on the apparent high quality of the hotels we're in (I had sent them some pictures of the hotels). These are about $100 CAD "normally," but I don't think anyone ever pays the normal price. We are paying $20-$30 CAD a night, for example.

I think Chinese hotels are generally tastefully decorated. They make good use of lighting and coloured materials to make the place look ritzy. However, on closer examination the cracks in the veneer are obvious.

First, the floor. Normally there are tile floors. These are generally not a problem as they're easy to clean. However, carpets are always bad here. I don't think I've ever seen a vacuum cleaner in China, let alone a rug doctor. The carpets generally go completely uncleaned. There is often dust and unimaginable stains, as well as dead bugs.

There's usually pretty generous use of expensive-looking wood finishes. Touch the surface though and you can see that the wood is paper thin or fake (plastic). They hide what's underneath with this, or with poorly applied wallpaper. Behind these are usually bare concrete or plywood.

There's lots of nice low-voltage lighting, but cheap power supplies mean many don't work at all, and where they do, they often can't keep a steady current so the lights are constantly flickering or getting brighter and dimmer.

There are also usually fancy computer-controlled A/C and fan systems. Just don't press the buttons too hard or you might break the plastic mounts that hold them on the wall, as I did in two separate hotels.

Take our place in Shanghai (coming in a later post). $30 CAD a night. Small and a bit musty, but not filthy overall. Bathroom did not smell like ****, and it's not because the drains were clogged like they were in our previous place. Half tile, half dirty nasty carpet. Surprisingly quiet. A/C was good, and a sign declared the room temperature in Shanghai to be 26 degrees. I set it for 21. Outside is nearly 30.

There's more. All over the roof and what little drywall they use are water stains from leaky pipes.

One might think it's a pretty nice touch to include a flat-screen TV. That is, until one looks at the brand: Soyea. Quality.

There's some pretty nice taps and mirror mouldings in the bathroom. However, it looks like whoever built it wasn't so handy with the tape measure. The tap handle has carved a hole in the moulding as it was placed too close. Someone also did a miserable job adding a phone beside the toilet and it's hanging by its cable.

Then there's the shower. It's made of what looks like nice marble (but is actually plastic tiles that are not actually that bad looking). However, in this humid climate it's key to ventilate the shower. Mould can even grow on fake marble tiles. I haven't seen a well-ventilated shower in all of China, so mould is prevalent.

The hallway, by the way, looks like half the walls have been replaced but they didn't bother to also replace the wallpaper or repaint it. There's a house phone but it's not connected to the hotel, it's just a phone. As such, there's no way to call the front desk unless you know their phone number.

They also cleverly replaced the hanging "do not disturb" sign with a light. However, it's operation is not obvious and it's easy to get both lights on at once (the "do not disturb" light is activated by an unlabeled switch by the bed, while the "please make up room" light is activated by an unlabeled switch near, but not right next to, the door). Also, the electricity to your room is cut when you take your room key with you and leave. Guess what this does for the "do not disturb" light.

[Jader Pack]

SHANGHAI 上海

Today we took the bullet train from Hangzhou to Shanghai. It's a 200ish km trip and it took us an hour. It only took that long because we stopped at a half dozen other stations; the train reached 300 km/h and can do 400. Given their propensity to collide with other things (unusual for trains, but this is China), maybe it's best they didn't punch it.

This was the newest bullet train I've ever been on. Japan's Shinkansen is from the 70s and 80s, and Taiwan's HSR is from the 90s. Those trains (the ones I rode anyways) could do 280 km/h.

The Chinese bullet trains are designed by Siemens and built in China. That latter fact is exactly why they seem to collide now and then, as the Chinese-designed controller is not perfect. Ours made it safely, however. It was also VERY smooth, very quiet (other than the patriotic nonsense they blared over the speakers and on the TV for a half hour after we left Hangzhou), very clean, non-smoking, and very spacious. Overall, it was a very pleasant way to travel and I'll choose it over a plane whenever I can. It cost us $15 each.

At Hangzhou's train station, you can pay 5 RMB extra and sit in your own seat at the waiting area. We paid, along with maybe 10 other people, since we arrived WAY too early.







My initial impressions of Shanghai were that traffic is lighter than other Chinese cities, it was generally cleaner than other Chinese cities, and people were as rude as ever (other than the police, who are oddly helpful). The air was so-so. Very, very humid (like, you feel like you're in a steamroom) and a bit smoggy. Some pics:







One more thing: to get a license plate here costs 100,000 RMB or more. That probably has something to do with the light traffic in this city of almost 24 million.

Overall, I think Shanghai was a pleasant city, but a bit boring for its size. We had four days here but felt as though we'd exhausted the places to go after just two days. Fortunately, computer problems meant I lost a day of photos so we just repeated that day and went to our favourite place again. I'd definitely come again if I had some serious money as the shopping looked absolutely out of this world, but beyond that I'm glad I've seen it and that's that.

I suppose my biggest complaint about the city is that it seems to lack the character that other places in China have. I like the oddness of other places. I've been to towns that were built in such a rush that certain districts could not be reached from other districts by car due to humorous oversights or bad street planning. I'm racking my brain here trying to think of any such unique things like that in Shanghai, but none come to mind.

There was one thing: at a tea house, there was some elderly fellow sitting there, smoking and singing what I presume were old Chinese songs. I thought the singing added immensely to the atmosphere. The server told him to shut up because he was too loud and was disturbing other customers.

There was one place that serves juicy dumplings with so much juice inside that they come served in a bowl and have a straw baked into them so you can drink the juice first then eat the dumpling. That was cool, I guess.

Unfortunately, I feel like the quality of food has gone downhill in China in the past few years. I was really, really looking forward to all the delicious dishes I loved from my time living in China a few years ago. However, it's no more. The meat is almost all chewy and now it's probably half joint and gristle, hardly any real meat. Vegetables are nowhere near as tasty as they were years ago. Not only that, but food is way more expensive than it used to be. Shanghai is the cardinal example of this decrease in quality for a higher price.

So, overall, the food was disappointing. Not that it was bad, for it wasn't. It's just that those juicy dumplings at Lin's (Vancouver) that I love so much are called "Shanghai juicy dumplings." That would imply that they're mere shadows of the actual juicy dumplings you can get in Shanghai. We ordered them everywhere we went, sometimes standing in line for 20 minutes or paying $8 CAD for six dumplings, but only learned that Lin's juicy dumplings are the real goods.





I love vegetarian food, but this place was a real disappointment. No wonder it's almost always empty.



This is a famous tea house. The upper level costs more than the lower level, and I didn't bother bucking up the extra cash. Tea was good, service was not great.



This is a typical tea-house seat in the older parts of town. Not especially comfortable, if I'm honest.



This dumpling house is famous in China. It was reasonably priced, but the dumplings really weren't anything special. My favourite was the crab egg soup dumpling, which was a definite stand-out.



That dumpling house's kitchen, like a factory. They turn out dumplings for thousands of people in a matter of hours.



I got sick for a few hours. It started with coffee-like diarrhea, and ended with me being very tired and having slight chills. By morning it was gone. No clue as to which meal caused it.

Today at the hotel the security guard started bussing tables at the hotel restaurant. Jack of all trades, that one. We hung out in the hotel lobby until some Indian people showed up and started huffing on the foulest-smelling cigarettes I'd ever had the misfortune of being exposed to. I've smelled of smoke all day because of them, and I'm sure they took a few weeks off my life.

We rode the Maglev train today. I'm given to understand that it's the only such train open to the public in the world. It covers 30 km in eight minutes, averaging 301 km/h. I was a bit disappointed in this, too. It was remarkably quiet from the outside, but on the inside it was not so quiet. It was also not so comfortable, as it rocked rather harshly from side to side. Wikipedia led me to believe it would reach 400 km/h, but the speedo never went above 301. It cost 50 RMB a head, which, while cheaper than a half-hour taxi ride, was quite a bit more expensive than the subway would have been. Pictures:





Speaking of which, Shanghai's subway is fantastic. The ticket-buying process is nowhere near as mystifying as in Beijing (where even pressing the "English" button does not make things any easier). The subway seems to go literally everywhere, and there are dozens of separate lines with very convenient transfers. The trains are clean, smooth, and reasonably quiet. They also come pretty much very minute. The obvious downside to this is that, in a city of 27 million, such an efficient form of transportation is bound to have good ridership. The cavernous stations and football-field long trains are packed pretty much of the time. Did I mention it's preposterously cheap? You can cross the entire city for pennies on the dollar, and so everyone does.

Our flight to Harbin is two and a half hours. I'm on the plane just now, and by my reckoning, about a third of that time was simply taxiing on the runway. Busy airport.

My wife says she normally gets one car or maybe has to take the bus from Harbin to her hometown of Shuangcheng. Today I learned there will be a convoy of three cars and 10 people picking us up and driving us back. I'm flattered, but it just means we had to get more gifts. Fortunately for me, My wife took care of that while I packed up, shaved my beard (her parents wouldn't like it) and chose photos for our wedding slideshow. You all know how I feel about gifts.

My wife told her mother that she spent $100 CAD buying her grandfather a bunch of healthy fish oil that is hard to get in China. In turn, her mother suggested she "show her respect for her grandfather" by buying him a hat. So, we got him a perfectly nice $3 CAD hat that pretty much anyone in China could get. Respect.

Below are some pictures of downtown Shanghai. All the old buildings are colonial buildings; note that they now all fly Chinese flags (in the past, those all flew the flags of the European colonial powers).

The modern and massive financial district lies across the river from the old colonial part of town. Thus, standing beside the river, you can see China's past (former vassal state to the Europeans) and China's future (economic powerhouse of the world). This contrast is no accident, and the patriotic symbolism is very powerful here.







And below are some photos of some of the older or restored old areas of Shanghai.

















Also check out the public wifi "telephone booth".




---


THE HOSPITAL

I had to get my stitches taken out (had a nasty lump under my skin removed before I left) so that meant going to a hospital. The security guard at our hotel who we asked for directions first suggested we try a dentist. However, the dentist declined on the basis that it might burst open and then he wouldn't know what to do. That would have been easiest, though, because the bureaucracy in Chinese hospitals is basically as bad as can be imagined.

After a bit of trouble finding the hospital (in what seems like a startling oversight, the sign for the hospital was on the wrong building, so when we walked into a recruiting agency and said we need to have stitches taken out the receptionist looked at us like we were crazy), we finally got inside and lined up. There was no system to the lineup and people were butting in left and right. Not knowing what I might catch from them, I just kept my distance. We made it to the front and were told we had to pay a couple Chinese dollars for a membership card of some kind. Then we were told to line up "over there." After lining up in the wrong place a couple times, we finally wound up in a doctor's office. The people lining up behind us didn't stay outside though, they all lined up right into the office, sitting down on chairs and lounging around in the same room while we spoke to the doctor. Privacy was nonexistent.

We showed the doctor the stitches, and he agreed that they were, as I had said, stitches that need to be taken out. We were told to line up again elsewhere, where we had to pay another small sum of money, this time presumably for the service. As we left the doctor's office, the guy behind me pulled his pants down and shoved his genitals in the doctor's face for examination as the people behind him looked on in curiosity.

We paid the second sum of money, then were told to line up "over there" again. Having found the correct lineup, we waited for a while before another doctor agreed to see us. I sat down on a chair and noticed that the ground was covered in some sort of liquid that I feared was urine or spit. My wife thinks it was saline, but it had bubbles in it. The doc asked why we didn't remove it in Canada, then took the stitches out and told me never to wash it (the water's dirty here) and that it was a little bit red but otherwise OK.

Before we were totally done, the guy behind us (whose foot appeared to be on incorrectly) muscled his way into the room, evidently fed up with waiting and lining up for the wrong thing. We left, and that was that.

I snapped a few pictures but wasn't sure of how far I could push it, as people were whipping out their rashy dongs left and right. Notice the general griminess (which isn't fully captured in the photos). The air had a very strong alcohol smell to it, and I wonder if they were putting something in the air to keep airborne contamination down.



The guy with a rashy dong. The room has two doors, you line up from the other side. There were probably 15 people in the room with him pulling his pants down.





These are sharps containers. Note that they just put the sharps in garbage bags and keep the nice sharps containers, rather than throwing the needles out in the sharps containers as intended. They probably save a dollar a day like this.



Getting my stitches removed.

[Jader Pack]

SHUANGCHENG 雙城

Shuangcheng is a smallish industrial and farming village south of Harbin by about 40 km.

Many Chinese towns have a sole product. I've been to towns entirely devoted to the manufacture of buttons, or socks, or 4-pin connectors, or pretty much any little inane thing you encounter in your life. Many of these towns boast a significant percentage of the world marketshare in their tiny products. Here in Shuangcheng, they make milk. There's a Nestlé factory here, which everyone here thinks I work at. They also make vegetables, mostly bok choi, and pigs.

A tractor full of bok choi.



My parents-in-law's apartment is approximately 900 square feet, two bedrooms, bamboo flooring, has a kind of mezzanine level, and is nice and clean. The beds, in Chinese tradition, are hard like boards and the pillows are filled with wheat husks, not feathers. Hot water comes from a small tank right above the tub that is turned off most of the time (so you have to plan ahead if you want to shower). The deck is covered, probably because of the cold winters. It's about 15 degrees right now. It was exceptionally quiet at night, but as soon as daytime comes around the usual Chinese traffic noises resurfaced. Also, my mother-in-law seems to have a deathly fear of the cold. She insisted my wife put on more clothing (she was wearing pants and a sweater) and she has a closet entirely filled with maybe 40 blankets of varying thicknesses.

The neighbourhood around my parents-in-law's apartment













Horse-drawn vehicles are common here.





This is graffiti, offering all kinds of fake documentation. No political statements here, just business.



Since they heard I like seafood, this seafood feast is what greeted me the first night.



Cleaner here is called "Mr. Muscle," not "Mr. Clean."

I wake up most days and enjoy a breakfast of apples, leftover meat and sweet baked biscuits of some kind.

My wife, since I've mentioned her so much.



Then we go to the gym that we had registered for on the second day here.

One day, a fellow who was also exercising did so while staring intently at me. Another guy was rocking the treadmill and bench pressing, randomly shouting "HUH!" when his strength flagged. I hit the treadmill and the owner thought I wanted to watch TV so he tried to show me how to operate it. I said I just want to think with the TV off, so he sent his employee to turn the TV on for me anyways.

This is something I've noticed here. Everyone, under all circumstances, needs the TV on. It's on constantly in my wife's parents' home. We were all trying to watch a video my parents sent us over the noise of the TV (playing a shopping channel with two ladies frantically extolling the benefits of a handheld clothes-washing and drying machine that was powered by its user shaking it) and it took five minutes for anyone to think of turning the TV off. As soon we finished watching the video, it turned on again, seemingly by itself. When we went out for fancy tea the first day, the fancy room we were in had a TV blaring news. Tonight we went to my wife's aunt's place and the second thing she did after turning the kettle on was turn the TV on (news, again).

My wife's aunt's “Land Rover” brand phone



As I was hammering my triceps, the boss of the gym had his (I presume) landlords come in so he could complain about the water leaking down from the floor above. There was, indeed, a lot of water leaking down. However, the landlord made a good case for blaming the gym boss. He pointed out that the reason there was water leaking down from the floor above was that the gym boss was also renting out that floor and he had shoddily converted the office space into a shower and changing room. The gym boss crossed his arms, then led the landlord over to another area a few feet away. "And look here, at these leaky pipes!" he complained. The pipes seem to have been recently added, and lead to the upstairs showering room. The argument went in circles then the gym boss let the landlord leave. He then started putting buckets down to catch the water, so I presume that was their solution. In the showers, I saw the problem. The pipes came in through the floor, which was sloped toward the new and unsealed pipe-hole. As the people showered, the water ran down that hole and into the gym area instead of into the drain.

In the shower room, I met a guy who was a sumo wrestler. It was the "HUH!" guy. He now sells cell phones. As I was leaving, he horked a big nasty loogie on the floor of the change room, not even in the shower area.

After the gym, we went for Shanxi spicy shaved noodle soup. $3 CAD got my wife and I a great meal and a half liter of beer. I saw a fellow staring at my iPhone and thought to myself that he must be seething with jealousy. Then he pulled out a $800 CAD Android phone and began carrying out a noisy communication with, I think, his mom. Another fellow came in and declared "wow, this place has become famous! There are foreigners coming for the food!"

We walked from there about half an hour to my wife's aunt's work. Along the way we saw some things. A fellow was staring at me and mis-stepped onto a curb. As he tripped and nearly fell, he never took his eyes off me. From inside windows, I could make out people staring at out me and calling their friends to come stare at me. All over there were lettuce heads and radishes being preserved for the winter. A person approached a stranger carrying some vegetables and asked "where did you get those? Was it expensive?" a block away, a person was selling vegetables off of a blanket. An old lady was standing there pointing out how awful the vegetables looked in what I presume was a bargaining tactic. My wife wanted some gloves so we entered a store. The boss was sorting through a pile of twenty or so bottle caps, looking for an elusive "free beer" bottle cap (gets you a free bottle of beer, though I can't imagine where you'd be able to redeem such a thing). My wife found some gloves for 2 RMB, but the boss tried to argue before he saw the price tag. A man walked in between dozens of semi trucks going full speed. At a red light, cars stopped and immediately started honking, presumably thinking that that would cause the light to change. A lady selling tofu off of the back of a motorcycle had a megaphone repeating the words "frozen tofu" in Chinese in a humorously excited tone.

Vegetables being preserved for winter.





When we arrived at the aunt's store, I could not tell what exactly they sold or did. The small shop was packed with megaphones, megaphone parts, various computer parts, various cables and adapters, and video cassettes. They informed us that my wife's grandpa (mom's side) had stopped by four times to see us. We decided to go see him before dinner.

This guy is a bit over the hill. He's in his late 80s, used to be an engineer and is now living on a pension. Half of his teeth are metal and the others are held in place with wires. He spits a bit when he talks; I know this because the first word he said to my wife caused a good bit of spittle to fly out of his mouth and right into my eye. What he said was "this guy's not Chinese!" We smoothed that over then he invited us to his bed, which evidently serves as his living room. He sat down uncomfortably close to me and began sensuously caressing my upper thigh. Then he started crawling around his bed and from out of nowhere pulled a wad of cash as thick as a dictionary out and tried to give it to us. The next fifteen minutes were spent repeating that I was Canadian, refusing the money, looking at the seven broken TVs her grandfather keeps in the house, listening to various fibs (he claimed to have built a nearby TV tower and that he had a 140 year old Russian friend who visits him regularly), trying unsuccessfully to call my mother-in-law for help (the grandfather appears to have partially cut the phone cord so that he can hear what is said but no one can hear what he says, so help was not to be had), and going from room to room so I could avoid being molested. When we finally left the old guy was waving his wad of cash around at his door, where hopefully no one saw him.

We crowded 6 people into a newly-built Jetta of the sort they stopped selling in Canada in 1992 to go to dinner. Dinner was hot pot. A smallish room with a table in the middle. A pot on the table, the middle of which is a receptacle for hot coals. A pipe attaches to the pot so that the smoke from the coals heating the pot's contents is piped... elsewhere (I hesitate to say outside because, well, who knows). We all sat around drinking bai jiu (translates as “white alcohol, it's a brutal kind of grain alcohol peculiar to China; it was only 39% tonight, not the 59% stuff we had last night) and beer and boiling beef and lamb in the pot. Pretty good stuff.

Hot pot.



A typical home-cooked meal.



A few days ago the weather started to get really cold, and so everyone started heating their homes. Heat here is supplied by communal coal burners, the giant smoke-stacks of which are all over the city. The coal burners heat water which then runs through the apartments. The (increasingly rare) single-family homes have their own chimneys, and the smoke belching out of them suggests that they are also burning coal.

A communal coal burner next to one of the buildings it heats. In the winter, parking space is reduced as they dump a massive load of coal in the middle of the lot.



The result of all this coal burning is some of the worst air quality I've ever come across. In Beijing, it's smoggy and you can somewhat feel and smell it. It blocks out anything a few city blocks away at its worst. Here, now, it's downright smoky. You get coal dust on you when you go out, and black soot in your boogers. When you blow your nose, you suddenly smell coal again. Visibility is a few blocks at best, and sometimes when I look out the window I can barely make out the building across the way or the park four stories below my window. It was a bit warm inside so I went to open a window but it smells like a bonfire so I had to close it again. However, the absolute worst part of this coal burning is the way certain smells settle at certain altitudes. At ground level outside, it smells like you'd expect. However, at ground level indoors there's a strong turpentine smell. The second and third floors have a dusty, smoky smell. The fourth floor (where I am) has no real smell beyond what wafts in from outside, and for that I'm grateful.

Smog on the way to Harbin.



Buildings here are, as mentioned, all concrete. The interesting part of this to me is the entrances. In Canada, each floor is all connected and the building shares a few elevators and stairways. Here, there are doors at the ground level, each serving columns of apartments going all the way to the top of the building. There are only stairs, no elevators. These stairwells are spartan and concrete at best, and look unimaginably bad at worst, with years of coal dust settled on them (it drifts in as many stairwells are still "outside" and cannot be sealed off from the elements).

A few days ago we went for our wedding pictures. In Canada, I think, this is a short in and out affair that yields a half-dozen photos. Here, it's a full-day photoshoot at least, with multiple costumes and settings, and yields some 50+ photos. Apparently there will be books and giant prints made. They provide the costumes and some were downright silly. They were dressing me up like Michael Jackson with frilly vests and puffy pink shirts and silver pants and ****, until I told them no and insisted on black and white, plain clothes only. The settings included a fake white baby grand piano, a fake dining room table, a fake garden gate overgrown with plastic ivy, a pink room filled with pink balloons and stuffies, a fake Chinese castle, and a plain black backdrop (my favorite). At one point I was told to pose with a stuffed lamb, at another, with fake gold ingots. There is also a picture of me in traditional Chinese wedding garb and cap wielding a sword that looks like it came from Conan the Barbarian's arsenal. I will say here that I would never have chosen this, but apparently this has become Chinese tradition and I had no choice. Here are some examples:











It was not gold. Also, I shudder to think how many other people touched their dirty mouths to it.


As it was an 8 hour shoot, we got hungry. There were no lunch breaks so I declined an outfit change and went for a couple of chocolate bars wearing an all-white outfit with an embroidered vest that, on the whole, made me look like Colonel Sanders. I stepped outside into the Shaungcheng streets wearing this, and stood out like nothing in history. Not only was I a white guy, but I was wearing a bright white suit standing on a filthy street filled with dark-skinned Chinese people all wearing dark thick puffy wool clothes that date back to the cultural revolution. Usually I attract stares, but this time I gathered a crowd. People were stopping cars and running out of buildings to see me more clearly. Probably 20 people poured out of a restaurant and milled around pointing at me. A man was preparing to slaughter a chicken but paused to stare at me. The chicken, seeing an opportunity, wrestled from his grip and took off. The man didn't even bother chasing it, he just sat there with his knife still raised, staring at me. I bought three Snickers bars for about 50 cents CAD.

Marketplaces here are nuts. They're pretty much all located in the worst possible spots. One is all along a muddy street, outdoors. People sell off of tables fixed to the back of their motorcycles. Meat, fish, fruit, tofu, vegetables, it all comes from there. Another is located in what seems to be an abandoned hangar. The ground level is all of this being sold off of tile tables, and the outsides of the hangar have been retrofitted with 100 sq ft rooms where tailors and barbers have all set up shop. The washroom costs 1 RMB and consists of a tiled ditch through which street runoff is flowing. You piss in it or squat over the ditch and **** in it and it all gets rinsed away to... elsewhere (once again, I hesitate to say it goes to the sewer because, well, who knows).

An outdoor market.



An indoor market





Some of the many things you can buy there; needless to say I bought a few.





Some wisdom from, of all places, the bottom of a wash bucket.



Some of the shopkeepers are at their doors, shouting for more customers. Some have music or megaphones to attract customers. In the busier parts of the markets, this has resulted in a kind of arms race where shopkeepers get bigger and more powerful speakers so their message can be heard over other those of other shops. The result is an unholy cacophony that really benefits no one. I can't imagine living nearby or having to work in those conditions every day.

In one such market, I was walking along when, over all else, I heard a booming "Hello?" I thought I'd imagined it but it came again. "Hello, welcome!" I looked around in confusion but could not discern the source. "Hello, welcome!" the voice boomed again. As I was almost certainly the only English speaker in miles, I felt confident that this message was directed at me. I swept the crowd again and found the source. On a raised platform stood a thin, grinning man wearing a black cap and holding a microphone. The cable led to a monstrous speaker of the sort you'd see at a concert. "Thank you very much!" the shopkeeper beckoned. I politely waved no thanks, and he looked at someone else in the crowd. In Chinese, his voice boomed, "Hey pretty girl, come over here! Special price!"

Dry cleaners have no dryers, so their stores are full of clothes hanging from the ceiling.

Most red banners are state propaganda. This one entreats people not to steal metal (i.e., copper from wires, steel from manholes, etc.)



Other than that it's been as ordinary as possible. I'm ****ting once every two days, no sickness, endless great home cooked meals and beer, I get chauffeured around everywhere, and I haven't spent a penny since I got here. My wife's family is incredibly warm an welcoming and tolerant of my Chinese, which is near fluent but not quite. I'm overall quite happy here and doing well.

The bureaucracy permitting, I will be taking a road test to get a drivers license. If that fails I'll buy one for $200 CAD.


---


MORE SHUANGCHENG 雙城

I had been dreading this day for some time, but it finally caught up with me. I had been catching snatches of conversations that some event worth celebrating would result in us being invited to Uncle Chu (a very close friend of my father in law)'s farm for a special celebratory meal. I was also given to understand that this meal would be a "whole pig" meal. It's exactly what you think.

The “whole pig” meal.



The celebratory event happened: my father in law's hospital was promoted in some way and is now more recognized nationally than it was before. The invitation was extended and accepted without my knowledge, and I was simply told that we needed to go to Uncle Chu's farm for dinner. I suspected what was up but my fears were confirmed when we arrived. Uncle Chu's employees were chopping up various sausages and meat dishes, and the characteristic lazy Susan was already full of still more meat dishes. I was told at this point: Uncle Chu had raised a pig which had been killed for today's meal, all of which was various parts of that pig. The table was full of sausage of various colorful meat chunks, organs, meat sausages, and so on.

Some of you might not know that I'm not the biggest fan of meat, and have grown less enamored with it in the past few years. I like a fine cut of beef or fish in moderation, but I have never enjoyed "meaty" dishes or cuts of meat with lots of fat or gristle or bone. Tonight's meal was not so much a fine pork chop as it was a smorgasbord of fatty, gristly, bony pieces of pig, and a selection of pig organs. What happened to the good pieces of the pig is beyond me; perhaps they threw them away like we would throw away the parts of the pig that were now on the table before me.

Fortunately, there was more "China Garden" bai jiu, the 49% variety, to wash it down. I started in on that right away as it tends to overpower offensive tastes or, indeed, tastes of any kind.

Chinese people have an (annoying to me) habit of strongly suggesting certain dishes, or simply grabbing a big chunk of the most inaccessible dish on the table and plopping it down on your plate. This is a personalized thing: they can sense what you are least interested in eating and universally push that on you. Immediately, Uncle Chu grabbed two large pieces of pork that were 90% fat and skin and put them on my plate with a rather agreeable sauce. I ate both pieces, gagging the whole while. Next, a blood-red sausage passed me and Uncle Zhang put a couple slices on my plate. I'm pretty sure it was bratwurst. A hip bone on a plate with a bunch of tendons flayed out on the plate before it went by and Uncle Chu told me, "lamb meat!" I saw very little meat, but braced myself for a chewy, gamey piece of tendon when my wife mercifully told Uncle Chu "Don't fuss over him, he'll eat what he wants." I managed to pass on the "lamb." I scored a bowlful of "cool vegetables," a kind of salad with tofu that I am fond of and managed to look busy with it. I choked down a few other pieces of nasty fat, skin, tendon, and organ that found their way, uninvited, onto my plate, and then the drinking began in earnest.

Most of the people present I had drank with. Uncle Zhang is short of stature and can't handle his liquor. Like my father in law, he is aware of this and bows out after one bottle. Uncle Chu can drink pretty well; he gets to the happy zone at the same time as me, and while I think I could out-drink him, it would not be pleasant for me. There were some of my father in law's coworkers there, also celebrating, as well as Uncle Liu, a large, stocky fellow with a giant red face. I knew Uncle Liu was a force to be reckoned with just by looking at him. After a half bottle of bai jiu and six big bottles of beer, I was on the brink of drunkenness so I bowed out and admitted defeat. To my surprise, one of my father in law's coworkers, a short thin fellow of maybe 140 lbs, kept up with Uncle Liu, far surpassing me and carrying it well. I've learned that these northern Chinese people can hold their liquor very well, and I'm not the drinking superstar that I am in China's south. Nonetheless, the night went well. The beer was a new (to me) variety of Harbin Beer that was light and hoppy. Served cold, it would be a regular at my house if we could buy it in Canada.

I was thereafter invited to go shower. Cleaning one's self is troublesome here. Though my parents-in-laws' house is clean, the bathroom is definitely not up to western standards. The shower is the worst part. It's a not-too-clean bathtub with faint mildew smells and an ancient shower curtain. The water pressure is best compared to that of a squirt gun and is further mitigated by the fact that 75% of the water flows out the back of the broken shower head and does not reach one's body. I avoid it as best I can and go to the gym, where there's a large, filthy shower room in which patrons smoke and cough up giant spit balls. The water pressure there is also pitiful, but better than at home. At the gym, it also takes about eight minutes for the water to fully warm up, which is miserable on cold days.

This public shower, though, was glorious. For some reason, my father in law was reluctant to let me go. He claimed it was dirty, that there was fungus, and that I wouldn't like it. I think he simply doesn't want me intruding on this time with his friends (for it is a social event) or perhaps he doesn't want to see my dong. However, the invitation was extended by his friends and he didn't seem to mind me going this time.

We arrived at the shower house, walked in the door, and we're greeted by a half dozen servers. We were ushered upstairs into a private room with five beds, where everyone stripped and donned an airy, white little getup. I was a bit worried that this was a brothel and some kind of test. We lounged around drinking water and red bull for a bit, then suddenly left the room. We walked down some hallways and entered a change room, where we stripped again and entered a bathing room. It was about 1,000 sq. ft., and was laid out thusly. On the right, about 15 showers. From there, in a counterclockwise direction, there was a warm pool, a HOT pool, and a frigidly cold pool. I was in heaven. I showered then hit the warm pool, where my comrades were. They warned me that the other pool was too hot, but I already knew I wanted to go. Hot, hot baths are among my favourite things, so I went right in. Everyone else, who stared at me just as much as they would elsewhere, could not bear the heat and sat on the side, but I was happy as could be. When nearly hyperthermic, I went to the frigid pool and stayed there until dizzy and shivering, then back to the hot pool until too hot, and so on. All the while various other big bosses there chatted with me or with my friends about me. As I showered off, a fellow offered to scrub my back and I gleefully accepted. He did a great job.

Then we returned to the room with beds, ate some fruit and drank some water. At this point, you can get massages and other services, but we simply ate and chatted. Then we dressed up and went home. I'm still, a couple hours after, squeaky clean and comfortable. I do sincerely hope I'll get another invite to the bathhouse.


---


STILL MORE SHUANGCHENG 雙城

Crystal clear blue skies today, but not from where I live. Fall has fell, and it is apparently a priority to gather up all the leaves and burn them right outside my window. You know that smell that leaves make when burned? So do I.

Parks in Canada often have playgrounds and **** for kids to play on. In China, those are somewhat rare. Instead, public exercise machines are ubiquitous in every part of China I've ever been to.

Most of them are next to worthless as they offer no resistance (the walking machines pictured below, for example) but a few are not bad as they use your body weight as resistance.

Such a thing would undoubtedly never get used in Canada, but they're a real hit here. Every morning and evening the public parks are swarming with middle-aged and elderly people who gather around, chat, "walk circles" (a common form of "exercise" here) and use these machines. As with most things in China, it's a social event more than anything.

Nonetheless, there's something to be said for it. There are plenty of 80-year olds living in buildings with no elevators, going out and doing their daily shopping and criticizing people with gusto, whereas it's a relatively rare sight in Canada. I'm not sure if public exercise machines are the secret, but I kind of feel that old people are healthier here than in Canada.

Typical public exercise machines.
















---


EVEN MORE SHUANGCHENG 雙城

We took a trip to my wife's alma mater.

Some interesting features are the pictures of the students with highest test scores, posted outside the front of the building. There's a gigantic concrete plaza in front of the school. Every day, students show up, raise the Chinese flag, and do a bunch of dances and exercises there as a group. Many students (such as my wife when she attended) live at the school in separate boys' and girls' dorms out back near the running track (which my wife says used to be a miserable latrine). The dorms are pictured, they're the buildings with the white-shirted students out front. They were there doing exercises at noon. There are patriotic slogans and phrases about the school all over, and the school even has a school anthem which they presumably sing each morning along with the national anthem. The school anthem is engraved into the stone wall that encircles the entire premises. The entire school was spotless; the reason for this is that there are no janitors. Instead, the students are responsible for cleaning the school and seem to do a pretty good job.

[Jader Pack]

YET MORE SHUANGCHENG 雙城

A few nights back I was suddenly told we were going out for donkey dumplings. The name of the restaurant is "old donkey dumpling king." In case I'm not being clear, we're talking about donkey meat.

We had walked by the place once before and I was told it is very famous. People drive an hour from Harbin for these dumplings, so they mustn't be that bad. I'll admit I was a bit anxious, and not just because of the donkey meat (which I've never eaten). The restaurant has a nice sign, but it's pretty much the only restaurant in a district that otherwise seems to be reserved for car repair shops. There it sits, in between some 40 or 50 car repair shops: the donkey dumpling restaurant. So I was a bit worried that it would look, well, like the inside of a garage.

The donkey dumpling place



Anyways, it was actually rather nice inside. We got one of the typical private room with a round table and lazy susan for some ten people. We started off with the bai jiu (a very nice brand called "national cellar," which I gather goes for some $100 CAD a bottle) and beers. Then the food started arriving and it included donkey dumplings and donkey soup. The story is a bit anti-climactic because I ate them and they weren't bad. I wouldn't be opposed to eating them again.

A meal where all the meat is donkey.



I have some things to say about the taxis here. When we first arrived, my wife often flagged taxis with people in them and at first I did not understand the reason. Later, it became apparent to me that these are not actually taxis but a kind of public transportation system. Any "bread car" (so-called because they look like a loaf of bread) with a yellow stripe along its bottom is a car for hire. If empty, they drive around looking for customers. They stop and you say where you're going. There's about a one in three chance they'll flat out refuse to take you where you say, often made apparent when they drive off without a word. There's a further one in three chance that they'll quote a price well above the standard 1.5 RMB per person (like, 3 or 4 RMB per person... which is 50¢ CAD instead of 25¢), in which case you can either start to negotiate (they seldom move on their prices and just drive off if your price is too low) or wave them away. For the other one-third of the time, they'll agree to take you there and without any discussion of price, it's assumed that you're paying the 25¢ CAD per person standard price. For reference, some of these taxi rides are a few minutes but many are ten minutes or more.

A bread car



If the taxi has people, the driver will naturally be headed in one direction (i.e., in the general direction of the place the current customer wants to go). However, bread cars can sit 10 or more people (which is because of the people, not the cars, which are actually pretty tiny, unusually narrow, and only sit 5 comfortably), so the driver will still pick up customers. While driving on the road, if the driver sees someone he thinks is interested in a taxi, he'll do one or more of a few things: honk his horn, slow down, flash his high beams, shout out the window, pull up very close to you or approach you on a collision course so you have to back up. All of these are intended to determine if you're interested in hiring him and express to you his availability to hire more customers. However, this behaviour is utterly indistinguishable from that of taxis that are not interested in hiring anyone, so it's hard to say who wants what. In addition to all of this, the taxi driver with customers will, in addition to shouting into his cell phone, operating the manual transmission, and steering his vehicle through the treacherous traffic, indicate with his finger which general direction he's going. If you're not going that way, you wave him off (most people don't do this, though, choosing instead to ignore the driver, which causes him to drive by REALLY slowly in case they turn out to be interested, which also makes it impossible for them to cross the road which is probably what they actually want). If you are going in his indicated direction, you flag him down. Once again, the above mentioned steps for an empty car apply and you'll either end up in the car or staring at its taillights in bemusement.

Some of the taxi drivers have co-pilots who shout out the window at passers by and collect fares. The co-pilot also keeps an eye out for potential customers, shouting "stop!" to the driver when he or she spots one. The driver will then slam on the brakes and swerve towards the potential customer without looking, only to learn about 90% of the time that it's just someone trying to cross the road or someone whose destination is, for whatever reason, not to the liking of the driver or co-pilot. The result of this behaviour is that as you're standing on the side of the road you have to be aware as there is more likely than not going to be a taxi that will swerve at you and force you back onto the curb to express his interest in you hiring him (which is indistinguishable from cars that do the same because you're in their way). Sometimes the driver and co-pilot do things other than deliver passengers. Once we had to stop while the co-pilot counted then delivered a bunch of flowers, and once a giant hog in a burlap sack was stuffed into the trunk behind the back seat on which I was sitting.

The taxi drivers are generally maniacs. They drive astoundingly recklessly, cutting close to anything in the way even when there's no need (presumably, for the sport of it). They often jump to the front of queues at lights using opposing lanes, turning lanes, walkways, or by slaloming through cars. At red lights, they make a right turn, a U-turn, then another right to skip the light, even through thick traffic, just to save ten seconds. The roads are in exceedingly poor condition so they approach knee-deep potholes at top speed, swerving at the last second to avoid them and nearly crashing into everyone else doing the same thing. They often play chicken with pedestrians, who pretend not to see so as to avoid having to move. They are equally as likely to be going the wrong way down the road as they are the right way, so you generally have to look both ways all the time when near a road. The engines in bread cars are generally 900cc and absolutely gutless; nevertheless, they rev the piss out of them and change gears like they're in a race. I say “generally” because if you're ever in a hurry, you're guaranteed to get a driver who never exceeds 20 and is content to let everyone pass him. Really, there are two kinds of drivers in China: revvers and luggers. More on this later.

A traffic accident. No picture of the gore, but a guy was crushed to death by a car's wheel. If ANY of you or anyone you know goes to China, take triple extra care crossing the road.



The cars themselves are interesting. Bread cars, as I mentioned in a previous email, are made by a genuine communist company, a state-owned airplane manufacturer. The cars are essentially very thin minivans with three rows of seats. The model number is an easily forgotten alphanumeric jumble, "HF63714." The '7' in the badge is somehow less adhesive than the other numbers, as it (and only it) has fallen off of most bread cars. The interior is interesting in that no two bread cars have the same dash. I suspect the dashes are simply salvaged from recycled cars then shoe-horned into the bread car. Some have no dash at all, simply a piece of plywood with switches. Some bread cars have horizontal steering wheels like semi trucks, some are vertical. Some have big, some have small steering wheels. The manual transmission can be anywhere from on the dash to on the floor with a 2-foot-long shifter stick. Some have air blowers that seem to be getting their air from directly inside the engine bay, complete with dust and the smell of never-changed oil. One seemed to be piping its exhaust directly into the driver's face via the blower. They generally have plastic windows and poor visibility because of that. The front passenger seat is especially uncomfortable as the legroom is often cut in half by the front wheel well. How that works on the driver's side is beyond me. In spite of all this madness, they seem to be rather reliable, as there are a LOT of them out there putting up with all kinds of crazy abuse day after day.

Overall, the taxi system here has the same qualities of pretty much everything Chinese: it's overly complicated and dependent on non-obvious communication and utterly arbitrary decision-making to accomplish its goals, and yet is somehow oddly effective. No matter when or where I want to go, I'm pretty much able to use this system to quickly and cheaply get there.

Walking also has its fun bits. Once, walking along, I stepped on a rat. People still stare without reserve and often point me out to their friends. Some people happily shout the only English word they know: "Hello!" "Thank you!" "OK!" "Welcome!" I wave back and they all laugh and talk amongst themselves. It may happen more than I think, as most foreigners here are Russian (so perhaps people are shouting at me in Russian too, only I don't know as I don't speak Russian). There are random (and DEEP) holes in the road and sidewalks, so attention is needed.

Crossing roads is tricky. Legally speaking, drivers are considered to be at fault if they strike a pedestrian. This, however, is the only weapon in the pedestrian's arsenal. Vehicles, on the other hand, generally have the stronger hand as they won't die if they hit you. This results in an eternal game of chicken when people cross the road. The general procedure is to inch out into a lane when, forcing traffic to go around you a bit. You gauge the distance and body language of all approaching cars. If they'll go around you, hold your ground. If they won't, either advance or retreat as needed. Standing in between lanes are generally safe spots, but you still have to be aware as lanes are not respected by drivers, many of whom are pretending they can't see you so they won't have to move for you. The middle lane is most treacherous as you have to keep an eye on both directions, as they have no reservations about crossing the middle lane. Nonetheless, if you understand the way it works you can reliably cross the road with no more than a couple of close calls. I find the actual crosswalks to be the worst as they're near an intersection, which means that cars can approach from any direction, not the usual left and right if you jaywalk away from the intersection.

All along one street, people are digging up the street and sidewalks by hand, then laying pipes in the trenches. My father in law says they built the street then realized they forgot the pipes, so they're now in the middle of correcting that mistake.

I've been enjoying the public baths. They're very similar to the public baths in Japan, except the cleanliness is not nearly as good. In Japan, you shower and soap off thoroughly before entering the water. In China, you generally don't, so the water in the pools is not especially clean. I saw a guy take a **** (as they leave the door open while they **** on the squatter toilet, which is in full view of the whole pool) then jump right in the pool and scrub his *******.

A typical squatter toilet, but NOT the one from the bath, which is a bit cleaner… a bit



I generally stick to the hot pool, as no one can actually get in it and the water is crystal clear, and the cold pool, which no one uses either. I am, without exception, the only person who goes near the hot pool. Some people will come by, dip their finger in, then go to the warm pool. I am able to get right in there, having been accustomed to extremely hot baths from my time in Taiwan (a land full of very hot hot springs). Once, a fellow declared to his friends that "If that foreigner can do it, I can do it." He resolutely came over and stuck his feet in the pool, then pulled them out with a yelp and retreated. He was not aware that the feet are by and away the most painful bit to get in the hot water as their circulation is often poor. I decided to share my secret with him, telling him that you must first go in the cold pool, then jump in the hot pool and it won't burn. He scoffed and said that would make it even harder to get in. I replied by asking which of the two of us was in the hot pool. He did not follow my advice and I continued to enjoy my solitary clean hot bath.

You can also get massages there. Just put on some clean disposable shorts and take the elevator to the fourth floor, where there's a room with rows of massage tables. Lie down, they ask you what you want and you get it, then they record your locker number and you pay as you leave. This place is not a whorehouse and the foot massage was ****ing awesome if you can get over the 50% chance of having a dude massage you. It's a bit odd, but they're way stronger so that's nice. I'll probably go back for a full-body massage before we leave for Xi'an. All in all, the bathhouses are a great way to get clean (you shower off VERY thoroughly afterwards) and it's a great place to practice my Chinese. The bath is $2 (but we get in free because of my mother in law's “connections”) and massages are about $15-$20 for 90 minutes.

Connections, or 關係 guan1 xi5, are a very important concept in Chinese culture. It's basically nepotism. You can get nothing from the government, businesses, or other people without some kind of connection to the people in those establishments. For example, trying to extend my visa, I went completely ignored until my mother in law called someone who knows the police office in charge of foreign affairs. The next day, instant service. When people say “I've got connections” in North America, they're probably a twit. Here, though, it's serious business.

Shuangcheng police station.



I'll note that, at the police station, the officer was asking people who needed passports and stuff if they believe in Falun Gong. If they said yes, she would completely and utterly ignore them. I asked her if this was a policy and she just said “no, I just don't like them. They're idiots.” Being a practitioner of Falun Gong is bad for your connections, apparently.

Some pro-Falun Gong graffiti. Typically, they write 法輪大法好, which means “the Falun Gong method is good.” This is what they write on their protest posters in Vancouver outside the Chinese consulate, as well..





Visited one of Shuangcheng's older neighbourhoods today. These areas are increasingly rare as they are constantly being demolished to make room for new high-rise apartments.

As in most other Chinese cities, these neighbourhoods consist of small one or two-storey concrete and brick structures. Many are half underground here, possibly because that would make it easier to stay warm in the winter. Most have single-pane windows, concrete floors, walls and roofs, and many have no bathrooms (there are public bathrooms in every block which are mostly just outhouses without sewer access). Many would have housed a number of families with shared kitchens and doors. People here seem to have a pretty low opinion of them, complaining that they're cold and dirty. Nonetheless, as in other Chinese cities, there are still people living in them, whether out of necessity or stubbornness, even as their neighbours' houses are reduced to rubble.

I thought they were worth taking pictures of before they vanish forever.

[Jader Pack]

WEDDING 婚禮

On about the 28th, my wife's family started arriving in town. More than a thousand relatives all arrived in Shuangcheng, checked into their hotels, then immediately converged on our apartment. My parents in law lacked sufficient sandals (which everyone, without exception, wears indoors and the host is expected to provide) so they laid down cardboard boxes on the floor so everyone could just wear their shoes. For the two days before the marriage, family members arrived at the apartment starting at six in the morning, and continued cycling through the apartment until around ten at night, when we just flopped into our beds and passed out.

Each family member would arrive, smoke half a pack of cigarettes, ash and butt on the floor, consume a bunch of sunflower seeds, spitting the shells on the floor, hand my father in law dad a red envelope full of cash, then leave. Some came back a few times, most came by only the once.

On the subject of sunflower seeds, most people here have a notch in their front teeth. The consistency of this made me think it was a ritual of some kind, intentionally done to the teeth. Fact is, their teeth are worn down forming the notches because they use their front two teeth to crack open sunflower seed shells all their lives.

On the subject of the red envelopes, we received 400,000 RMB (about $60,000 CAD) in cash for a down payment on an apartment in Canada, plus another 20,000 RMB (about $3,000 CAD) for travel. We actually received more money than that, but custom dictates that the money first be used to pay off the parents-in-law's debts.

Naturally, this procession of smoking and sunflower eating relatives made an absolute mess of the place. For those few days, it was literally like living in a smoky bar with sticky ashy floors covered in garbage. I was not especially happy, and even less so because I was running on nearly no sleep.

The inside of the apartment during the run-up to the wedding





Everyone was constantly fussing over my wife. I was lucky in that everyone just wanted to drink beer with me.



Naturally, all the beer-drinking and no sleep took its toll.



My wife and I writing my speech for the wedding.



The day of the wedding, I woke up at 6, FaceTimed with my parents briefly, then socialized with the visiting relatives until my wife returned from having her dress prepared. Then we sat on the bed and relatives came to take pictures with us for an hour. Then, the MC (who is, I think, also a reporter of some kind) came in and told me that I had to put my wife's shoes on and carry her to the living room. On camera, I completely failed to put either of the shoes, which were a complicated strappy affair, on. My wife did it herself, then I carried her into the living room. In front of a crowd, I turned three circles then put her down (some sort of tradition). More pictures were taken, then we went downstairs.

Our wedding vehicle was a Hummer limo. To be honest, it was a bit garish for my tastes, but my parents-in-law had probably spared no expense securing such a car in this part of China, let alone this part of the world, so I did not indicate such. To be honest, It was super comfortable and quiet, and its garishness was rather subdued compared to our escort of ten Benzes and a BMW. At this point, you don't just drive straight to the wedding reception, you drive around town showing off the cars and the wealth they represent and make sure everyone knows there's a wedding going on. We did so for an hour, and everyone gawked at the convoy of cars which were very, very out of place in this town. They practically s*** their pants when I rolled down the window and started waving at people.

Our wedding vehicle.









The rest of our wedding procession. The vehicles belonged to family members.



When we arrived, a row of firecrackers that looked like those chains of bullets used for heavy machine guns was set off. The noise was positively deafening. My understanding is that this is to frighten off evil spirits so that our wedding can commence in their absence. We stepped out of the car and went up to the third floor of the restaurant, where some 1,000-1,200 people were dining and drinking. Some photos were taken, then the ceremony began. My mother-in-law works at a TV station, so her guanxi (connections, remember?) netted us a nifty video including photos of my wife and I, a video from my parents who could not attend (complete with subtitles for my dad's spoken English which my mother-in-law just made up since she doesn't understand English… my mom speaks Mandarin as well so no subtitles needed).

The giant hall where we were wed.



Then I took to the stage, gave my speech in Chinese (rather nervously I think, but I got nothing but rave reviews other than that I was fidgety with my hands), and my wife came on stage. We poured some glowing liquid into an ice block which formed some romantic phrase in Chinese, then lit some candles, one of which startled me by turning out to be some kind of rocket, then we were asked if we would be good husband and wives and we said yes. Then we hugged and kissed, people blew some sort of explosive confetti on us, and we went to a back room for my wife to change into her qi pao (the red dress).

Me delivering a speech to a thousand Chinese people, in Chinese.



And afterwards…



The best thing about marrying a Chinese girl is the Qi Pao.



We came out, listened to some speeches from my wife's dad and friends, then had a shot of beer on stage (gan bei or "dry the glass" as they say), then took photos with pretty much every single person there. Then, we went outside to find some kind of heavily outfitted full-size Dodge van waiting for us.

Very few things in China are done well. There's a pervasive attitude of "that'll do" that is apparent in the half-assedness of pretty much everything. The exceptions this day were the wedding ceremony, which was pulled off perfectly, quite impressive considering it was just my parents-in-law working on it, and this Dodge van which was exceedingly, impressively nice inside, having been completely re-upholstered with high quality stuff. It drove us home, where the closest family members were waiting with take-out. As they ate, I secretly started cleaning up the rooms and before anyone knew it, the two bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen were clean. Then we slept for a few hours, then ate again and slept again.

I can put up with dirtiness all over as long as I have a clean home. I could not wait to tidy up after the wedding.




---


XI'AN 西安

We are now in Xi'an. The taxi ride from the train station was pretty normal in China, but rather harrowing otherwise. We were totally unaware how far to the city and our driver quoted us 150 RMB, or some $23. We told him to use the meter and implied that he was off his nut. He opened the meter, complained for a bit, then set into a kind of awkward silence. Leaving the parking lot, he drove against the arrows painted on the ground (which were not pointing in the same direction as the signs, making it unclear if we were actually going the wrong way).

For some reason, many drivers in China seem to follow odd rules about their transmission. No one ever, under any circumstances, uses first gear. All acceleration from a stop is done in second or third gear. Some drivers rev the piss out of the motor, especially motors that are less than one liter of displacement. Others refuse to rev above 1,500 RPM, which puts them in fifth gear just to drive at 40 km/h. When driving, they often accelerate at the oddest times and for no reason, and fail to brake until absolutely necessary. Our driver approached toll booths at 120 km/h, accelerated to 130, then at the very last moment slammed on the brakes, barely stopping behind the car in front of him. When the car is an auto, they often shift into P for even the briefest of stops in traffic, then back into D when going again. I've noticed my father in law doing this, then acting surprised when the transmission makes a noise shifting in and out of D. When cruising at a steady speed, everyone alternately accelerates and brakes instead of simply keeping a steady speed, even when no other cars are around. Further, no one, ever, and I mean ever, goes straight and stays in their lane. Every single vehicle is constantly in a state of being in the middle of a lane change, straddling lines and generally shifting back and forth for zero reason. This makes it treacherous to pass anyone even in light traffic, for you can be certain that the car you're passing will not stay on its present course. High beams are an oddity, too. It's illegal to drive with any light on during daytime, yet many people do. They also flash their high beams for no reason I can discern. They flash when cars approach, they flash at stopped cars, they flash when lights turn red, yellow or green, they flash before, during, and after executing a turn or lane change, they flash when approaching toll booths and when leaving them. When a car honks or flashes its highs, it can literally mean anything from "my brakes are out, get out of the way" to "I'm a car."

Our driver was a low-revver, and he lugged his 1.6 liter Jetta all the way to Xi'an, a 45 minute drive. The meter read about 100 RMB when we arrived, so we were right to imply his original offer was bonkers. Our hotel was nowhere to be seen so our driver called a few times before determining that our hotel was new and had been built inside of another hotel.

We entered the enclosing hotel and were told that our hotel's reception was on the third floor. Without a key card we could not get there, but fortunately a guest of the enclosing hotel was going up so we hitched a ride. The third floor looked like a parking garage, with nothing but concrete. I was certain it was a mistake but sure enough our reception was around the corner in a tiny office. We checked in and were told we are in room 21412, which (as is not obvious from the name) is on the 14th floor. We were also told that we cannot take certain elevators to get there, as only some of the elevators go there. On the fourteenth floor, we were confronted with a baffling array of signs. Apparently, all the room numbers were completely random, so the signs indicated that rooms 11933 to 12843 were this way, rooms 13485 to 14829 were that way, rooms 34939 to 39847 were yet another way, and so on. The room numbers were also not in any order as you walked down the hall so finding the room was extremely difficult (and made more so by the fact that the lights were out). What was wrong with the usual system of room numbers being short and reflecting information such as the floor number and where it is in relation to other rooms is beyond me.

Our hotel is right downtown, inside the city walls. Right outside is the "Muslim street," a series of narrow streets packed with markets run by members of Xi'an's significant Muslim population. Xi'an is at the end of the old silk road, so that explains that. Instead of the usual Chinese street fare or apples and oranges and pears, it's dates and walnuts and pomegranates. Lots of people speak something that is not Chinese, but they all still understand Chinese. The food is an odd mixture of Chinese and Muslim-style. We had dumplings with some kind of smokey chick-pea taste, and there's a lot more lamb than usual about. Annoyingly, it's not very good in spite of how interesting it sounds.

Xi'an's Muslim street.









The oddly disappointing Muslim-influenced Xi'an food.



Our second day we headed to the usual in-town tourist attractions. There's a bell-tower and drum tower which are old. The former was closed for maintenance, the latter was much like most old towers. Then we went to the city wall, which is about twenty meters tall, as thick as a four-lane highway, was built 1,200 years ago, and surrounds the inner city with a ~20 km perimeter. To my delight, you can rent bikes and ride around the wall, which was nearly empty of people and had no cars at all. In a first for China, the bikes were easy to find, easy to rent, and easy to return. We rode almost all the way around the walls for about two hours. The bikes were not great and the road was bumpy-ish, but it was a good time all the same.

Biking on the Xi'an city walls.





Then we went to another old tower but did not scale it as the ticket to enter the courtyard surrounding the tower did not include the tower itself, and it didn't seem worth the extra 50 RMB.

The tower we didn't climb.



The area surrounding the second old tower was very new and modern and filled with Subways and KFCs and Pizza Huts and expensive stores selling brand name stuff. I loathe these areas as they're utterly devoid of meaning.

The boring part of Xi'an.



However, we quickly learned that we were trapped. There were taxis all about, but all refused to pick us up. The traffic was snarled up in a fantastic way. Someone suggested we take a bus, but the buses all looked packed. We found a stop that would go to our hotel, but there were people all over, milling around with the same idea as us. We fought our way onto the first bus and found ourselves packed in like nothing I've ever seen. There were probably 400 people on this regular sized bus. As it was an air conditioned ride, the windows were sealed tight. However, the A/C was off. One was literally unable to move an inch, and a guy near me fell asleep but could not fall as he was so tightly packed in. Another guy got into such a position that his junk was right against my knee. People kept getting in at every stop, and they had to squeeze extra tight so the doors could shut. Someone lit a smoke. This went on for an hour before we got home.

The next day we went to see the Terracotta Warriors. Honestly, I didn't see the big deal but as we're in Xi'an, we ought to have gone so we did. I had more fun with the bus, but I suppose there's value in being able to say I've seen them.

Getting around Xi'an is rough. The bus depot was some 3-4 km from our hotel, but that entailed an hour of waiting for buses. We found a stop with buses going to the depot, but half of the buses that were supposed to stop did not even though they had space. A fight broke out between a bus driver and a car driver, but no one was hurt. Just as we left, a bus going to the depot stopped and we raced back to board it, just making it.

The bus depot is madness. There are migrant workers and their families from all over China, seemingly camping in front of the building. Some are selling things, others are just hanging out. We asked a police officer where the buses going to the warriors are, and after he suggested we go with his friend (a taxi driver sitting beside him), he pointed us in the right direction. The bus was a smaller coach bus, but after all the seats were filled people kept piling in until the bus was packed. As the bus took off, the driver shouted that the police were nearby and everyone standing had to duck down and hide (evidently coach buses cannot have standees). About four or five times, everyone in the bus had to crouch down in the aisle to avoid police or cameras.

We stopped at a restaurant where the driver decided he was going to eat. We all had to change buses, and the driver of the other bus was NOT happy. The whole way he shouted and complained to no one in particular about how no one ever thinks about how HE feels. A young Uighur kid played peekaboo with me.

The Warriors are in a place called Lishan. We arrived and were instantly set upon by people selling pomegranates and offering to guide us through the Warriors. We hired a Chinese guide as the English-speaking ones were 60 RMB more expensive. The Warriors were as expected: a bunch of stone dudes in pits. It was kind of cool and I took pictures.









On the way back, the bus was similarly packed. It stopped briefly and I got out to buy a pomegranate. 2 RMB for one was a pretty good deal and it was god damn tasty. A fellow tapped me on my shoulder and gave me the thumbs up, but I was not sure why. Minutes later, he shouted that he had to get off the bus and fought his way through all the people carrying a giant bag and got off in the middle of nowhere. The bus made it back to Xi'an and we decided on McDonalds for dinner. It was delicious, as McDonald's only is in China.

Getting my hair cut.



My favourite food of all, sushi. It's about $1 CAD for two pieces of salmon nigiri. Fantastic.




---


MOUNT HUA 華山

Today we went to Mount Hua (Huashan, in Chinese). This is a famous mountain in China, known partially as a holy site for Daoists, and known even better as being one of the most dangerous climbing trails in China. One of the most grueling parts can be bypassed by a newly installed cable car, but the crazy steep parts are still done manually. People used to climb it at night, in part because that way you can arrive in time to see the sunrise, but also because that way you can't see the insane drops you're walking beside.

The “Soldier's Path,” a not-too-scary part of the trail (unless you're scared of endless stairs) that can be bypassed by a half-hour gondola ride. I bypassed the s*** out of it.



The gondola ride. Yes, I was thinking to myself “This gondola is made in China. Don't look down.” I was comforted to learn that it was actually an Austrian gondola. I still didn't look down though.



Our tour left our hotel at 7:30. We arrived at some store at 8:00, then milled around for a new bus to come. It did, and there was about half an hour of shuffling for seats. Evidently there was one too many people and everyone fought over who had to get off the bus. A party of four angrily left, and we took off.

Naturally, our first stop was a store. No Chinese tour is complete without an unwanted stop at some junky shop or another, as the tour guide gets a kickback for this. This store was notable in that everything in it was made of bamboo. There were pillows, cloths, Spongebob stuffies, underwear, books, then things like vinegar and deoderizers.

Next was lunch, which was fantastic. I ordered fried rice and egg foo yong, and they were both out of this world tasty. Then we walked up to the shuttle, which takes us to the gondola, which takes us to Hua Shan.

There are four peaks to Hua Shan. You arrive, and the north peak is right there, about 10 minutes up some near-vertical stairs. The next three peaks are harder to get to. You have to crawl up more nearly-vertical stairs, up another 1,200 meters to get to the top. Along the way is a section that I've seen in all those "world's worst trails" lists for years, and I was dying to get there.

A picture from the internet of the “Sky Boardwalk” (天空棧道), one of China's most famous trails.



This is the one that convinced me I had to go here.



Everyone told us it would be absolutely frigid, so I dressed for the worst. Double pants, cotton t-shirt, long cotton shirt, thick wool sweater, and North Face shell, as well as gloves and a toque. On stepping off the gondola, it was a balmy ten degrees. My wife and I did the North peak, then she decided to relax while I did the much more dangerous summits, as she was feeling a bit under the weather (possible food sickness). I left all the warm gear with her. Hell, I'd have worn shorts if I could because the climbing made me hot as hell.

Hiking to the top took me about three hours. It would have taken half that if I wasn't stuck behind crazy crowds most of the way, but as I got closer to the top the crowds had mostly thinned and I could jog. On the way, hundreds of people commented that I was wearing too little. Chinese people have a crazy fear of the cold, which I find odd. It was seriously not cold at all. There was some poor dude hauling cement up, balancing it in bags at the end of a bamboo pole on his shoulders. I made his day by offering to help, then carried it for about ten minutes. People clapped as I passed them with the concrete, to which I replied "no one claps when this dude carries it, and he's way older than me."

On the way to the Sky Boardwalk.





















By the time I was at the "sky plank path", there were probably only 10 people about. At this point, I developed a fear of heights. I'm not at all afraid of heights normally, and I've been to the top of a few mountains in my time, not to mention driving roads like the Bolivian Death Road, but this was like nothing I'd ever seen. It was literally a 1,000 meter vertical drop into a smooth stone gully. The path started with a climb down a steel ladder embedded in a crevice, then across some foot-holes dug into the rock face. Then, the board-walk began and I edged my way across gripping the chain for dear life. Then, there was another vertical staircase that went to the summit. There, there was a small cavern with a Buddha in it, where you could kow-tow. I did for the first time in my life.

I was accompanied on the sky plank path, and photographed by, a producer at CCTV, who I ran into on the way. I also took some shots of him. While we were going, I tended to hold him up a bit. He let loose a stream of insults, to which I could only reply that there are times when giving people s*** only makes things worse. I said this as I was flattened against the rock face trying not to look down for fear that my legs, which had already turned to jelly from the brutal climb and my new-found fear of heights, would give out on me.

My pictures of the Sky Boardwalk.















The CCTV producer who came along with me.



Fortunately, my life was in no real danger. Since 2005, you can rent a safety harness for 30 RMB ($4ish dollars). You then clamp it to the ropes along the path and hope that whichever poor sap had to carry a bale of steel rope up those vertical stairs and hammer them into the vertical rock face (without the benefit of the rope he was installing) did a good job.

In case you're wondering, the padlocks and red ribbons have family names on them. People bring them up and put them on the mountain for good luck. More of those:

[Jader Pack]

TRAIN TRAVEL 坐火車

Just off the train from Xi'an to Chengdu. Trains are quickly becoming my favourite means of travel. My favourite is the high speed train. I've ridden them in Japan, Taiwan, and China and they're always the s***. Easy and fast to board and disembark, lots of room, quiet and smooth, and for short to medium trips the total travel time is about the same as train stations are usually right downtown (while airports are way out of the way) and you don't have to bother with checking in and all that bulls*** with a train.

Unfortunately, high speed trains don't go everywhere, though China's building a huge amount of high-speed rail at the moment. So the next best option is the fast train. These do about 120 km/h (as opposed to the 300-400 km/h of the high speed train, and as opposed to the 60 km/h of local trains, which also make way more stops). The biggest problem with a fast train is that even a moderate trip, like the 1,000 or so km between Xi'an and Chengdu, takes the better part of a day. Trains are comfy and quiet and all, but no one wants to sit in a seat for that long.

Chinese fast trains have four classes. You've got your hard seat, which is a wooden bench or, more recently, a plastic seat like on a bus or even a smallish upholstered seat) with no assigned seating and more people than there are seats. Economical for short trips, but worse than death for a long trip. Next is your soft seat, which is much like an airplane except the seats face one another and sometimes there's a table in the middle. This is great for an hour or two, but people cross the country like this with all their belongings and family members so it can be uncomfortably crowded. Somehow, people always sneak on so there are often standees too, making it doubly uncomfortable. These rock if you get four friends and occupy a set of seats facing one another with a table. You can drink, too, which makes it that much more fun.

The highest class is the soft sleeper. This is a closed room with four, approximately super-single sized, soft beds in cubbies in the wall. Sometimes there's also a little couch and more often, a table. Book one of these with a couple of friends and a backpack full of cold beers and it's a hell of a trip, but these can be as expensive as flying, and more expensive at busy times. Also, good luck ever finding tickets, they're always booked.

That leaves my favourite class, all things considered: the hard sleeper. Six slightly smaller than single bunks that are not quite long enough to lie on (so your feet get struck by the passing food carts) with a thin, hard-ish mattress and bedding of questionable cleanliness, no closed room (it's just open to the corridor), a tiny TV, a tiny table in the hallway, and a tiny table between the two lowest bunks. A twelve-hour train ride like I did yesterday usually costs $50-60 CAD. The bottom bunks are a few dozen RMB more expensive because you get enough headroom to sit up, so you can hang out with whoever is in the other bottom bunk while the upper bunks are stuck either lying in their bunk or at the table in the hallway. See the pictures if my description is unclear.

A typical hard-sleeper train (this is the one I rode on).







A typical lunch bought on the train. There are hot water heaters in every cart. It pays to bring some fresh fruit because noodles get old real fast.



Now, if your trip is time-sensitive, you want a plane. But sometimes, you just want a day off, especially in the middle of a marathon trip like this. Twelve hours in your own (tiny) bed with time to read and snooze can be heaven, as it was for me the day after climbing Hua Shan. I took three full naps, studied my Chinese, read an e-book cover-to-cover, and generally lazed about with nothing to do. Lovely.

There are some downsides. People smoke, that's a given. No one in my group of six did, which is lucky, but it's still a bit smokey. Food is rough. We brought instant noodles (boiling water is provided for free from an on-board and pretty skookum boiler) and fruit, but you never really feel good about food in such situations, just like on long drives. The TV is a touchy issue, as Chinese people seem to like having it on full volume even when no one's watching it and when it's obviously time to sleep. Also, there's no Internet and 3G wouldn't work because of the tunnels. Finally, other passengers like to chat with you.

My wife and I had four bunk-mates. One I don't think I saw once, he slept the whole time. One was a fellow from my wife's town, Shuangcheng (a relationship Chinese people call 老鄉 lao xiang; Chinese people have a word for every conceivable relationship). Another was a businessman who was reasonably friendly. The last was a 78-year old woman who became the defining feature of this train-trip.

When we boarded, she was shuffling around the lower bunks, which my wife and I had bought. She made a show of having difficulty putting her s*** on the middle bunk, which was hers. She also seemed to be trying to figure out how to get up the ladder when she asked if we could switch a bunk with her. Naturally, we said yes, even though we'd bought the more expensive lower bunk and it meant my wife and I would no longer be next to one another. This delighted her to no end, and she told us the young Chinese guys who she had been with before we boarded refused, forcing her to sit at the tiny table in the hall for a few hours.

She then started commenting us profusely, saying I was cute and I spoke good Chinese and I was polite and so on. Then she opened her bag which was full of biscuits and milk and insisted we take a bag of biscuits. "They're from Beijing, very clean," she boasted, and would not take no for an answer. I ate the one she forced into my hand, and she said I was a good boy and the more I ate the happier she was. Then she pulled out some yoghurt, which was in a plastic bag, and insisted I have some. I declined on the grounds that I brought a bunch of my own food and I feared for what she would eat if I kept eating her things. She insisted so I just said I was full and I'd have some later. That satisfied her but I knew I had only won the battle but not the war. My wife suggested I take the middle bunk we'd traded the old lady for as I was tired and obviously not interested in dealing with the old lady all day, and I slept for two hours.

I awoke because I had to piss. Unfortunately, we were approaching a station. Apparently on the principle that airplane bathrooms are closed during landing, train bathrooms in China are closed when approaching stations. Rules were rules and I had to wait ten minutes.

The bathroom is a squatter with a trap door where the drain would usually be. When the weight of your waste is enough, it flips open and dumps whatever was on it into the tank. There is no flusher, only a tap on the wall which pours out onto the floor and then into the squatter. The smell is atrocious, and whoever had been in there before me had had diarrhea and partially missed the squatter (but did not miss the floor nor part of the wall). Unrelated to the diarrhea, I think, there was also a pinky-sized stick of what appeared to be dried cat **** in the squatter but not on the trap door. I performed my ablutions very quickly then decided to limit my fluids for the trip.

When I returned from this, the old lady insisted I eat some biscuits and bag yoghurt. I had some biscuits as she looked on approvingly, then she started fussing over how little I was wearing and how cold I must be. I was wearing jeans and a long sleeve shirt and as it was well above 20, I was not cold. She seemed unconvinced. She started shuffling with some of her things so my wife and I talked for a bit. When we looked back, the old lady had wrapped herself up in a blanket tight as can be, right up to her nose, and passed out. Wifey went to the middle bunk to nap and I read on the bottom bunk.

After a few hours the old lady was suddenly awake and once again pushing biscuits and yoghurt, and a jacket, on me. I fended her off and then she really started to talk. I learned she had served in the volunteer army against the US in Korea and that she was later a red guard. Presently, she was a professor of concrete engineering in Beijing who had written a book. She traveled the country assisting in construction projects, then donated the money she received for this to some charitable fund. She was definitely an old-school communist in many ways, and she spat with disgust when the new, materialistic TV shows came on our shared TV.

I took another nap and snapped awake when the TV suddenly turned on full volume. The old lady was fiddling with the switch, turning it on and off. "How can this be, where is the sound?" she muttered to herself. Then she went to the crew cabin and repeated this exact question to the stewardess. The stewardess said she had to flip the switch and the old lady said "It's broken, come and look, ok?" The stewardess came in, turned the sound on, and said it was now on. The old lady disagreed, visibly straining her ears. Though I was pretending to be asleep to avoid the bag yoghurt, I can verify that the sound was very much on. The old lady seemed to recognize this and reluctantly loosened her grip on the stewardess' arm.

For the rest of the trip, the old lady continued to fuss over this and that, told her story to us again, fiddled with some papers of hers, drank her bag of yoghurt, downed a bunch of pills, napped again, and chatted with me when I was clearly reading or pretending to sleep.

Our train went right through the part of Sichuan where that big earthquake hit a few years ago. All of the houses looked brand new. The old lady explained that the government built them all and gave them to the victims of the earthquake. She was undeniably proud of this. I didn't mention anything about why they'd fallen down in the first place (though to be fair, it was a pretty crazy quake).

When the train was approaching Chengdu, the old lady's cell phone rang. Without opening it, she held it to her ear and started talking, then got frustrated when the person on the other end did not reply. The phone was still ringing. I shared a look with the other bunk mate I was chatting with, who was watching with amusement. The phone stopped ringing, then started again, and the old lady kept talking into it without skipping a beat. I opened it for her and explained that she had to do that to answer it. The call had just started, but she took the phone back and resumed her conversation right where she'd left off, much to the confusion of the caller. She sorted out her ride home and that was that.

Anyways, I got off the train feeling reasonably rested and amused, which is more than I can say for a 12-hour flight. I am now in Chengdu, in Sichuan province.


---


CHENGDU 成都

I'm in Chengdu. We decided to stop here mostly because we were looking for a place to go in Sichuan that is in between the places we really wanted to go: Xi'an, where we were a few days ago, and Yunnan, where we're going to be tomorrow. I didn't have especially high expectations, but I was way off.

There's not exactly anything exciting here. On the contrary, we exhausted the rather dull tourist attractions in about half a day. There were two touristy "ancient" streets, a temple, a brand new subway system, and a public square with a statue of Mao. Dull. But the attractions aren't what Chengdu is about.

This is the one place in all of China I've been to where pretty much everyone seems happy. People walk around at a leisurely pace, smiling and chatting. They stare at me still, but when I catch them they smile and give me a thumbs up. We ask for directions from people on the street, shop-owners, and police and even though there's nothing in it for them, they give an answer or apologize for not knowing. The traffic is dense, but completely lacks the desperate, fighting-for-your-life quality of other cities. You hardly even hear a horn honking and I haven't almost been killed since I got here. Indeed, I haven't seen a car on the sidewalk or anywhere that was not a street (except the truck that was driving ON THE PLATFORM at the train station). There are lovely green trees and parks all over, with pleasant-looking willows and vines dangling down all over. The streets are remarkably clean, and while it's perpetually cloudy here, the air is definitely cleaner than other places in China. The restaurants are reasonably priced but as clean as anything you'd find in Canada. I actually saw them wiping the undersides of the seats, and the grease fans, at the hot pot place I was at today. Hell, even the bathrooms are clean here!

The people here seem to have an abundance of free time. Pretty much every street has a few tea houses or bars or massage parlours (real ones… damn) with people lounging around, playing cards or mahjong, chatting and smiling. They're even polite to one another: the other night I was getting a foot rub and all the customers and staff were chatting as though they were all old friends. I haven't seen or been the subject of a single rude act since getting here. People still spit, but far, far less than elsewhere. Same with smoking, I haven't seen nearly as much of it.

Then there's the food. Our first meal was a hot pot place, as Sichuan is famous for hot pot. Everything was astounding. The meat was delicious, the veggies were clean and fresh, the soup was new from a sealed bag, the beer was nearly frozen, and no one got sick. I found a fruit store that sells grapefruits and pomegranates the size of basketballs, bananas so yellow and firm I couldn't believe it, and odd green oranges that are deliciously juicy and sweet. We had a giant breakfast of fruit and I grinned all day because of it. In fact, I haven't had a single disappointing meal here, and the prices, while higher than usual for China, have been universally reasonable.

Our hotel is "apartment style," and is amazingly clean, large, and comfortable. It's quiet at night, but we are next to an elementary school. Every morning at 7 we are awakened by ****ty music that is an odd blend of the Venga Boys and classical music, a bunch of shouting of school slogans, then an odd exercise music with repeated counting up to 8. Other than that, though, most of the city is reasonably quiet.

In a park, we saw a fellow writing characters on the concrete with a brush, using only water. People gathered to watch him write, and he was quite good. Then he broke into a sales pitch for the brush he was using; turns out he was a salesman, not an artist.

My biggest complaint is the Internet. It seems to be inexcusably slow almost everywhere. Only today did I find a tea house with decent speeds, but otherwise it is absolutely abhorrent. Other than that, I can't think of anything wrong.

I'll definitely come here again. There are some mountains and a part of the great wall nearby so there's some climbing to be done. The food and relaxing atmosphere are absolutely delightful. If one came here with a bit more money and stayed for a week, one could probably get a beautiful hotel, massages as often as needed, three fantastic meals a day, and taxi rides to and from the nearby mountains and great wall. It wouldn't be the most interesting vacation but it would absolutely be relaxing and pleasant. As it's close to a bunch of neat places west and south of here, as well as Tibet, it's a great place to rest after going there, too.

Oh, one more nice thing about Chengdu: Sichuan girls are absolutely stunning.

Sichuan hot pot. Oh. My. Word.



Fruit stand.



The square that is Chengdu's biggest landmark.





In one of the many temples in Chengdu, a monk grows his own food.



Chengdu street views.













One of the better meals we had, in a Xi'an night market. Cost about $3 CAD, too.



Chilling out at a Chengdu tea house.



Spicy tofu soup. Sweet mama.



I forget what it was called, but it was similar to kung pao chicken. Also fantastic.

[Jader Pack]

DALI 大理

I am now in Dali, in Yunnan province. We are currently at 6,700 feet and will ascend to 8,700 feet then 10,700 feet over the next week or so before arriving in Tibet's 12,000+ feet.

This area of Yunnan is very unlike the industrialized coast. There are far fewer people and the environment is as clean as anywhere in Canada.

Dali is a region and a small town. The region is a largish lake nestled in between two mountain ranges which form the foothills of the Himalayas. There are about 400,000 people in the area. There's an airport, a modern town, an old town, and a lot of farms, each of which could rightly be called "Dali." The Dali I'm in is the old town. We have a lovely little hostel here, of which I've already sent pictures. The old town is a grid of alleys lined with ancient houses. Some of the alleys are pedestrian only, many have cars. The houses are almost all little businesses and as this is a bit of a touristy area, they're mostly touristy places. Lots and lots of restaurants, lots of B&Bs and hostels, lots of cafés, lots of internet cafés and IP phone shops, and so on. As this is also a bit of a backpacker haven for Chinese travellers so it has a neat kind of bohemian sort of feel.

Some pictures of old-town Dali.











There's lots of fantastic vegetarian fare here. The restaurants all keep their vegetables out on display on the street so you can choose the restaurant with the freshest s***.









As you can see in the pictures, this area is entirely unpolluted. Skies are blue, clouds are white, trees are green, and you can see all the way to the other end of the valley we're in, which is at least 30 km away. The weather is a bit unusual. We're about 6,800-7,000 feet up, but we're quite far south, nearly tropical. So it's about 0-5 degrees at night and 15-20 during the day. The temperature is very, very pleasant during the day, but the thin air and brutal high-altitude sun means it's really only 5-10 degrees in the shade, so it's tough to dress right. The best trick is just to stay in the sun, but wear sunscreen as I burned my whole head and face today.

Went out for dinner. There's a street called "foreigner street" because apparently they serve western food there. We thought we'd give it a try since I'm sort of craving a pizza.

My wife ordered black pepper steak and fried rice. She got tiny thin slices of chewy beef, much like what you'd get in Mexico. I ordered French onion soup and pizza. I got a bowl of hot salty cream with sliced onions (!) and something that sort of looked like pizza. However, the dough was far too fluffy and the sauce was not tomato sauce but barbecue sauce. Also, even though it was Hawaiian pizza it had onions on it.

Overall, just what I expected but not what I was hoping for. Oh well.

Also, for a place called "foreigner street," there were not very many foreigners. There was one by my count, that's not accounting for the observer effect (the scientific principle which states that you can't measure a phenomenon without somehow affecting that phenomenon).

Me, the only foreigner on "foreigner street" (洋人街)



This is the only place in China, I think, where you can go out with no ID and 200 RMB (deposit, about $30 CAD) and rent a bike. The rental guy takes 10 RMB (a buck fiddy) off the 200 every day you keep it, and gives the remainder back to you when you return. It's literally that easy, no f***ing around like everywhere else. So, after walking around the old town for a few days, drinking some Yunnan coffee (some of the best I've ever tasted, though I'm hardly a coffee expert), eating a couple of meals (including a waffle with real whipped cream and no weird Chinese touch like seaweed or something, first bite of that sort of food I've had in over a month), we got up early one day and embarked on a multi-day cycle trip around this area.

Biking in the no-car areas of the old town is heaven. The roads are wide enough and not so crowded that you can get around easily, and people are reasonably friendly so they stay out of your way and don't get into games of chicken with you. The town is on a gentle slope towards the mountains in the west, so you can climb up then coast down very pleasantly. The police don't give a f*** (like they did in Hangzhou, telling us to get off our bikes on the nicest biking trail in the city), either.

Biking in the old town of Dali.



The old town also has non-tourist areas where cars are allowed. These are absolute hell to bike in. This is made worse by the fact that the highway that circles the lake is undergoing road work and the detour goes through the old town. We wandered into such an area and were surrounded with buses and tractors and semi trucks, blasting their horns and blowing black diesel fumes all over. The highways are also unpleasant. The western highway (closer to the mountains) is big and wide and OK to bike on with minimal danger. The eastern highway (closer to the lake) is narrow and has deep concrete ditches on either side, and is bustling with loud-ass semis and tractors that blow their horns and black diesel smoke. The latter is by far the more treacherous.

Cross the eastern highway and between it and the lake is a vast farming area. It's flat, it's beside the lake, and there's literally no traffic at all. Surrounded by all kinds of great-looking vegetable farms and reasonably friendly farmers working them, we had endless stretches of road to ourselves, as flat as a pancake. To one side was the lake (which is crystal clear and blue as the sky during the day), beyond which are a lovely mountain range. To the other was the foothills of the Himalayas, capped with snow and fluffy white clouds. All around were these neat little farms. There's some seriously good biking in the farming area.

Pictures of some of the villages and places we biked through on our little cycle trip.

















All the farmers delivering their vegetables to a truck in the morning. The truck goes straight to Dali where the vegetables are put on display probably an hour after they're picked. So tasty.



I thought this sign was a hoot.





So we biked all day. Days two and three were much the same as the first day. We saw a really nice (and REAL, in that they don't charge an admission fee) buddhist temple. We went in and bought a turtle ($3 CAD) to set free in the temple's pond (the one with the many fish pictured below). They apparently serve food but we were too late for lunch, which would have cost us 50 cents CAD.

The buddhist temple where you can pay to release fish or turtles. I think they just fish them back out and sell them again.



We stumbled across a restaurant in the middle of the farmland today. She had a wooden sign out front proclaiming it to be a restaurant. We reluctantly went in, fearing dirty food or worse. The boss was a nice old lady. Since they didn't have a menu, we just ordered four dishes, all "vegetarian" (since I didn't really want her to kill an animal right in front of us on our account): one with eggs, one with potatoes, and two of her choice. She immediately set to work picking the vegetables from different parts of her little farm, then took all the gathered vegetables inside to cook them.

We wandered around her little farm for a bit and saw that she had quite the little business going on. In her little wooden shacks she also had a small hostel of sorts (probably VERY bare bones) and a mahjong table. I thought it must be doing poorly, but some Chinese tourists came by to play mahjong on her table, so evidently she's got some business. There were some speakers and TVs and stuff around too, so she must not have been doing TOO poorly.

The food came and it was pretty damn good. The eggs were an omelette with AMAZING green onions. The eggs were, unfortunately, a bit too salty and greasy, but not terrible. The potatoes were basically hash browns and were not bad. The other two vegetable dishes were some kind of spinach-like green leafy vegetable that was very tasty and had a strong grass-smell, and a little green melon with some kind of tea-like odour. Both were quite tasty and we ate them all up. She also told us that she grew all her vegetables without pesticides or fertilizer, so it was organic stuff. Really, really tasty. A bit pricey, at 70 RMB ($10 CAD) for two, but worth it.

Some pics of the farm restaurant.



She served organic tea that she'd grown and prepared herself. It was Longjing tea, I think, and quite nice. Note the marble table. Dali is a huge supplier of marble, so there's marble furniture EVERYWHERE here. In fact, in Chinese, marble is simply called "Dali stone" (大理石).



Then we went back down to the lake and biked along the lake, cycled to a bunch of nearby villages and, on day 3, completed our loop of the lake and returned to the old town after a harrowing stint on the other, dangerous highway, which was awful. Now we're back on the rooftop deck of our old-town hostel eating peanuts, drinking beer, and writing emails. The wifi in this place is exceptional, covering the whole building. Also, the internet is extremely fast which is very unusual for China. It's a great way to relax after our cycling trip.

Our hostel in Dali, a great big stone building with a fantastic rooftop deck/garden.





Dali was absolutely astounding. I will absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, be back here. The food's pretty good, the environment is fantastic, the cycling is great, and there's a lot of things we didn't get to see. There are gondolas going up the nearby mountains and apparently the mountains are just covered with great hiking trails. There are a bunch of temples up there which will let you stay overnight in a spartan room for a couple bucks, so you could really get a big long hike on out there. There's also boating on the lake and we passed by some impressive looking rock climbing on the other side of the lake. Sounds like a whole ton of fun.

The plan might be to renew my Chinese driver's license in January, then next time we come to China we can rent a motorbike in Kunming and motorbike around the whole province. The guy who rents us the bike might be surprised by the mileage, but oh well. This place is MADE for that kind of trip.

This place isn't so much funny (like the coastal areas of China) as it is just genuinely a very nice place to be. I do think the buddhist temple fishes the turtles out of the pond and sells them over and over, so that's kind of funny I guess. Also, I included some pictures of toilets as they are here. They're just little tile ditches that are sloped downwards. If you pee in them the pee just runs down to wherever the end of the ditch is (presumably a hole or something). If you ****, they run water and use a brush to get the **** moving, then it slides down by itself. Fun.

The toilets on our trip started to look exclusively like this.



Smoking some hookah in Dali. They apparently have weed all over this place, but I didn't want to risk deportation or worse.



These creepy f***ers were in all the clothing shops. Probably deters shoplifting (as well as actual shopping).



Night-time barbecue stands like this are all over the place, with delicious barbecued Yak.



Yunnan food isn't especially spicy, but for some reason everyone is busy preserving spicy peppers. They're on the road, hanging from walls, and drying on roofs.




---


LIJIANG 麗江

We are in Lijiang. A family friend got us a hookup with a dude in the old town of Lijiang who runs a hostel. The only downside is that our room does not have heating and it goes below zero at night. We've got a whole pile of thick blankets and an electric blanket to keep us warm.

Xiaomaomi, the cat who guarded our hostel from rats and leaves blown by the wind, liked to play pool.



Me getting my drink on with the proprietor of our hostel and some friends. The altitude here (nearly 8,000 feet) impaired my performance and I was not able to out-drink a few of them.



Lijiang is a normal Chinese city and an old city similar to that in Dali, only much bigger. The old city is situated on a largish hill so there are some neat scenic spots and lots of narrow alleyways sloping upwards that are quite pretty. It's a neat set of several-hundred-year-old wooden structures surrounding a courtyard divided by an ancient brick wall. The wooden structures are a refreshing change, as most buildings in China are solid brick and concrete.

The water runoff from the Himalayas comes right through the city. They're collected by a series of ditches all around the hills and mountains far in the distance, run here in a couple of massive aqueducts, then all split up so they run through the town in little channels in the ground. This is very pretty and the locals use the free running water for all kinds of things. This being China, most of those things make the water dirtier. People piss and **** in the ditches, wash their mops in it, wash clothes and dishes in it, and basically treat it as a combo toilet/sink/garbage can. Fortunately, people fish the garbage out of the few traps installed to catch it, but man, do I ever feel bad for whoever has to shower or drink that water downstream from here (probably people in Guangxi or Guangdong).

Some pictures of the Lijiang water channels.













Lijiang has some aspects that are better than Dali and some that are worse.

The good: no one can drive cars or bikes or scooters in the old town, so it's pedestrians only all over. You still get some little bread cars or scooters who somehow snuck in, but not nearly as many as in Dali. Makes walking much nicer. The old town is much larger, so there's lots more exploring to do. Also, I think the old town itself is a lot prettier here, partly because it was better maintained but also just the design of the place is nicer looking.

The bad: there are no mountains looming overhead. We're on a plateau of sorts and the nearest peak is a ways away. It kind of detracts from the scenic beauty that was there in Dali. Also, this place is much more popular with Chinese tourists than Dali, so it's become a bit too commercial in some spots. There's still a bit of a bohemian feel like in Dali, but not nearly as much. Most of the place is shops selling brand-name stuff and reminds me of places like Whistler. However, there are some neat genuine "old" parts of the town, and sometimes the herdsmen wander into the town to sell meat and stuff and provide a neat glimpse into this high plateau way of life.

Anyways, yesterday we walked around the whole old town and saw all the sights.







Again with the dried peppers. The food was still not very spicy.



You see these guys a LOT outside of the city, and occasionally wandering around inside the city selling meat or vegetables. Notice the normal clothes under the traditional costume.











For some reason, there was a big government ad campaign about shopping needing to be "rational." The Chinese makes no sense to me either.











A typical Lijiang market.









This cute little guy got in the meat. I didn't tell the seller, hoping he'd get away with a free meal. I also didn't buy any meat.





Then we went to a rib hot pot restaurant in the new town. Apparently it's famous. There is a whole wall with racks of animal ribs all along it and they use that meat to make the rib hot pot after it's dried. It made for an interesting atmosphere and pretty damn good rib soup.





We borrowed a scooter and went all around Lijiang. Drove all the way to the mountains some 80 km in the distance on a little 50cc Honda. It was slow going but nice to be back in the driver's seat. Taxis, buses, trains, and subways are generally so efficient in China that one seldom has reason to drive.

Our little white scooter, parked on a typical Lijiang new town street. Look closely, it's right there in the middle of the frame.















This is a park famous to most Chinese people. There's a natural spring there and a couple of little temples built around it and on the massive hill from whence the spring water wells. Unlike most of the water in China, this spring water was crystal clear and potable straight out of the ground. I even drank a bottle of it to no ill effect.



Note the manholes without covers. They've been stolen, probably for the metal. It pays to pay attention when driving a scooter in China. Oddly, someone even tried to hide one of the open manholes with a fallen branch. The manholes were especially scary because they're about 15 feet deep, full of water, and there's no ladder or anything. You'd surely perish if you fell in one because, as that poor young girl who got run over in Foshan, China, discovered, if you're in trouble you're on your own.

Manholes that have been stolen for the metal. Watch the road.





A quick lesson on the nature of some Chinese characters. Probably 5-10% of Chinese characters are simply pictures. For example, 山 is a picture of a mountain and means "mountain," 木 is a picture of a tree and means "wood," and so forth. This is a painting of the character 馬, meaning "horse," and it kind of illustrates what the character is actually supposed to be. I found it interesting, anyways.

[Jader Pack]

BUS TRIP TO SHANGRI-LA 坐大巴去香格里拉

The only way to go from Lijiang to Shangri-la is by road. For travelers on a budget, that means a bus.

Buses in China are notorious for being deadly. The drivers are underpaid, under skilled, on a tight schedule and work long hours day and night. The buses are Chinese-made affairs that are also famous for being poorly-made and poorly-maintained. Combine these with the sort of crazy, narrow mountain road that we had to take to get where we're going as well as with the suicidal style of driving that is peculiar to China and there was pretty good reason to be anxious.

Our bus driver was the archetypal Chinese bus driver. Stocky, crew-cut, stripy polo-style shirt and black pants, and an incredible ability to hork up a massive loogie every five minutes (for the entire 4 and a half hour bus ride) and blast it out of his window while smoking and talking on his cell phone, AND driving our giant bus along the narrow and crowded road.

The road itself was miserable. Two-way traffic the whole way, though the road was only just wide enough for two vehicles to pass one another. Every time a semi truck or bus appeared in the opposing lane my sphincter tightened until it went by with barely an inch of clearance at top speed. The road was also under construction so we spent about an hour on a dirt road detour, which was bumpy and dusty. The construction also meant that the road was packed with semi trucks, all of which are of Chinese make and in a sorry state. They were all loaded to the absolute brim with rocks and would have been able to plow through our bus like nothing was there. The construction kicked up so much dust that all the nearby crops were absolutely covered.

Worse than all of that was the heights. This road took us from 8,700 feet to 10,700 feet, and it went through those sort of sharp, steep, picturesque mountains that China is famous for. The roads were largely on the side of a steep mountain with a rock wall on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Naturally, we drove on the sheer-drop side. It rained at one point, but the driver didn't seem to notice and continued jack-knifing around the sharp corners with no guards to keep a vehicle from driving straight off at full speed.

The driver also did not bother to slow for these corners in case there was another bus or semi coming the opposite way. If there had been there'd surely have been a crash, but luckily for us that particular fear never materialized. Aside from not slowing for blind corners, our driver actually passed while rounding them, even though our sluggish bus took 45 seconds to pass anything. Once, we even passed a police car as we we were both rounding a blind corner at 20 over the limit. The officer was on his cell phone and smoking, far too busy to care.

The roads were shared with all sorts of things. There were scooters and bicycles, which were no danger to us but it would have sucked to see someone get punted off a cliff just so that I can get to Shangri-la a bit faster. There were farm animals (yaks, at this altitude), which were also no threat but still a constant nuisance. The horned male yaks had a tendency to charge the bus, causing our driver to swerve. There were slow-moving tractors and odd three-wheeled motorcycles with trailers, which were hauling anything from farm animals to rocks to gigantic bales of corn stalks that were as wide as the road and taller than our bus (which our driver passed with gusto, despite the fact that one could not possibly see past these loads). There were cars, which also passed with suicidal disregard for their own safety and also had an odd tendency to stop right in the middle of the road after a blind corner for no obvious reason, even though there were plenty of pullouts. The drivers of other cars, like our own, were at least as busy spitting and talking on their phones as they were in minding the road. There are also pedestrians, which was odd as there was nowhere to come from and nowhere to go. One fellow was crouched on the edge of a sheer drop in the middle of nowhere, smoking a cig.

There were some things designed to minimize the risk. There were many signs warning of the extreme danger of the road we were on. However, someone had taken the time to stop and spray paint "his mother" (他媽), a statement of disrespect, over most of the signs. Our driver had a bevy of good-luck charms hanging from the mirrors and various hooks at the front of the bus, though the way they were swinging around they were more of a distraction than anything. There was also a device which monitored the speed of the bus and beeped if it went over 60 km/h. Needless to say, it beeped for pretty much the whole ride, even though the speed limit was almost never greater than 40.

Our bus said on the door that it was air conditioned. It was not and sitting in the hot sun in the construction zones, the temperature easily reached 30 inside. The passengers were upbeat. Some sang, some played music loudly on their cell phones, some slept, and one stood up, bent over, and let loose a massive fart. They, also, were horking up loogies and spitting them in the trash cans or, when those weren't nearby, into napkins or just onto the floor of the bus.

At one point we passed through a town with nearly a hundred road-side stalls selling a thing. I say "thing" because there was only one product available in this town: red sauce evidently made from red hot chilli peppers. Every stall had a bundle of peppers hanging from the roof as if to prove the origin of the small stack of jars of red sauce on their tables. They sat, waiting patiently for any of the passing vehicles to stop, but none did that I could see.

We stopped at a rest stop but, before anyone could get off and pee, a squad of police officers burst into the bus and demanded to see everyone's ID. They scanned them all on a computer and chose a short, Tibetan-looking fellow to harass. They yelled at him for a bit then searched his bags (one of which, surprisingly, was full of raw meat). Then they let him go.

Perhaps to make up for the low pay and long hours, our bus driver appeared to have a little side business going on. We purchased our tickets at the bus station from the bus company and paid a flat rate of $11 CAD a person. However, our driver stopped to pick up passengers on the road, argued about the price with them, accepted payment in cash and gave no ticket, and dropped them off at some point on the way. He also picked up packages and delivered them. I suspect he pocketed the cash.

When we finally arrived in "Shangri-la," (a city whose name was only recently changed to that in order to drum up tourism; it was called Diqing before that and many of the road signs still reflect that fact) we were accosted by people offering to drive us all over. We declined, got a taxi, drove to the old town and started searching for a place to stay. There, a Tibetan lady approached us and asked in broken English, "Guest House?" Turns out she speaks Mandarin so that was convenient, seeing as those were the only two English words she knew. We accepted a room for 60 RMB a night ($9 CAD) and went to unpack. "One more thing!" The lady called after us from the desk, "Don't leave your lights on at night, sometimes the building catches fire. Bad wiring!"

We were very careful with the lights and there were no fires. We had dinner at a local restaurant run by a nice lady from Dali. We had Yak hot pot, which was amazingly tasty. Then we walked around and then went home, drifting off to the sound of a dog barking extremely, almost comically, rapidly.

I slept poorly due to the altitude. I decided not to go with the medicine to relieve the symptoms of altitude sickness. It makes you pee NON-STOP, which is annoying. Turns out the consequences of this choice are equally annoying. Anytime I breath automatically, my body is fooled into thinking that my blood oxygen is higher than it is, so I stop breathing. Then, when my blood oxygen level drops to dangerous levels my body realizes its mistake and I start gasping for air and wake up dizzy and short of breath. I have to constantly consciously control my breathing, which makes sleep very difficult.

This is the lowest point of the high-altitude part of our trip, so I hope I acclimatize soon.


---


SHANGRI-LA 香格里拉

Today we explored Shangri-La. This is a tiny little village nestled in between two mountain ranges, much like Dali but at a higher altitude (over 10,000 feet). Apparently people have been here for thousands of years, though they were mostly Tibetan people. The Tibetans are still around, as are some other minorities like the Bai (who are really from Dali but seem to come here to do business).

There's not much to say about this place other than that. It's an old town with lots of traditional, ancient houses. Evidently, the government is hoping to make it a tourist destination. The highway we drove on from Lijiang (already an international destination) is under heavy construction to make it less treacherous and faster to drive. There's a new airport here as well (which is where we'll be flying to Lhasa from). Right now, this place has an honest-to-goodness ancient city feeling which was partially there in Dali and not really there in Lijiang. There are people actually living in this place as they have been for thousands of years, raising yaks, eating yaks and yak cheese and yak butter and drinking yak milk and yak butter tea. Kids play in the streets (soccer and toy cars seem to be the games of choice), and people from the outskirts of town (mostly Tibetans) bring their yak-driven carts into town to sell vegetables and yak yoghurt. There is yak s*** all over the place. The houses are made of mud, yak s*** cakes and wood and are very charming in appearance. The only hint that this isn't the year 600 is the occasional car or motorbike, the music (played on stereos), and the presence of electricity, which has been added to this town as though it were an afterthought, with wires hammered to walls and running in and out of everywhere.

The bad side of the development is development. There's a largish and growing new city outside this ancient city which is quite utilitarian in appearance. Many of the ancient houses are being razed in favour of ancient-looking new houses, which are attractive but not in the same way as the really old s***. The streets are being dug up to add plumbing and replaced with newer-looking cobblestone streets. And, there are a growing number of the same s***ty touristy places that you'd find in Lijiang or Dali, as opposed to whatever used to be there before.

Anyways, we walked all over today. We climbed the highest hill and found a Tibetan Buddhist temple there. We chatted with the caretaker and his daughter, and his grandson was extremely interested in my hairy arms and petted me like a dog. Other than that, we slowly walked around the ancient part of the ancient city taking pictures and resting often as we easily lose our breath at this altitude. Now we're going to head out to a tea house as I have some work to do, so here are some pictures.










































---


FLIGHT TO LHASA 飛去拉薩

We flew from Shangri-la to Lhasa today. Two hour flight, maybe one of the better flights I've ever had. Check in was a 2-minute lineup, security took 30 seconds, there was fast internet in the Shangri-la departure lounge for the price of a bottle of water ($2 CAD, airport price), our plane was right on time, we had a whole row to ourselves, the food was not half bad (yak and rice), the plane's temperature was perfectly fine, no one gave me s*** for reading on my phone on the plane (China has a stupid rule about that which will probably get me on a no-fly list one day), and the views out the window were something else. We were flying at 30,000 feet and it felt like we were still taking off, the mountains were so close. Some of them off in the distance looked like they were almost the same height as our plane (though I know they were not). I took a few pictures but nothing really looks like the real thing. Neat flight.

[Jader Pack]

LHASA 拉薩

Last time I tried to come here those riots broke out and I was turned around. Today I finally made it.

My sister was a bit disappointed in Lhasa and at a first glance I can sort of see why. Whenever people think of Lhasa they seem to think of some kind of beautiful city with ancient architecture and all that. I think many people expect it to look like the last few places I've been. I know I did. Instead, outside of the attractions, the architecture is pure Chinese (that is to say, square, low-rise concrete buildings without decks and with shops on the bottom level, then a broad sidewalk, then a broad road divided at times by little shrubs). More than that, like everywhere else in China, this place is under construction. We stepped outside our hotel and found that they were digging up the street and laying down more pipes (an activity I've noticed just about everywhere I've been, actually). So, at first glance, this is just another Chinese city.

One part of Lhasa that reminds me of much of China (and, indeed, most developing parts of the world), is the plumbing.





Second thing that might surprise some is the lack of greenery. Lhasa just sounds like some kind of exotic beautiful place and for some reason I expected it to be green. It isn't. Nor is anywhere in Tibet, from what I've seen. This is more due to the altitude than anything, though, and probably at least in part due to the fact that it's winter now (though there are not many trees to turn green in the warmer months). Brown and grey are the colours of the day. That said, I still think it's a really pretty area, aside from the function-first-and-last Chinese buildings. It's very different from anywhere else I've ever been. There's some brown grass and spindly trees here and there, but otherwise it's all rock. The mountains are everywhere and go up about 30 degrees from the flat horizon, and they're all rocky and snow-capped. The sky is a dark navy blue if you look straight up, and there are all kinds of pretty colours as the sun goes down. The stars are out exceptionally bright. So, Lhasa is not what I expected, but it's got a kind of rugged beauty that I quite like.

Third thing is the people. My experience is exactly the opposite of my sister: I find the Chinese people to be the nicest and the Tibetans to be the rudest. There's probably a very good explanation for this, though: I'm already very accustomed to the Chinese version of politeness, so I don't really consider them rude (judging them by their own standards, which I have adopted in large part for the duration of this trip to remain sane). Further, Chinese people generally like me because I speak Chinese. Finally, Tibetans don't speak especially good Chinese and may also consider my decision to speak Chinese a sign that I've thrown my lot in with the Chinese and not the Tibetans (which is partially true in that I think Tibet is China's, but not at all true in that I strongly disagree with some of the absolutely ridiculous policies China has implemented and is still implementing here). At any rate, the Tibetans are rude, even by Chinese standards, to me and my wife here.

This was not the case in the parts of Western Yunnan where I was in the past week or so. The Tibetans living there did not view language in such political terms, probably because there aren't Chinese troops with rubber bullet guns on their streets. They view it as a useful lingua franca (as they don't speak English and they can't possibly expect me to speak Tibetan) and nothing more, and even complement me on my Chinese. They were universally friendly to my wife (an obviously Chinese person) and I (a white person who speaks the language of China, not Tibet). The contrast is rather stark. My thoughts are that Tibetans in Tibetan areas outside of Tibet have it a lot better than those in Tibet, but I also think that this attitude of us versus them that Tibetans in Tibet adopt isn't helping them. Today my wife and I decided to go to a Tibetan restaurant and try some yak butter tea. They ignored us even when we spoke directly to them and they weren't doing anything else, they reluctantly gave us the pot of tea and though there were probably 10 servers and only 2 full tables (the others were dirty) they couldn't be bothered to wipe a table down for us to sit at (we wiped it ourselves). I also got the distinct impression, by the staring, pointing and the looks they were sharing that they were talking about us in Tibetan and they were not saying nice things. I tried to turn things around by using one of the two Tibetan words I've already learned but they just laughed at me.

It's just as well, as I'm told (by our Tibetan guide) that one good thing about the increased Chinese population here is that there are some actual good restaurants now (she did not seem to hold Tibetan food in high regard). Given that Tibetan food is pretty much just yak, and given that I've never heard of a famous Tibetan restaurant anywhere else in the world, I suspect he's right. Yak is tasty the first few times, but it's already wearing thin with me.

Some of the tastier Chinese meals we had in Lhasa.





Lhasa beer. It's a pretty plain pilsner, but they do serve it cold (unusual in China).



The altitude is not really affecting me any more other than occasional shortness of breath. There was a point yesterday where I suddenly felt like superman, then I had a great night's sleep without constantly feeling like I was suffocating, and since then I've been feeling pretty good even now at Lhasa's 11,400 feet (3,500 meters). My wife was doing good yesterday but has started to feel a bit uncomfortable since we climbed a thousand feet from Shangri-La. She had a little case of blue-ish lips a couple of times today and wasn't up to the three-block walk to Potala Palace (which we can see from our window).

I went to Potala anyways..



Our hotel rocks. It's a 3 star, which means a lot after the places we've been in the past week. We have carpet, we have heat (not just the blankets, the actual AIR), and we have a decent-sized western-style hotel room. The internet is unexpectedly fast and liberal (I'm able to access some sites that I could not from other parts in China). We're here for five nights so just as well it's good.

Lhasa's f***ing cold at night, too. It's only -4, but for some reason it REALLY gets to you. I had to buy wool socks (irony of ironies, I have six dozen pairs I left at home in Canada from when I first started studying in the prairies and my dad kept giving me wool socks at every opportunity) and long johns, and I'm wearing my North Face fleece, thick Spyder sweater, AND my North Face shell, as well as gloves and a toque, pretty much every night. For reference, when it's -30 and windy back home, I only need the fleece, the shell, the toque and gloves, and otherwise regular clothes underneath.

Our second day in Lhasa (and our first full day) was a pretty full one. Some of my opinions (from above) have changed, too.

We had breakfast delivered to our room at 9 AM (not bad for a $20 CAD a night hotel). It consisted of yak dumpling soup and some tasty spicy sauce. It wasn't a Belgian waffle with whipped cream and hot blueberry compote and sprinkled with icing sugar, but it was nice not to have to leave our warm hotel room at 9 AM. This was doubly so since the sun had only just come up and it was still absolutely frigid outside. Yes, the sun rises at 9 AM, but that's because even though we're 2,500 kilometres west of Beijing, we're still on Beijing time, as is all of China. The upside to that is that in the dead of winter it's now 7 PM and we only just lost the sun.

Our tour started at 10:30. Yes, we have a tour. Not because I or my wife want one but because China says any foreigner going to Tibet has to go with a tour. We found a decent company that will take the both of us on a 9-day Tibet tour hitting all the good spots, including breakfasts hotels, transportation in our own Land Cruiser (which I get to drive to the Nepal border and our guide will take back home) to all destinations and finally to the Tibet-Nepal border, tickets, my wife's Nepal visa and my Tibet visa, and some other stuff for 6,000 RMB per person (about $1,000 CAD). It's not exactly the cheapest 9 days of our lives, but it's also not a terribly expensive trip through Tibet.

The Nepalese consul in Lhasa, where we got my wife's Nepal visa.



So, 10:30 we took off to Potala Palace. This is the most well-known landmark in Lhasa, if not Tibet. It was originally built in the 1600s and became both the seat of government and the holiest place in Tibetan Buddhism. This was because the Dalai Lamas united Tibet and became both their head of state and the holiest people in their religion (similar to the Holy Roman Empire in Medieval Europe, which was a Catholic country run by the Pope). It was this way (and Tibet was a tributary state of China's until 1912) until China invaded in 1950, and the Dalai Lama became number two in Tibet to the Chinese government. In 1959, the Dalai Lama tried to take Tibet back, lost, and fled to India. The Communists then turned the palace into a museum which it still is today.

My pictures of the outside of Potala Palace.











It's a remarkably interesting place for a museum. The Tibetans still treat it as the holiest place for their religion (Tibetan Buddhism, which is similar to Nepalese Buddhism and slightly different from Chinese Buddhism). Tibetans from all over make pilgrimages here to kowtow before the various golden Buddha statues and touch the holy objects in the palace. Normally, one needs to pay 100 RMB to enter Potala Palace, but for Tibetan pilgrims the charge is only 2 RMB. Many Tibetan pilgrims will begin to prostrate themselves a certain distance from the palace. This is a kind of kowtow where one lies right down touching one's head to the ground, then stands up but a few feet ahead of where they were before. In this way they approach the palace, looking rather like inchworms from up high. So, it's not just a collection of dusty old relics, you can see the Tibetan Buddhists worship as they really would.

Kowtowing Tibetans.



The "debating monks," who evidently discuss the finer points of Tibetan Buddhism, while clapping.



Seig heil. Yes, I know what it really is.



So, not only is Potala Palace a museum, it still serves as a Mecca for Tibetans. There's not a single mention of the current Dalai Lama in the palace, but on the throne where he would normally sit there stands an empty yellow jacket which apparently symbolizes him. In his absence, the Chinese-appointed-and-controlled Panchen Lama (ordinarily the number 2 in Tibetan Buddhism) serves as the leader of the faith. However, I get the impression that while no one is allowed to say his name, everyone is still silently praying to number 1.

The dual role of Potala Palace (museum and Mecca) has me divided. It was incredibly neat to be able to go inside and see all the cool s*** and the way the Tibetans fervently worship all their little symbols. Even though I think religion is a silly waste of time, it's still interesting to see. Further, I was quite moved to see the empty yellow coat on the throne waiting for the Dalai Lama to return. So, going in was a plus. However, it's a continuing affront to the Tibetans that they must compete for space in the cramped palace with tourists. The actual Mecca doesn't allow tourists in for a good reason. I was as respectful as possible, but many tourists were not. There were Chinese tourists dressed in high heels and tight-fitting clothes with LV bags and giant sunglasses chewing gum and looking around in a disinterested manner while standing exactly in the way of everyone trying to get on with their worshipping. There were also idiot white people taking pictures when you're not supposed to (I haven't a single picture of the inside, and I snap a LOT of pictures) and getting in the way just as much. In short, I'm grateful I got the chance to go in, but I didn't get the impression many others appreciated what that entailed for the Tibetans.

On the subject of the Tibetans, even the ones not from Lhasa are still pretty nasty. They push and shove like no one's business, spit everywhere except in the really holy places, still talk in Tibetan about me and giggle amongst themselves, and while some stare at me and smile and say an English word, many more seem downright hostile (and not just inside the Palace). I see both sides to the issue and I get their plight, but they're not a very sympathetic bunch from up close.

Anyways, the impression I get from Potala is that China is actually embracing the religious freedom they have in their constitution, but they're also still reluctant to lose face and change their position from the last 40 years on the Dalai Lama and engage in any meaningful reconciliation. To be fair, the Dalai Lama says some pretty dumb s*** about China too, so there's bad blood on both sides. It's a sad situation, and not nearly as black and white as it's often made out to be.

After Potala, we went to a Tibetan restaurant. The servers were much more receptive to us today as we brought our Tibetan guide with us. We treated her to lunch ($15 CAD for three of us) and it was absolutely divine. That said, little of what we ate was Tibetan; rather, it was Indian, Nepalese and Chinese food. I tried to order from the "Tibetan food" menu but the server said she didn't like any of it except for some yak meat cakes, which we ordered and were alright. The other stuff was just fantastic. We drank had some yak milk tea, which was also Tibetan and good. From the window, we could see a Tibetan selling cold drinks on the street. They were not Red Bull, nor were they Red Oxen nor Oba Bull (both are common Red Bull knockoffs); no, they were Ice Bull (you were expecting Red Yak, weren't you?).

"Don't touch this door," the sign commands. On further inspection, it was hanging by just one hinge and on the other side of it was a three storey drop. OK, then.



Then we went to another nearby temple, Dazhaosi (Jokhang in Tibetan). This is another Mecca for Tibetans. This is a fairly large three story building, the lower levels of which are a huge indoor ring of holy objects that Tibetans come to see and bang their heads on. When the Dalai Lama left in 1959, the Chinese turned it into a pig sty. It's still being restored from that, but it's a pretty neat place. People bring yak butter and add it to perpetually burning candles, and the whole inside is quite cool. The smoke from the incense causes the rays of sunlight which seep in through the cracks in the ancient walls and roof to be visible as they shoot down towards the golden Buddha statues. Aside from the Tibetans jostling one another and me quite badly, it was a good experience.

The square outside of Dazhaosi.



Me, Dazhaosi and Potala in one shot. Epic.



Outside the temple was Lhasa exactly as I imagined it in my head before coming here. Turns out Lhasa was quite a small city in 1959. It mostly consisted of Potala Palace and a smallish neighbourhood of low-rise whitewashed mud-brick buildings with narrow alleyways for streets. This area still survives, and that's where we presently found ourselves. The Chinese new town I was complaining about yesterday was all added later and now makes up the bulk of Lhasa.

A picture of a picture of Lhasa in the 1930s. The little village to the right of Potala Palace now makes up the old town of Lhasa, and probably about 10% of Lhasa's total area, the rest of which is modern Chinese buildings.



The "old town" part of Lhasa.















"Tibetan crap" for sale.







These things are rad. Place them in the sun and you've got a pot of boiling water in about ten minutes, for free (electricity and natural gas are expensive here).



This place was pretty rad. Lots of little street stalls selling Tibetan crap, and a real "old-town" feel that was a pleasant surprise. The people were almost all Tibetan (as opposed to the 70% Tibetan mix you find in the new town) and there were also some Hui (a Muslim minority in China) folk milling about, and a mosque. The only downside were the police and army. Just about everywhere you turned there was a small police station (or one being built) with glass windows and a half-dozen cops inside. Each one is clearly equipped with riot gear. Cops walk about carrying guns. At first I thought they were real guns, but on closer inspection I found that they're bean-bag guns. There are also army patrols of six walking all around the town. The police and soldiers weren't as obnoxious as one would think. They were definitely distant towards me, but I saw them joking, chatting, fooling around, singing along with, and so on, with the Tibetans and Hui whose neighbourhood they were patrolling. They didn't seem especially unwelcome (which isn't to say they were welcome).

Military patrols in Lhasa. There are also far more police here than elsewhere in China. If you plan on going to Lhasa, be VERY discrete in taking pictures of these guys. I had to explain myself in Chinese more than once to avoid them confiscating my iPhone or just deleting all my photos.







I can also sort of understand why, after those riots in 2008, China would want such a presence here. As this is where the riots took place, there can be no confusion about why so many people (both Chinese and Tibetan) died. It was pretty wild just walking around today; if this place was violent it would be terrifying. It's no excuse not to address the underlying causes of the discontent, but it's not so offensive to me as it appears at first glance.

Yesterday, our last day in Lhasa, we had a free day, so we decided to try to get to a little yellow temple that we saw near the top of a mountain at the base of which was a temple we visited and from which we saw the little yellow temple near the top of a mountain.

The trail started off reasonably enough. It was an obviously-marked and clearly visible trail that began by going around (clockwise, in accordance with Tibetan Buddhism) the temple at the bottom of the mountain. Then it rather clearly branched uphill and several people were on it. It passed some little springs with tiny Buddhas in them with people worshipping them. It passed a little house/temple nestled in the woods.

Some things on the way to the yellow temple.













Then the trail started to get a little harder to see. Also, it started going quite steeply uphill and over some slippery rocks. However, it was still obvious and was still headed in the right direction (we could see the little yellow temple almost the whole time) so we persevered.

Then the trail became less than obvious, and also up over some slippery wet rocks, under a little waterfall with icicles in it (it was about 20 degrees but at night it's right cold), and through some pretty dense foliage, many of which were violently thorny. However, a little Tibetan couple who were obviously also out for a hike indicated vaguely (vague to us, anyways, since they didn't speak Mandarin or English) that we were going in the right direction.

Then the trail nearly vanished. Also, it became steeper still, and a great deal of yak s*** was all over the place. However, we continued, as we were essentially in an open grassy field, the other side of which was, plainly visible and closer than ever, the little yellow temple. The only obstacle was the fact that the open grassy field was at about a 50 degree angle.

At this point, we found a nice big shady tree, a little stream, and a couple of rocks (some in the sun and some in the shade) to sit on. My wife decided she was done and said she'd wait here for me. We agreed that I had one hour to get there and back. She lounged in the sun and ate a Snickers, and I pressed onwards (upwards).

There was no trail anymore. The little yellow temple was so close I could practically smell the yak butter candles burning in worship. I kept going, one step at a time, but my lungs and muscles were burning for air. At this point, I was probably near 13,000 feet and feeling it. I decided to stop for a moment. It took me five minutes to get my breath, then I set out again.

Five minutes later, I was bushed, so I rested again. The temple was so close I could almost see what was in the windows. I rested for another ten minutes and decided to ignore the headache. I told myself that if I trip and skin my elbows, I'm heading back even if it means I can't go to the temple. In reality, the slope had become even steeper than before and if I'd tripped and fallen I'd probably have tumbled all the way back down to my wife. The solid rocks of lower altitudes had also given way to a kind of crumbly gravel that provided no support at all. The plant roots that I used as steps and grips were all gone; I was the only living thing at this altitude... or so I thought.

I rested again, then started to climb. I grabbed what looked like a solid rock but it turned out to be more crumbly gravel bulls*** and I nearly toppled backwards. Simply getting my balance drained me of my oxygen, so I sat down, seeing little spots dance about in my eyes. The temple was about 3 minutes away, if this were normal altitude. However, I decided I had to admit defeat. I simply couldn't go up another step and the further up I went in this weakened state, the further I'd have to go down. I swore at myself, stood up, almost took another step upwards as if my body were ignoring my instructions to give up, then slowly started my descent. An hour had already gone by at this point.

While descending, I heard an odd grunt. At first I thought it was a rock hitting another rock, but then it sounded again. I looked around and discovered I was not the only living thing at this altitude. There was a male yak (with the big male horns and long fur) standing about 10 meters from me, staring at me. Fortunately, he and I were separated by a moderately deep gully.

Anyways, as I continued my descent, I kept one eye on the yak. He followed me down, and looked like he was trying to find a way to cross the gully. I tried to get away from the gully but it wouldn't make much difference as there was nothing to hide behind on this rocky slope. Also, the further I got from the gully the s***tier and crumblier the rock became, so I returned to my yak tormentor. I thought about yelling at him but I couldn't spare the breath, so I just kept descending.

Fortunately, the gully was deep all the way down and he never found a way across. As I got back to where there were little tufts of grass the yak refused to descend further, and stood there watching me as I kept going down. I met up with my wife and we both went back down.

Here are some pictures from that day.



The little yellow temple. How they built it up there is beyond me.



There are tiny hamlets on the way up; this was a little cluster of houses with probably 5 families, farming yaks.



This dude dug a hole under a rock and made a home there. Yes, he's actually been living under a rock, which probably explains the way he stared at us as we passed by.



Icicle waterfall. My oxygen-starved brain thought this was the raddest thing ever. I thought about drinking some but later I saw yak **** in the water upstream. Death avoided... narrowly.



Closer to the yellow temple.



Closer…



This is as close as I got. It was so close I could touch it, but no matter in how good shape I am, the altitude just killed me.

[Jader Pack]

FROM LHASA TO NEPAL 從拉薩到尼泊爾

In China, it's common to see blinking police lights (red and blue) all over the place, even where there are no police. The idea is to trick people into thinking there are cops nearby so that they drive properly. These are generally referred to as "fake policemen."

There are, in places where electricity is hard to come by, honest-to-goodness fake policemen. They're ceramic statues of policemen, grinning like idiots, on the side of the road. Some of them are saluting, while others are holding out their hand to indicate that you should slow down, saluting, or even holding fake radar guns. Some had been badly vandalized: one had a beer bottle shoved through his eye, and another appeared to have been severely beaten with a baseball bat. Others were drawn on with black felt and others, I'm sure, simply were not there (but instead, were at the bottom of the ravine which was once behind them).

















We drove a mid-90s Land Cruiser almost right across Tibet, from Lhasa to Shigatse, our first stop, then on to Mount Everest and Everest Base Camp, then finally to Zhangmu, a little trading town on the Nepal border. I have a Chinese driver's licence (they don't accept foreign licences, nor international licences, both of which I also have) and specifically said when booking the tour that I would be driving (normally the tour guide or a driver drives, and they drive themselves all the way back from Zhangmu to Lhasa, a three day trip). Driving in Tibet wasn't really anything special since most of the roads are brand new and quite good. The scenery, however, was out of this world.

Our car is the same one we've been shuttling around in all week: a 1994 Toyota Land Cruiser with a 4.5L gas V6. It's a fantastic vehicle: smooth even on rough roads, reasonably quick (I average 100-120 km/h on the flats) and comfortable. Beyond that, it's apparently exceptionally reliable. I'm a fan.

Our driver (who sometimes takes over for me, and who will drive the car back from Zhangmu to Lhasa) is a Tibetan fellow named Benbo. He speaks no English but OK Mandarin so we are able to communicate. Our tour guide is also Tibetan, and her name is Li Zhen. She speaks Mandarin but prefers to speak English. It's an interesting mix because my wife better understands the driver's Mandarin and I better understand the guide's English. Everyone is constantly translating for each other.

The two of them prefer to speak Tibetan amongst themselves. They sit in the front playing Tibetan music (much of which sounds like a mix of techno and bagpipes). They occasionally sing along out loud. They don't do this because they don't like us or don't want to guide us, it's mostly because we don't have much to talk about and there's not a great deal of guiding to do across most of Tibet.

Tibet is a giant farm with a few modern cities and towns. Lhasa, the biggest city, is more than 70% Tibetan people. Shigatse, the second biggest, is apparently 90% Tibetan. However, these cities are mostly newly built, and so look like most other Chinese cities, as I've described a few times. Wide four-lane roads, wide sidewalks, hemmed in by low-rise apartments with garages on the bottom floor that are used as commercial space. Everything is very square and very concrete. The only variation is in the sort of food served and the colour that the buildings are painted (here, they are white with a red stripe on the top). There are also many signs of Tibetan culture, like rugs hanging over the door and Tibetan script on the signs.

When I say that these modern cities look like the rest of China, that is accurate, but also misleading as it implies that this is a Chinese style of building. It isn't. The exact same sorts of cities can be found in pretty much every country I've been to, especially the poor ones. Most countries have their traditional form of city (Chinese hutongs, Japanese and Korean wooden villages, and various other primitive stone, wood or mud structures accessible by narrow pedestrian lanes) which are rather quaint to our eyes. However, as they become modern countries and begin to urbanize, they need to build new cities. What form should those cities take? Our own cities, attractive and clean though they are, separate us into commercial, residential and industrial areas. This assumes a great deal of wealth (i.e., the ability to drive places on a daily basis), and so is not appropriate for poor countries. The style I've described is. You can walk all over, the roads are big enough to share horse drawn carts, pedestrians, bikes, scooters, cars and semi trucks. Many people can open businesses in the same building or a block away from where they live. If you have relatively poor people living in a city in a developing country, this is the most logical way to do it. Thus, this style is replicated all over. In my opinion, these sorts of cities in Tibet are far less about Chinese cultural imperialism (of which there IS plenty, like communist slogans all over everything, even written on mountainsides in white stone) and more about the fact that Tibet is moving out of the middle ages. The fact that you can find this architecture in places where there are nearly no Chinese supports this.

Outside of these cities and towns, one can see the traditional Tibetan towns. As I said, apart from the cities, Tibet is a giant farm. Tibetan houses are made almost entirely out of stone, then covered in mud or pressed grass and whitewashed (except the top 5% of the building, which is painted red or black). The roof is flat; they lay wooden beams over the top then cover the wooden beams with dirt or, more recently, concrete. Some have glass windows, others are simply covered with Tibetan rugs. Most have a small yard, surrounded by a short wall made entirely of stone and/or cakes made of yak **** (which presumably dry in the sun then don't stink). At each of the four corners of the house are tiny turrets, on top of which rest prayer flags. Many fly Chinese flags, many others fly the flag of the Communist Party, implying that the homeowner is a Party Member. New or old, most have electricity, as newly-built power lines follow us most of the way to Nepal, connected to most of the houses (I say most because closer to Nepal the villages begin to have no electricity other than from gas generators which they run a few hours a day). There are no phone lines here: littering the countryside are solar-powered cell towers; we had full 3G coverage the whole way, even in the most desolate parts of the country. Cellular coverage is one thing the Chinese do fantastically. There appears to be no running water (but plenty of streams) or at best, a community pump. Toilets are communal outhouses, holes in the ground with walls.

So Tibetan villages are made up of packs of houses like this. Some very few have little plots of land growing rice or veggies, and some even have greenhouses made of stone with plastic wrap over the top. Most, however, grow animals. The animals all huddle into the walled yards at night, then roam during the day. The yaks do their own thing and are presumably marked for ownership. The sheep are all herded around by Tibetan shepherds. These animals roam the grassy plains and hillsides.

Pictures of rural Tibet.





Sheep roam the hills looking for little patches of grass.























So that's the idyllic Tibet that most picture in their heads, and how Tibetans have lived for probably centuries (except for the electricity). It is quite pretty and peaceful from a distance, but also looks pretty rough for the Tibetans. Most are short and thin, have dark and deeply furrowed skin from the harsh sun at this altitude, and most probably bathe once a year. I've seen lots of kids with birth defects. Education, sanitation, and entertainment are all pretty much nonexistent. None of this is to criticize, only to say that Tibet is a rather unremarkable poor agrarian area.

Their religion is probably the most interesting and beautiful part of the country. All over are temples from tiny to massive, which are the largest and most impressive structures. Their devotion is remarkable, and they seem to spend a LOT of time offering butter to the Buddha statues or banging their heads on the floor in submission. Everyone has prayer flags (those coloured flags on ropes, on which are written prayers in Sanskrit or Tibetan) and some people climb the sorts of crazy mountains I was on a week ago to hang prayer flags or build temples. As I've mentioned, the policy of the Chinese government towards this religion is idiotic; however, as I mentioned, the Tibetans could have their Dalai Lama back if he would accept the one condition placed on him by the Chinese government: he becomes a Chinese citizen instead of insisting he return as a sovereign. It's unfortunate that things are at such an impasse.

Religion aside, the Tibetans are just as irritating as the poor uneducated folk in any other country. They push and shove, they stare shamelessly at me, they spit with gusto and use the lumberjack kleenex (blow one's nose without a kleenex) at every opportunity. They are not at all friendly to each other and especially not to me. I'm already fully used to this behaviour, but they're definitely not the jolly, gentle, cultured, spiritual folk that seems to come to mind when imagining Tibet.

Aside from these villages and cities, the drive is pretty neat. Five years ago this whole road was a dirt road that would probably take weeks to cover. Now it's a pretty decent two-lane asphalt highway. The road crosses vast plains and climbs up massive mountains. Yesterday we crossed a summit that was almost 16,000 feet (at which altitude I got tired and short of breath just sitting and all of our sealed bags of cookies and snacks popped; that was the highest I'd been besides being in an airplane). The mountain roads are fantastically smooth and windy and I fantasized bringing a sports car here (a turbocharged one, as naturally-aspirated motors, even the beastly 4.7 in our Land Cruiser, are gutless at this altitude, barely able to rev above 2,000 at full throttle in second going uphill). We passed some stunningly blue glacier lakes and some giant glaciers. The terrain goes from rocky, frosty grasslands at "low" altitude (12,000ish feet) to lunar at high altitude. There are no police looking for speeders but they have speed stations: you check in at one, then if you check in at the next one before a certain time they know you're speeding. Some of these have armed guards, but most are just a card table on the side of the road with a couple of cops. Most are disinterested in us, though some want to see my passport.

Some pictures of driving and the roads in Tibet





This sign declares the altitude to be 5,248 meters, or 17,200 feet.























That's a mule on the road, there.





Our first glimpse of Everest.







We stopped at a few temples on the way. One was in Gyantse. It was a remote walled temple against a mountain. It was unique in that, due to its remote location and formidable walls, it went unharmed during the cultural revolution. The structures and paintings on the walls were hundreds of years old, which is cool.

A palace in Gyantse.



The temple in Gyantse





The other, in Shigatse, was devoted to the number two in Tibetan religion: the Panchen Lama. Like the Dalai Lama, he's supposed to a continually re-incarnating spirit. When the last one died, he named a young boy as his successor. The Chinese promptly disappeared that boy and named their own puppet as the next Panchen Lama. With the Dalai Lama gone, the Panchen Lama is supposed to be the head of Tibetan Buddhism. However, no one buys this. While it is politically expedient to have photos of the Chinese Panchen Lama up in temples, most also have a (much larger) photo of the previous Panchen Lama up. Since he's supposed to be a continually reincarnating spirit, worshipping the previous Panchen Lama is the same as worshipping the current real one (of whom there are no pictures since the Chinese have hidden him away or killed him).

The temple in Shigatse.





A Shigatse street.



Our Hotel in Shigatse seemed to be a state-owned affair as it had the feel of a business that would stay open no matter how much it was making. Called the Shigatse hotel, it was much bigger than the city would seem to be able to support. It was quite opulent in the lobby, bedecked with just about every Tibetan decoration and styling cue imaginable. I think we were the only customers, so we were handily outnumbered by the staff. The entire building was lights-off at night, so it felt like sleeping in an abandoned mansion. The security guard slept in a little cot under the stairs, and the receptionist slept across three chairs in the lobby behind the desk.

We also stopped at an honest-to-goodness Tibetan restaurant in a tiny village. There were benches along the wall draped in colourful Tibetan rugs, and solid wood benches painted in bright primary colors. The rugs also hung from the wall. A cast iron stove stood in the middle of the room; on it was a pot of stew and some kettles. Men wearing fur clothes and hats sat in the corner smoking and worrying a plate of boiled yak meat. We ordered curry rice (which came with yak meat) and noodle soup (also came with yak meat). We also ordered a pot of butter tea, though they did not have the sweet variety I like. Instead, they only had the traditional salty variety, but we decided to try. The food was fine, and only cost $8 CAD for four people. The salty butter tea, however, tasted like creamo and sea water. No thanks.

An authentic Tibetan restaurant/inn.



Tibetan yak-butter tea. Tastes like s***.



There are military checkpoints near the border with Nepal and India. Unlike Canada, China doesn't let its people leave at their discretion. Chinese people (indeed, anyone in China) need passports and government permission to leave. So, not only do you face Chinese border guards when entering China, you face them when you leave, too. In fact, this is also very common among other countries. It would be much easier for me to list the countries I've been to that don't do this (Canada, USA, Japan) than those that do (every other country I've been to, many of which even charge foreigners $50 or so for "exit visas"). The Tibetan checkpoints are simply further from the border than usual (usual being at the airport or land crossing). The surprising thing to me was that the soldiers carrying guns and harassing Tibetan travellers were Tibetans, not Chinese.

One of many checkpoints along the way.



Our next hotel was originally going to be Everest Base Camp. However, two factors mitigated against this: first, I have a bad cold (that I got from the crowded Buddhist temples in which people blow their nose on the ground, wipe with their hand then use the handrails on the steep stairs; also they sneeze without covering their mouths; one fellow sneezed straight up in the air in a crowded lineup) and am not interested in freezing my ass off in a tent at 18,000 feet in this condition. Second, it will be exceedingly cold at Everest Base Camp at this time of the year. So, we opted to stay in a village in sight of Everest.

This is one of the Tibetan villages I described earlier. It has about 50 houses clustered near a highway. It isn't fully a farming village (though the amount of animals around mean that it definitely isn't not a farming village); the highway goes to Nepal so there are some restaurants and little hotels. Now, when I say "hotel," I'm being very liberal with the word. The hotels we stayed in earlier were three stars by the Chinese "star" system; that makes them about as good as a mungy Motel 6.

The village we stayed in the day before Everest, called "Dingri" in Chinese.













Tibetan people don't believe in the environment; they throw their garbage on the ground. Households just dump it in empty lots like this one.



Our "hotel" (a one star by the Chinese system) is a pair of the traditional Tibetan homes like I described earlier. The first is a restaurant like the one I described earlier. The other is longer and has a number of divided rooms. The rooms are solid concrete (dirt floor though) with a pair of single cots and a single light bulb. Electricity from 7 to 11 PM, but as there's no plug, electricity really just means light. No heating, no electric blanket. It promises to be a cold night. There's public showers for an extra 10 RMB, and I'm not hopeful that they're hot. The toilet is also shared; it's a raised concrete platform with a hole and walls, you squat over the hole and let loose. For some reason I couldn't take my once-every-two-days s*** in the clean western toilet in our hotel in Shigatse or in the toilet we'll have in our modern hotel in Zhangmu tomorrow, it had to be here. While I was squatting, I heard a noise below which startled me. I peered down into the hole and saw a wild dog had wandered into the pit and was eating my hot s***. The noise I heard was him smacking his lips.

Our Dingri hotel.







The s***ter, complete with dogs to eat your s***.



Other Tibetan s***ters look basically like these.





We've asked if we can stay in the restaurant with the tour guide, as there's a stove in there (that burns yak s***, I'll add) that should add a bit of warmth. We would sleep on the concrete benches lining the room which are covered in dirty rugs. Beats the cold though.

We went for a walk around this little town. No Chinese or foreigners in sight, all Tibetans. Lots of wild dogs, too. There was a pile of freshly removed furs with a dog gnawing on them. S*** all over the road, yak and dog, maybe people poo too. Dogs were f***ing and fighting. People were burning garbage and yak s*** all over and the stench was foul. The air was, without a word of exaggeration, worse than Shuangcheng in all respects except opacity. There was also garbage all over, in the gutters and piled up all over the outside of the town. Garbage management apparently meant letting the yaks eat it, and indeed they did. Yaks with plastic bags in their mouths looked up at us as we passed by. As parents sitting on the doorsteps of their houses saw us approaching they would dispatch their children, who ran to us and demanded money. A lady also approached us and said "hello, money money money!" with her hand held out. I didn't give money, but appreciated the words, as most people here just hold their hands out as they glare at me as though I owe them. I saw a fellow putting water into the radiator of a running tractor, then a few minutes later pour it back out of the radiator into a bucket: hot water!

There's a general store that sells everything from shoes to hot water bags. It, too, is a concrete shack. The shopkeeper was from Gansu, another Chinese province. She said she hates it here. She was civil to us, while the miserable Tibetan owner of another shop charged us $8 CAD for $2 worth of stuff. C*nt.

The only good thing about this town is the fact that we can see Everest. It's still 200 km distant and about as big as Mt. Baker from Vancouver, but it looks just like in the pictures. Awesome.

Dinner was in the restaurant we hope to sleep in rather than our rooms. In one corner sat a Tibetan fellow with a prayer wheel on a staff. Prayer wheels are cylinders with a string and small weight attached. One spins them in a religious rite: inside are Buddhist scriptures and each clockwise rotation counts as reading the scripture aloud once. Thus, it's a good way to collect "merit." So this guy's spinning his prayer wheel and occasionally mumbling "oh mona mona mona ma" (I presume, a prayer). I also decided I didn't want to sleep in the restaurant as the stove operates in reverse: what I thought was the chimney turned out to be the fresh air intake. The exhaust was the port out of which the fire shoots and cooks things. The room quickly filled with yak s*** smoke which burned my eyes and throat. I'll take the cold room, on second thought.

Dinner was OK. I got vegetarian fried rice and it hit the spot. I also had a traditional Chinese remedy for a cold: ginger boiled in Coke. A recent tradition to be sure, but so widespread that I could even find it here. The fellow with the prayer wheel had yak soup and a cold Budweiser. While he ate, his wife picked up the slack and spun the prayer wheel for him. She also did so again when his cell phone rang and he chatted on it for a while. On the TV was a Chinese comedy about a guy with a stutter that was not in the least bit funny (not offensive, just not funny). All the Tibetans in the room laughed their asses off. Another Tibetan fellow was practicing writing Chinese characters in a child's practice book like the ones I learned with; however, it started to look more like he was doing his kid's homework.

Anyways, tomorrow is Everest Base Camp so we're off to bed in our room with the dirt floor. Good night.

[Jader Pack]

FROM LHASA TO NEPAL, PART TWO 從拉薩到尼泊爾，第二節

I'm sick.

That goddamn hotel in that s***ty little Tibetan village was impossible to sleep in. It was well below zero so we had to put on all the warm clothes we had. The bed was miserably hard and the dirt floor was not only dirt, but it was also un-level so my head was lower than my feet. The pillows were pitifully small and hard, and the bedding was almost certainly not clean. My cold was just getting worse and worse and my nose was running like a faucet all night. Finally, the altitude was nearly 14,000 feet and while I'd had only minor troubles in Yunnan and the rest of Tibet, this altitude proved to be my limit. I simply could not sleep a wink due to constant shortness of breath. I basically just lay there for 8 hours, shivering, blowing my nose and trying to catch my breath. When the alarm went off, I hadn't slept at all.

It was 5 AM, and we were planning on driving up to Everest Base Camp to see the sun rise over Mount Everest. The electricity in our pitiful little hotel was off so in the freezing cold and pitch dark we packed our things and ate breakfast (a greasy s***ty pancake with a fried egg on it). My throat was killing me and my nose was running non-stop, and my stomach had suddenly decided to get completely intolerant of Tibetan food so I barely managed to eat half my garbage pancake.

5 AM candlelight breakfast.



Then, we all piled into the freezing cold Land Cruiser and took off. I did not drive as I was almost completely incapacitated by illness, altitude sickness and lack of sleep. The road went from paved, to dirt, to rock (and from acceptable to OK to positively bone-jarring, respectively). Our guide knew exactly where he was going, as the road took a few turns. We followed a river for a while, crossed some snow drifts, drove on a little dirt road along a near-vertical drop, and generally got tossed and bumped about in the back seat. It was supremely uncomfortable, especially when compounded with the symptoms of my cold, my upset stomach from the ****ty food we'd had the night before and that morning, and the lack of sleep. I sort of sat there in a trance before putting my head down and napping a bit. Apparently I missed an astounding drive that, my wife says, looked almost identical to the Bolivian death road (she wasn't there, that was a different girl, she just saw the pics).

Three hours later, when we finally arrived at the base camp, I was not in good shape. The altitude was now over 17,000 feet and I was way past my limit. How my sister and her boyfriend managed to sleep here is beyond me. My goal was simply to climb the little rock mound in front of us, get a picture of me and Everest, then get the hell out of there. However, even that was almost beyond me. It took me ten minutes to baby-step the two-storey rock mound from which one can see Everest, and I gasped and sputtered the whole way. Oh, also it was piercingly cold, well below zero, and that just made everything worse. So we got to the top, took our goddamn pictures, waited a bit to see if the sun would come up over the mountain, then said "f*** it" and left.

Everest Base Camp, Tibet.







We made a quick stop at a nearby temple (the highest in the world, as though that were a good thing at this point) and took a picture, then went back down. Another three hours of bone-jarring bumpy, ****ty road went by (again, I involuntarily slept through the awesome dangerous road, f***!).

Unfortunately, our guides took us back to the same ****ty hotel again for more food. Just thinking about it now makes my stomach churn. I ordered the same vegetarian fried rice I got the night before and it was just as greasy and salty and s***ty as it was then. I left utterly dissatisfied. Our next goal, Zhangmu and the Nepal border, was at a merciful 6,500 feet and it was all I could do to keep breathing until we arrived. I was fine with everything until the cold (both the illness and the temperature), the food, and lack of sleep took it right out of me: now I just had to get back to civilized altitude.

The drive was a few hours, I slept through some of it, and we stopped for pictures for some other parts of it. It was as pretty as the rest of Tibet, especially the last two hours where we approached the highest peaks of the Himalayas, crossed them in another 17,000-foot-high pass, then descended down an insane criss-cross road that was somehow fixed to one of the vertical slopes of two mountains (one of which was China, the other was Nepal) on the southern side of the Himalayas. Between these two slopes was a vast crevice, at the bottom of which (at least a kilometre of sheer, vertical drop), a raging river ran. As the car descended, I kept my eye on the Land Cruiser's altimeter (yes, it even had one of those, awesome) and gulped down the delicious oxygen that was also becoming more and more humid with each switchback.

The drive from Dingri to Zhangmu.









As an experiment, I sealed this bottle full of air while we descended. Five minutes later, this is how it looked.



Zhangmu is a little town affixed to the side of a near vertical drop in the same way as the road that passes through it. Each switchback has a row of low-rises in between it; the roof of one is at about the same level as the ground floor of the one above it. The road is a little wider than one lane, and is made utterly chaotic by the fact that the majority of the traffic passing through here is semi trucks plying the Nepal-Tibet route. When one keeps in mind that Nepal drives on the left-hand-side of the road, and that most Nepalese truck drivers seem not to care that China is the right-hand-side, I think one can begin to understand the madness. As one approaches the switchbacks, on one side of which is an unprotected sheer drop of at least a kilometre, one must not only contend with the slippery wet roads (many of which have collapsed, perhaps due to earthquakes and perhaps because many fully-loaded semi trucks park RIGHT ON THE EDGE so their drivers can sleep, leaving less than a full lane to drive on) but a constant onslaught of Nepalese semi trucks, many of which are driving on the wrong side of the road. I wished I was driving but, in my shape, I was glad that Benbo, our fearless driver, was on the job.

Other than that bulls***, Zhangmu was really neat looking. There were Nepalese and Tibetan and Chinese restaurants, rooftop decks overlooking the incredible canyon we were in, and waterfalls all over. Unfortunately, I was so totally weak that all I could do was check into our room (no heated blanket or heating, so kind of chilly) and sleep for 8 hours until dark. Then my wife and I got up, had some Nepalese food for dinner, then went back to our room. I took an hour-long hot shower then slept again until 7:30, when we had to go to the Nepalese border.

Zhangmu, a little trading town clinging to the side of a mountain.











The border is at the bottom of the crevice, where a bridge (called the Friendship Bridge) crosses the canyon over into the Nepal side. We arrived an hour early, which was good because we were the first. Shortly after us, busload after busload of Tibetans arrived, eager to cross into Nepal. They all smelled like hell (Tibetans seldom shower), and were pushing and shoving and shouting and spitting and generally pissing me off. When the Chinese customs officers opened the doors and the Tibetans tried to shove their way in front of me, I went off my nut. "Don't f***ing push, don't you idiots know how to line up? Go in one at a time!" I shouted in Chinese. Our guide was shocked, my wife simply said "awesome!" and the Tibetans, all of whom were a head shorter and quite a bit smaller than me, reared back. "Don't get mad, fellow," one of them said, "You go first." I scowled and puffed myself up as big as I could so none of the sneaky f***ers could get past me, then slowly walked up to the first customs counter. Here, you have to show your passport and stuff, but then you also have to submit to a full luggage inspection as the Chinese border guards are searching for any pro-Dalai Lama or Tibet flags. I spoke Chinese with the guards, saying basically every bad thing I knew how to say about f***ing Tibet and its s***ty people. The guards, who were Chinese this time, let me through with no trouble. They didn't even search my bags. I looked back and the guard was giving the first Tibetan behind us **** for something, and this time it made me happy. My wife and I spent two hours on the other side of the bridge before we caught a car, and only then did I see that guy finally get through. Serves him right for pushing.

The China-Nepal border crossing at Zhangmu.



The right side of the Friendship Bridge in this picture is China, the left is Nepal.



Yours truly on the "Friendship Bridge"



The contrast between the Chinese side and Nepalese side was remarkable. China's towns generally look like hell compared to Canadian towns, but the opposite is true when comparing Chinese towns to Nepalese towns. This place was a disaster, at least as bad as the Philippines. Dirt roads with water running all over them making a muddy mess, s***ty wooden buildings that only just clung to the mountainside and avoided plunging into the river below, at least 10x as many people in the same space as on the Chinese side, and cars and scooters all over. It also distinctly smelled of s***.

The scene immediately after crossing into Nepal.







On the Chinese side, you have no choice but to pass through customs before entering or leaving the country. Here, I almost missed the customs office, which was an optional stop, a small little shop among many. You could easily walk right by it and, as I learned later, no one would check. I went in and there before me was a desk, swarming with tourists. There was no discernible lineup. Behind the desk was a brown guy who looked like the finger-waving Indian fellow from Seinfeld, with a toque perched jauntily atop his head. He was looking at passports from a pile and writing their particulars, by hand, in a notebook that one could buy from any old store. I learned, from conversing with the Chinese tourists, that you have to somehow get your passport in the pile for him to consider it. After trying politely, I shouted "get out of the way!" in Chinese and they parted like the Red Sea for Moses. I put our passports in. My wife's came back (by that, I mean the brown guy threw it into the crowd, who then returned it to its rightful owner) but he got mine then said, sounding very much like Apu, "you need a visa!" I said, "where can I get one?" and he said "right here sir," and gave me a sheet. I filled it out, nervous about the box on the top right which said "attach photograph here" (as I had brought no photograph). When I was done, he asked "do you have a photograph?" I said "no." He thought for a second, then said "Oh well" and drew a little cartoon face in the little box. My visa was a sticker, which he pulled from a little book then put in my passport. "Before you can enter Nepal," he said ominously,"You must have an interview with an immigration officer. There is his office!" I entered the office and another little brown fellow was sitting behind a desk picking his nose. "Come in!" he said. "How do you like our country?" I said "It seems very nice." He looked at my passport, without even turning to the visa, then said "Sir, I really hope you enjoy our country, thank you veddy much!" and I was free.

There are not many customs offices in the world in which you can just snap pictures at will. This was one of them.



As mentioned, no one checked my passport to see if I had stopped at the customs office as we left the little border town. Most people speak some English and some Chinese here. However, we discovered that when they don't understand you, they will happily nod their head and say "yes." Because of this, we ended up waiting on a bus for a while as we were under the impression that, "yes," it WAS going to Kathmandu when, in fact, it was not. We finally got an H1-sized Mahindra truck to take us, with the help of a Chinese tourist who seemed to have been to Nepal a few times. $20 CAD a head got us a 5-hour drive to Kathmandu.

The ride was absolutely harrowing. Nepal is PACKED and the roads are mostly dirt or very poor pavement. They are crawling with pedestrians, scooters, buses, semi trucks, and what not, all of which drive at breakneck speed. The roads are almost all mountain roads, switchbacking up and down the foothills of the Himalayas. Most towns are along this main road, which means that half of the time you're in bumper-to-bumper traffic (traffic being anything from farm animals to pedestrians to actual vehicles). Farmers throw grain on the road as you're approaching, hoping you'll run over it and remove the seeds from the rest of the plant. Then they scurry out after you've passed to collect them, even though there are more cars coming. Animals and people leap out of nowhere onto the road without looking. Vehicles barrel around blind corners at top speed, often on the wrong side of the road. This constant stress, the interminable bumpiness of the road, and my lingering sickness, took its toll on me.

Pics of the drive from the Nepal-Tibet border to Kathmandu.





For some reason, almost all Nepalese trucks have hand-painted tailgates which proclaim the favourite brand of shoes of the driver. Converse and Reeboks were the most popular by my count.



Kathmandu is a disaster of a town. Ten million people packed into a city that is almost all narrow alleys and the same amount of crazy traffic. I didn't expect this, but the air is abysmal. Even the Chinese tourists we hitched a ride with were complaining about it!

I haven't much more to write about Kathmandu. I've been sick so I've basically hung out in my hotel room sleeping and drinking water, for the past week. Hopefully after tonight's good sleep I'll be ready to head out. Pics of Kathmandu are forthcoming.

[Jader Pack]

KATHMANDU 加德滿都

Kathmandu is one of the nastiest cities I've been to. I can't go a minute without a fly landing on me.

Even at the expensive ($10 a meal for two people) and clean-looking hotel restaurant we mostly ate at while I nursed my stomach back to health, I haven't managed to get rid of my diarrhea, and even my wife (who has a hardy Chinese stomach) is starting to feel sick. The food is pretty tasty Indian fare, but things simply are not sanitary here (and considering how much I like China, my standards for sanitation are generally quite low).

The travel guides I've read all agree on one thing: the water here is deadly. Even though Nepal is the very first stop for the clean glacier water coming down from the Himalayas, Nepal has somehow managed to scum it up so badly that all tap water is deep brown and even boiling it does not render it safe to drink. In China, you can use tap water to brush your teeth and wash fruit and stuff as long as you don't swallow too much; here you are told not to let it near your mouth when showering. This, naturally, must contribute to the low quality of prepared food.

Water isn't the only utility that doesn't work properly. The electricity for the whole city is only on about 12 hours a day. It randomly shuts off for hours at a time, several times a day. It makes it very difficult to charge my neat computer things, and it pretty much ensures that no one uses computers to do business. Everything is recorded by hand in ruled notebooks. Also, it makes it tough for me to trust anything that needs refrigeration, like food.

The air is absolutely, abhorrently bad. I have never, anywhere in China, encountered such terrible air. Sometimes it's just Beijing smoggy, sometimes it's so thick that you cannot see more than ten meters in any direction. Always, it smells very strongly of exhaust and has little particles that make my throat tickle if I dare inhale too deeply. My wife who, being Chinese, doesn't mind dirty air even bought a face mask. This makes it difficult for me to recover properly, too. Kathmandu was once famous for mountain views but I haven't seen the mountains once. You may have heard that some flights in Beijing were delayed because of smog; the very same thing is happening here to the plane I am waiting for as I write this.

The city, as described before, is a vast sprawl of ancient low-rise buildings (3-6 stories) connected by narrow cobblestone alleys only just wide enough to fit a car. It appears to have quite a bit of character but the main problem is the cars and scooters which drive through the alleys at top speed honking their horns. Walking anywhere is positively treacherous and extremely uncomfortable. The motorbikes have vicious metal bars welded to their forks which stick out an extra foot so that nothing hits the driver's leg. These would easily break a shin if they hit a pedestrian at the speeds they drive at. The alleys aren't even one way so you can't just walk against traffic and see whatever's coming at you, death approaches from all sides. It even bursts out of the tiny basement doors lining the alley, where people keep their motorbikes, without warning. This might sound like China but it isn't. If you know what's up you can always predict what will happen in Chinese traffic. This place is like the Philippines: a total clusterf*** disaster. The roads are absolutely destroyed. There are knee-deep potholes everywhere so you have to watch your ankles. All street signs are hand-painted on plywood. Our taxi almost got stuck in mud, right near our hotel, in downtown Kathmandu, Nepal's capital. There are squads of soldiers, 30 strong, in blue camo all over, carrying mismatched weapons (some shotguns, some rifles, some batons) and mismatched plastic shields. On top of the people (who are a full order of magnitude ruder than Chinese people on the streets, not only pushing and shoving and spitting but even s***ting in roadside gutters), there are stray dogs and pigeons and bats and probably other wild animals all over and I haven't had my rabies vaccination. Everywhere smells of piss and s*** and garbage, and there's s*** and garbage ALL over everything. Pigs, goats, sheep, and cows wander about, eating plastic bags. I saw someone approach a full-grown wild dog, slit its throat, and throw it in a giant pot of boiling water, fur and all. Seriously, it's all very stressful and utterly ruins the otherwise OK looking ancient alleys.

For the first week and a bit I simply slept, enjoyed the faint warm glow that managed to filter down through the smog on our rooftop deck, ate at the hotel restaurant, and rode the toilet. As I started to feel better we went for a few walks to nearby attractions. The walking was miserable, the taxi rides back were perilous, and the monuments were OK. There's a place called the monkey temple, with monkeys. They were OK. Nepalese kids were chasing them around with sticks and throwing rocks at them, though.

We got a bit fed up with Kathmandu and decided to fly to Pokhara for our last few days in Nepal. This is a smaller town in a separate valley. We hear that the air is cleaner and there's a lake. My hope is that we can get an OK hotel with a rooftop deck and decent hot water (showering in Kathmandu is an exercise in frustration; the water reeks and the pressure is so low it's like being spit on) so I can relax and actually recover. I'm also told there's apple pie there, which would be crazy. Since Tibet I've been on a Western food kick. We went to Pizza Hut in Kathmandu and the next morning I felt 10x better. Really, all I need is a couple of sanitary meals to kick this diarrhea. I kind of doubt I'll get that until I get back to China on the 11th, though. Really looking forwards to the McDonald's in Sanya.

The airport I'm in now, Kathmandu's international airport and the first thing people see when coming here, is a joke. All planes delayed due to smog. Absolutely filthy place with stray dogs somehow IN the terminal. There are spaces for TVs everywhere but no TVs, just dangling wires and Samsung TV ads. The one TV describing departures and arrivals was working for a bit but flashed through the flights far too quickly to read them; then it suddenly crashed, showing the Windows "blue screen of death" and has not resumed. Someone was mopping the floor with a horribly diseased mop, getting s*** water all over people's shoes and pant legs. "Your attention please, mmf unf gmm hmm uh mmm ah bmff dmm..." cried the woefully inadequate PA system; and this is not a big or terribly loud room. The bathroom, a single toilet with a broken flusher, absolutely fills with cockroaches (they swarm from the drain, which is just a crevice in the concrete floor) when the lights turn off. All the lights in the whole building turn on and off due to the unreliable power. There is no Wifi (this was written in the airport and sent from our hotel in Pokhara). I got through security with a litre bottle of water in my hand. There are people smoking everywhere, not just locals this time but insufferable European tourists.

I'm complaining a lot, so I should say I'm glad I came and I enjoyed seeing this city, but I definitely will not be back. Here are the pictures.







The view from our rooftop deck.























I don't know what Dhak Dhak is, but my heart went there. It reminded me of all-dressed.











You could buy some pretty sweet rugs and throws on the street for a buck or two. Why not?[/i]



Sure, I'd love some more diarrhea!





WTF.









Animals eating garbage. Seriously, they'd literally eat plastic, then the Nepalese would eat them.




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POKHARA 博卡拉

Now we are in Pokhara. It's a little lakeside town that is supposed to be cleaner than Kathmandu an have some nice views of the Annapurna mountains. It is a bit cleaner but not by much, and the mountains are still almost completely hidden by smoke. Power is still intermittent, so many people resort to fire or diesel generators for light, contributing to the smoke.

It's probably half because of my upset stomach (I finally decided to take some antibiotics instead of fighting the diarrhea myself) but the food is still pretty bad. Today I tried some French toast, and wound up with a deep-fried piece of bread. It also tasted like they'd used the same oil for far too long and they also used it to fry chicken, so my French toast was bitter and tasted of chicken. The apple pie is OK, but not in any way authentic. Really, it's just sugary apple slices in pastry prepared in a way that is almost, but not completely, not like the way apple pie is.

On the plus side, motorcycle rentals are about $5 for two hours. We rented one and went nearly around the lake. It was barely doable on motorbike and would have been hell on a bicycle. There are wild dogs, people, and farm animals all over. Tour vehicles, almost invariably giant Mahindra Cherokee look-a-likes, drive along the narrow roads at breakneck speed, and occasionally semi trucks or buses do the same. Avoiding them is made difficult by the road, with knee-deep potholes or sections made of boulders that are almost as rough as it would be if there was no road at all. After dropping my wife off I tried to go for a rip and open up the little 150 cc Indian-made café racer but cows and semi trucks kept leaping out of improbable places so I just quit.

The attraction here is supposed to be the lake. However, the lake is badly polluted and obscured by the numerous buildings along the shore, many of which inexplicably have high walls to block the view of the water from anywhere else and also are not waterside restaurants with rooftop decks. Really, if we hadn't driven that motorcycle out of town we might be excused for thinking there really is no lake.

Nevertheless the temperature is a pleasant mid-20s and sunny during the day and there are few mosquitoes (only flies). The available decks and courtyard restaurants have a bohemian sort of feel and serve decent coffee. If nothing else, it's rather nice to sit in such places and read. The beer here is not half bad, either. Frankly though, we're both looking forward to Sanya, which promises to be much better. We'll be there for almost a month, staying in a family friend's apartment which is apparently five minutes from a 22 km white-sand beach. Yes.

[Jader Pack]

SANYA 三亞

Last night we were desperately tired after our long-ass flight. For some reason, on an overnight flight, the stewardesses kept the lights up, played a movie on the shared TVs, and served a meal at about 2 AM (waking everyone whose seat was reclined). Sleep was not to be had. We arrived in Sanya at 9 AM and slept until 2 PM.

Sanya is at the south of Hainan, the southernmost province in China, a small island the size of Taiwan, east of Vietnam. It's tropical, at a latitude south of Puerto Vallarta, so even now it's still warm-ish. Daytime can hit 30 (though it has been cloudy since we arrived, so only mid-20s) and night is mid-teens.

This part of Hainan is a series of bays. Ours is the most populous, called Sanya bay. It's about the size of the Bay of Banderos (Mexico) to my eye, and just about as dirty. The giant beach is quite nice white sand, but the waves are brown. Oddly, they also built the main highway RIGHT BESIDE the beach for the entire bay, so that all the beaches are filled with the sound of semi trucks and constantly-beeping horns. Anybody who paid big bucks for waterfront rooms will be disappointed to learn that this noisy-ass highway stands between them and the otherwise quite pretty ocean.

Actually, I doubt they will be disappointed if they're Chinese. I read an article about Chinese ski hills, which said that European companies built beautiful ski hills with massive chairlift capacities (it is China, after all) only to find that people came from all over China just to sit in the ski lodge and play cards. There were literally no skiers. Those companies have apparently since changed their strategies. Where they would once clear a mountain of trees and put in chairlifts and smooth runs, they now just build a bunny hill and a gigantic ski lodge with lots of tables. Where Western ski hills advertise pictures of slopes and sunny skies, Chinese ski hills advertise pictures of cavernous halls filled with tables and people. Really, it looks like Beijing on a mountain.

Following this principle, Chinese advertisements for Sanya don't really look like foreign advertisements for tropical resorts like Mexico or Hawaii. Where the latter show white sandy beaches with no people, blue cloudless skies, and quiet rooms with undisturbed deck views of the ocean, the former shows pools (with tables all over, for playing cards), casinos, cruise ships (the inside of which have giant halls filled with tables), restaurants, and other places where you can sit indoors surrounded by people.

Turns out the reality is basically exactly like that. The resort rooms, as mentioned, have a view of the highway and not the ocean. The beachside has a concrete path like the Puerto Vallarta Malecon, which is largely followed by a wall blocking out the view of the ocean. Otherwise, there's a small sandy beach (largely replaced by concrete for the path) with no one on it. There are thousands of people on the path who, rather than sitting and watching the beautiful ocean, face the highway and dance to blaringly loud (and awful) music under blindingly bright spotlights to make sure that even if you did glance in the direction of the ocean, you wouldn't see it. A block further from the ocean is a long, brightly-lit shopping street lined with brand-name big-box stores and malls. From here, you can't see the ocean nor even tell that you're anywhere near it. For every person dancing on the "beach," there are ten people here shopping. In short, Chinese people fly all this way to Sanya, a beautiful tropical oceanside town, to do exactly what they could have done anywhere else in China, and they've altered the environment so that it looks exactly like the rest of China.

The weather is warm, the food is clean, there's a McDonald's, which I seldom eat in Canada but NEED once every few weeks in China (for some reason it's REALLY tasty over here), and the air is reasonably clean. The fruit is at least as good as in Mexico, with a better selection. We also have a free two-bedroom apartment with a 20th floor utterly unobstructed view of the water. We're three blocks back so we don't hear the highway. Oddly, we have no deck, and the amazingly nice rooftop deck in our building is locked for "safety." In all, I'm glad to be here but my initial impression is that this place is not so enjoyable as other beach areas I've been to (Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, Maui, Bali, Kending, Philippines, Okinawa, Vietnam, and others).

Some pictures of our apartment.





Our view.



The good news is that a few bays over, some ten kilometers down the highway, is a far-less populated and apparently much cleaner beach. I plan to bus out there tomorrow or the next day. If it's good, I'll buy some chairs and an umbrella and head out there as often as possible. It's close enough that I could buy a bicycle and bike there every day. Beer is still cheap and sold cold at every corner, so a pile of cold beers on a white sand beach is still a possibility.


---


Today, even though the weather is still cloudy, we decided to scout out a beach for when it gets sunny. This is Dadonghai, the next bay over from Sanya Bay (where we are). A 20 minute not-too-crowded bus ride to get here cost about 50 cents CAD for two; the buses come every minute until 7 PM, by which time the sun will already have gone down. A taxi ride would probably be $5 CAD.

As far as vacation beaches go, I would rate this a 5. The sand and water are quite clean (really, I know it's China, but really), the beach is about 3-4 kilometres long. Temperature was high 20s with a cool breeze coming in from the ocean.

There are a LOT of people at the busy end of the beach, but for some reason no one walks the 500 meters to escape the crowds. On either end of the beach it's reasonable (as pictured), considering now is the busy season. You can rent nice white towels, a wooden chair and umbrella for about $4 CAD a person for the whole day; that apparently also comes with a locker. There are tonnes of restaurants at the busy part of the beach. There are zero people bugging you to buy s*** like in Mexico. There are reasonably clean public washrooms for 25 cents a use.

Pictures of Dadonghai.















A pick-up game of Volleyball between the Russians and Chinese started. I played on the Russian side. We were winning until some little kung-fu f***ers showed up and absolutely destroyed us. They were doing backflips and s*** while returning our serves.




---


Some pictures of downtown Sanya. It's kind of a delta area so there are lots of rivers crossed by bridges. Some, like the wavy one pictured, are rather nice pedestrian-only bridges. Others are pretty miserable, being shared with cars and scooters. Along the rivers are some wide, waterside boardwalks, good for walkin' on.





















These garbage cans are ALL OVER the entire province. Someone OK'd the manufacture of thousands of these things without first checking how to say "non-recyclable." How they came up with "organic" is beyond me.



Some pictures of the far part of Sanya Bay, which you can walk to or take a bus to. The water is much cleaner here and the further you go, the less people there are. The whole bay is some 20 km long.







Kite-flying is a popular pastime here. Dudes show up with serious kite flying gear, including huge reels of wire that must weigh 40 lbs. They let their huge kites go out so far that you can barely see them. This is one guy just setting one off, which gathered a crowd.









Empty beach, hammock, nearly 30 degrees, iPad with 3G connection, and a backpack full of icy-cold beers. Heaven.




—


My wife's mom has been here for about ten days. I don't think she's ever been on a tropical vacation before and she has no idea how to enjoy it. For the first week, she basically stayed at home and watched TV. She has a set of soap operas that she follows religiously and refuses to miss. We would ask her to come to the beach with us and she'd act all hesitant until it was revealed that she didn't want to go because her soap starts at 2 PM. She also seems more interested in spending all her time saving a couple cents instead of relaxing. For instance, she told us not to throw the empty plastic water bottles out because she wanted to sell them (probably would have made 5 RMB, or about 80 cents). She refuses to shop at the nearby and very convenient supermarket which has very high quality fruit; instead, she goes all the way to the distant public market (walks or buses, refuses to taxi) in order to save a couple of RMB on the price of fruit. Even though she's disinterested in the beach (she said she wants to barf when she sees the ocean) I insisted she come with us and sit under an umbrella on some comfy rented chairs by the water. She refused to sit on the rented chairs (rented for $4 CAD a person for the whole day) and sat on the sand, then left because it was uncomfortable and she wanted to go home. We took her again and I told her we got a chair for free for her (buy two, get one free... even though it wasn't) and she sat for a bit. She seemed really comfortable and almost took a nap, then suddenly declared she wanted to go home and left. Basically, she sits in the apartment instead of on the beach, cooks for us instead of letting us treat her to a $10 CAD meal by the waterfront, and walks around in the city instead of on the beach. One has to wonder why she bothered to come all the way from Shuangcheng, where she could do all of those things. My wife is happy she's here, but it's impossible to vacation with someone who refuses to relax.

There's more. Even though there's a refrigerator, she never refrigerates anything. Fresh meat and fish sits in the grocery bag (which, oddly, she leaves on the floor) for hours until she cooks. Leftovers remain in the bowl, uncovered, on the table, overnight or for days until she eats it all. Indeed, she seems to have no clue about sanitation at all. She hasn't showered since she got here, and she has all kinds of habits surrounding food that make me sick. She's very typical, too. Chinese people, by and large, are filthy. The showers are universally of low quality (cramped, low pressure, poor heating that goes from hot to cold and never stays at one temperature), smells come up from the drain, and I always wonder how they put up with it. Turns out most of them just don't.

Even though the fridge is seldom used, she sets it at about 20 degrees and puts preserved vegetables in there. First, that makes my beer warm. Second, there are amazing fresh veggies here but she still eats preserved veggies. Third, they stink to high hell and make the fridge reek. Fourth, they're f***ing preserved, they don't need to be in the fridge at all.

All I want to do when I'm not at the beach is sit in the apartment facing the big window looking over the bay with my feet up and a nice book on my iPad. She refuses to sit with us quietly, she has to watch TV and wakes up when I turn it off after she's fallen asleep. Much of Chinese TV is pointless soap operas or vapid talent shows with lots and lots and lots of singing, including singing kids. Also, about 75% of it is ads. F***ing loud obnoxious ads that they play 3-4 times in a row instead of spacing them out like in Canada. Even the shows have ads all over them; in each corner and sometimes flashing across the screen making it impossible to watch. F***!

In her defence, my mother-in-law is not the only person here who doesn't know how to enjoy a beach vacation. I've already talked about the ridiculousness of Chinese people beach vacationing in Sanya (above), but when you're actually ON the beach there's more hilarity. Most people don't wear bathing suits, they wear street clothes. So, nearly 30 degrees and sunny on a beautiful sandy beach and about half the people are walking by wearing runners, socks, jeans, a fanny pack, a shirt, and a wool vest. Yes, a wool vest; my mother-in-law gets angry at me every day when I step out into the nearly 30-degree weather wearing shorts and a t-shirt because she's convinced I'll be cold. I refuse, but she makes my wife wear pants and a sweater, which she takes off again once out the door and stashes in the hallway. Back to other Chinese people on the beach: almost everyone wears a wide-brimmed hat and has a mask on to keep the sun off their skin. Some even bring hand-held umbrellas to keep the sun off. They wander around on the beach, sweating. Some wade into the water (taking their socks and shoes off, but leaving the jeans on, sometimes rolled up, sometimes they just let them soak). Others sit on the sand (no towels) or sit on the seats beside us, still wearing all their street clothes. A couple so dressed sat down beside us today, stuck it out for half an hour, then agreed to go back to the town because it was too hot on the beach. Neither of them clued into the whole bathing suit thing. Some poor old dude came out of the ocean, where he had been wading around in his khakis and polo shirt, and laid down in the sand, then seemed surprised by the fact that sand was all stuck to him. He wandered about in confusion before vanishing, probably back into the safety of the city and away from the nasty natural environment of the beach.

The whole point of a beach is to enjoy the hot weather wearing minimal clothing, enjoy some cool beverages, sit in the sun or shade, enjoy the scenery, take a dip in the clean ocean to cool off, and generally relax. Like the ski resorts, Chinese tourists don't seem to have gotten the hang of it yet.

In spite of all of this enough of them go that beaches are still crowded. Still, it's better than Taiwan, where you have to sit in rented tents that keep the sun off and the lifeguards' job is to keep you out of the water altogether. Lots of the people there are Russians, who know how to enjoy themselves. But the rest are Chinese, the majority of whom wear street clothes and seem miserable about the whole thing. You do get a few pretty Chinese bikini girls, which are nice to look at.

Aside from the beach-goers, most people seem to just sit in A/C lounges in their hotels, sit in sealed and A/C'd restaurants, go to dark, sealed up and A/C'd karaoke bars, go to giant indoor malls, and otherwise generally hang out indoors. I just don't get why they'd all come here to do it when every Chinese city has these very attractions. No beachside open-air restaurants, no rooftop or deck restaurants to enjoy the warm weather, the closest and largest beach is polluted and way over-constructed, and literally 10 meters from the main highway for the whole region... I usually enjoy bustling Chinese cities for their absurdities and interesting cultures, but I was really hoping for a nice tropical getaway and Chinese people are the absolute worst at that. Can you believe that our expensive 20th floor apartment with a 180 degree view of Sanya bay (which, from this six-block distance, is quite quiet and pretty) has no deck and barely-opening windows, and that the astoundingly pretty rooftop deck for the building is locked up for safety? I mean, f***!

The absolute WORST thing about this place is the scooter alarms. Some Chinese company makes electric scooters which are all the rage here. Each and every one of them is fixed with a defective alarm that goes off for no reason at all, constantly. People ride them to where they're going, stop them, arm the alarm (the whole problem could be solved if they would just not arm their alarm, but not a single person politely neglects to do this) and it immediately starts shrieking and beeping until they come back and drive off on it. When people park their scooters at night, the alarm literally goes off ALL NIGHT LONG. Since they all park on the street, the entire city is alive with these alarms, constantly sounding, non-stop, at all hours of the day and night. I would post a YouTube video of this racket, but it's blocked. Maybe when I get home.

There are at least twenty such scooters on my block alone. That's enough to ensure that I can hear at least one of them going at any given moment of the day or night, even with all the windows closed (which makes the west-facing apartment unbearably hot in the afternoon, even with the A/C going). I printed out a note to all twenty of them and stuck it to their scooter, explaining that the sound was very irritating and could they please not arm the alarm when they stop here as there's no point in doing so if it constantly goes off anyways. Not a one of them heeded my advice. I printed another note, explaining that I haven't had much sleep because of the noise their scooters make, and if they didn't stop them from making the noise I would give their alarms a reason to go off. Again, not a one of them changed their ways. About ten days after that, I bought a 2L bottle of Coke, wrote the words 吵死了 (noisy death!) on a note in angry-looking letters, and poured Coke all over the seats and handlebars of the offending scooters. The next day, all but three of the noisy scooters were gone or were no longer making any noise. I left thank you notes on as many as I could find, and downright threats on the others (which had been cleaned by their owners, who had not stopped arming their alarms). I gave it another three days (during which time I slept pretty well, since three scooters going off leaves hour-or-more-long gaps in the racket. Then, when the three offenders still did not stop, I took a pair of pliers, pried open the scooters' cargo hatches (they were locked, but you can still easily open them up... made in China) and cut the battery cables, leaving another "noisy death!" note. I'm not proud of my vandalism, but I did sleep very well for the next few weeks. I only had to repeat the Coke trick a few times before I left and otherwise I had blessed silence all month.

Oh. Perhaps you've heard of cargo cults. They're pacific island tribes that have had no contact with the rest of the world for centuries. Sometimes, when they find debris from civilization (cargo from sunk ships or crashed planes, or just garbage) they worship it as being from the gods. Sometimes the oddest bits of western civilization pop up here in the strangest spots, such that it feels like China is a gigantic cargo cult. The other day my mother in law was watching the shopping channel. They were selling clothes and crappy orange juicers and s***, when suddenly the item for sale was a Snoopy (the dog, from Peanuts) kit. It had figurines, stamps, stickers, rub-on tattoos, posters, note-books, and other ****, all bearing Snoopy's likeness. Apparently it was a collector's item and was selling for some crazy price. Sometimes you'll hear a Chinese song on the radio that has completely stolen the tune from a song well-known to us in the West; alternatively, Chinese songs are (naturally) all in Chinese, but now and then the singers will bust into English to say some well-known English catch-phrase from a western movie or song, or even just a word (歡迎你來我們的 PARTY!) The other day on TV was some old-ass black and white Hollywood movie, probably from the same era as "Gone With the Wind," complete with Chinese subtitles. Or, sitting on the beach at Dadonghai drinking a beer, when who should walk by but Mickey Mouse, in full costume, shaking hands with kids and taking pictures with girls. Lately, there's some Chinese cell phone being sold, the ads for which are using Leonardo DiCaprio's likeness (it appears to be a screenshot from Inception). Red wine, these days, is a really upscale drink here and everyone's trying to ride that one. Only, they don't know a thing about wine. They INSIST that it be French, red and, since Chinese people don't drink slowly but gulp down whole glasses at a time, sweet like fruit juice. Some of the crappiest wine I've tasted (and I'm not a connoisseur, but come on) sells for $100 CAD a bottle or more, and it all delivers the nastiest headache imaginable. Some of it has French (or French-sounding) names, but most of it is actually Chinese-made. There's a reason, too, that you can't find China in the wine section at the liquor store in Canada. The most expensive red wine in the world, Lafite, sells for double the price here in China. There's even a market for used Lafite bottles (which must have the label complete with the five-arrow logo) because fraudsters like to fill them up with s***ty Chinese wine and re-sell them. You never really know when something from the west is suddenly going to pop up here and be unexpectedly popular.

Another aspect of this is ****ty brands in the West being high-brow here. Howard Johnson hotels, for example, are some of the fanciest and most expensive in China. Same with Best Western. Budweiser beer is expensive, fancy beer here. Among the places you might go for fine dining is Pizza Hut (seriously, it's a swishy restaurant here).

---

Today started off almost as bad as a vacation day can go, and finished off beautifully.

Yesterday the weather took a s*** so we skipped Yalong Bay and stayed at home. Today it was sunny so we got up at ten and took the bus to Yalong Bay. It was just under $2 CAD for two people. Bus ride was about half an hour and was a long-distance bus (like a Greyhound) and not one of the city buses with hard seats and lots of standees.

We arrived at Yalong Bay, which was like a different world from Sanya. While Sanya is basically a mini-Beijing on the water, Yalong Bay is a completely untouched bay surrounded by mountainous jungles, with a little resort town right on the water. Unfortunately, much of the resort areas are off limits unless you have a room key and can prove you're a guest, but there's a public road that leads down to the beach.

The beach is absolutely stunning, among the best I've ever seen. I'd put it on par with that in San Pancho, only it's far bigger and the sand is much whiter. That is, of course, ignoring the people, who bring it down quite a bit. The beach, like the rest of the area, is divided: the majority of it is resort access only. The public part of the beach is jam packed. As soon as you set foot on the sand you're surrounded by hundreds of other Chinese tourists.

Some pictures of Yalong Bay.





I've mentioned already that Chinese tourists are a bit of a pain in the ass to try to relax around. First, there's so damned many of them that it feels like you're fighting for scraps at a Boxing Day sale. Second, while I enjoy traveling in China and amongst Chinese people, they are the last people you want near you on a tropical vacation. Walking along, there were people horking up giant loogies and spitting them right on the sand, pissing in the water, shouting (no exaggeration, they scream all the time) into their cell phones or talking to one another, throwing garbage on the ground, stomping crabs that dared wander up on the beach, playing music out loud on their cell phones, and basically doing everything imaginable to make you think you were in prison instead of at a tropical beach destination.

We walked for about ten minutes to get as far away from the crowd as we could, but found that as we rounded a certain point the army (!) had reserved half the beach for themselves. Beyond the barbed-wire fence that extended all the way to the water were a bunch of fatasses on lovely reclining chairs playing cards under lovely wide umbrellas, with VERY pretty young ladies serving them beer and giggling seductively at everything these guys said. As much as I wanted their lives, we had to retreat. We found a little spot where we could rent some chairs (cheaper than Dadonghai, only $3 for two people).

Things were nice there for about twenty minutes, then a bunch of Chinese people came up and sat down in the chairs next to us. They immediately set about shouting, littering, spitting giant loogies onto the sand, and playing s***ty (both in that it was bad music and very poorly compressed) music at full volume on their cell phones. Unfortunately, on the other side of us were also a bunch of Tibetans whose behaviour was equally unbearable (and even louder than the Chinese). In an odd coincidence, amongst those Tibetans were the girl who accepted payment for our Tibet tour, and the brother of our Tibetan driver. Seriously, China's a big place with lots of people, and I can't wrap my head around the odds of running into someone we had met earlier in another province. Really weird.

Anyways, I decided to take my chair and table and beer and move it closer to the water. The second I got away from those idiots, things started to look up. The sun came back out from behind the clouds, I cracked open a set of ice-cold beers that I'd carried all the way here, I bought a coconut and drank its delicious juice and bought two more beers for $2 CAD, and drifted in and out of a light nap for a few hours in about the best peace and quiet a guy can find in China. The weather was not too hot and not too cold, lightly breezy and somewhere in the high twenties. Absolutely fantastic.

Some pictures of my little slice of heaven in Yalong Bay.





Be careful putting your shoes back on!





The bus ride home was a bit long due to Sanya's murderous traffic, but we caught the bus just as it was heading INTO Yalong Bay and got a couple of primo seats. All the other suckers who waited at the bus stop had to stand for 45 minutes. Came back and went out for sushi, which was also absolutely divine. A pair of salmon nigiris cost just under a buck and it's some of the finest, softest, most flavourful salmon I've ever tasted. Came home and now I'm reading and writing emails.

SUSHI.





We spent New Year (traditional new year) here in Sanya. It was madness.

One more picture that doesn't fit in the narrative, of Perfume Bay, the furthest away from Sanya. It is 100% natural, no people, nothing. Too bad it was cloudy that day or it would have been astounding.



Next post is concerned with Guangzhou, then next will be Chinese New Year back in Shuangcheng.

[Jader Pack]

GUANGZHOU 廣州

So we spent a few days in Guangzhou. Our plane from Sanya was supposed to arrive in Guangzhou at 1 AM; but didn't take off until 2 AM. We arrived around 4 AM, got to the hotel around 5, and learned that there was no room for us until someone checked out, even though we'd booked our room for last night and told them we'd be arriving early in the morning. We sat around in the lobby as miserable as can be until 8:30, when someone finally checked out and we passed out shortly thereafter.

We had to get up at noon to go have dim sum with teacher Wang, a former professor of my wife's. The dim sum was fantastic, as was most of the food we had in Guangzhou. Though the food in China has generally not been as good as I remember, Guangzhou (along with Sichuan province) have been notable holdouts.

Guangzhou's a bit of a boring place but it has changed remarkably. Four years ago it was a cesspool not unlike Shenzhen. These days the air is much cleaner than ever before, the traffic is quite civilized (people even stop at red lights to let pedestrians use the crosswalks), and people are noticeably politer than elsewhere in China. Honestly, this place has become a lot more like Chengdu (from an earlier post), which is very good in my books.

Anyways, I've been to Guangzhou a million times so here are some photos.

Guangdong Province still does dim sum best. Cheap, too!



There's a reasonably prevalent and well-used public bike system here, which is probably one of many things which has contributed to the vast change in air quality since I was here last, two years earlier.



Lots of people ride their own bikes here, too, since the weather is reasonable year-round.



There's still quite a bit of rich meets poor, though.



These two are Guangzhou's latest and now, most famous buildings. A few years ago, the sites they're now on were hutongs or farmland.





Guangzhou has a nightly water show, synced to music. It's kind of cool and I bet it's a lot more popular when the weather's warmer.





In most of China, people don't have drying machines. Guangzhou is one of those places warm enough year-round to hang your clothes up outside, though.







A not-well-advertised restaurant at the University. Also, not very good.



A much better pond-side restaurant at the University. Oh, I've been saying "the University," without being clear. Guangzhou has dozens and dozens of universities and thousands of colleges. This is Jinan University.













Wen2 ming2 文明 means "civilization" in Chinese. In Guangzhou, there seems to be a giant government ad campaign focusing on making Guangzhou a "wenming" city. As silly as it sounds, remember when SARS was all the rage our own government put up all those ads telling us to sneeze into our arms and look how well that turned out (well, I think).

In Guangzhou, people are noticeably politer than last time I was here. Almost no spitting, no fighting to line up, no crazy traffic moves (it's not quite Vancouver, but maybe more like Richmond), and generally friendly service. These ads should be all over China.

Some pictures of the streets in Guangzhou. Unremarkable, right? Right. This whole wenming ad campaign has caused people to drive in the lines, stop at red lights, stop spitting, and not run over pedestrians at crosswalks.









I didn't even see a single car or motorcycle on the sidewalk. Weird.



Government propaganda exhorting students not to cheat on their exams. Chinese exam-takers are world-renowned for clever cheating schemes, and every year those who get caught are shamed in the news. Toe-activated morse-code radios, lookalikes, tiny wireless cameras and earpieces, and other such spy-fantasy stuff are all regular occurrences during Chinese exam season.



Odd. The number of lanes drawn on the road equals the number of effective lanes here.



Some of the government wenming ads.
















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HARBIN ICE PALACES 哈爾濱冰雪大世界

The day after our return to Harbin, my father-in-law took us all to Harbin for a fantastic hot pot meal and then we all went to the Harbin Ice Palaces. This is an annual event in Harbin, where they take a giant empty field and build hundreds of giant castles out of ice, then you can walk around it and climb up onto the structures. It's no Six Flags, but I've never seen anything of the sort in my whole life, so it was pretty neat. The ice structures have multicoloured fluorescent lights embedded in them, so it makes for quite a spectacle at night. There's not much more to write on this subject, so here are the pictures.























You can go up all the castles, four or five storey high.



Watch your step on the stairs, though.



Unlike the tap water in most parts of China, including Harbin, the water they used to make these castles was crystal clear. Nice touch.



Many of the castles have little 1-2 storey slides you can ride. There's one five-storey slide but you have to line up for an hour. It was -30 degrees celsius that night, so not worth it.



Chinese beer is almost all pilsners and very light lagers. Much of it even tastes watered down. One significant standout is Harbin Beer, who have a lineup of very tasty beers and even one stout (which is no good and is famous for causing piercing headaches).

[Jader Pack]

CHINESE NEW YEAR 春節

When we came back to Shuangcheng from Guangzhou, Chinese New Year was upon us. The deep winter here in Shuangcheng is much like my new prairie home back in Canada, with short days, minimal snow, temperatures ranging from -10 to -30, and blustering winds. During this, the darkest and coldest part of the year, Chinese people have a two-week holiday to welcome the new lunar year. Chinese New Year is considered to be the largest human migration in the world. Around this time, any flight in or around Asia is astronomically priced. Our flights from Sanya to Guangzhou and from Guangzhou to Harbin were probably 3x what they would normally be.

The streets of Shuangcheng in the winter. Note the huge coal-burning smoke-stacks all over. These heat water which is pumped through all the houses to heat them.





My favourite tea cup. Double-paned to keep from burning my hands. One of my favourite things about China is the quality of the tea. Also, it's still really cheap.



My wife's cousin's kid, born a few days before Chinese New Year.



The holiday itself is pretty similar to Christmas. The entire extended family spends much of their time inviting other family members over to their house for giant feasts and kegs of beer or bottles of bai jiu. Almost every business is closed pretty much of the time, which makes it impossible to get anything done.

Much of the city, normally packed with people and cars, was deserted.







For some superstitious reason or another, people don't throw garbage out during the festival. We had heaps of garbage in our kitchen and it positively reeked. Finally, on some arbitrary day, everyone decided to throw their garbage out again.



This is usually the busiest street in Shuangcheng, and it's usually a parking lot.





This area is usually a public market, absolutely packed to the nuts with stalls and people.















There are dozens of TV specials, most of which I saw since the TV was on nearly 24 hours a day.

Me enjoying my favourite Chinese comedian, Zhao Benshan, in his epic New Year special. I had to watch it four or five times to get the whole thing, but this guy is classic.



People who are more senior (primarily determined by age, but also determined by how much money one makes) give "red envelopes" to their juniors, inside of which is cash. People who are more junior give their seniors gifts other than cash. For example, a fruit vendor would give his seniors some choice fruit (and probably receive a red envelope in return). The fruit vendor's senior would give the fruit or something special he has access to to his senior, and probably receive a red envelope in return. Near the top of the social pyramid, a whole bunch of pretty fine goods and thick red envelopes change hands. So, the whole family just comes together, eats, drinks, and gives gifts.

The last Chinese New Year that I spent in China was with the family of another girl (who I came close to marrying). Her father was a taxi driver and her mom sold seafood at a public market, so they were near the bottom of the gift-giving pyramid. They mostly gave seafood and received cash, which they then gave to my then-girlfriend.

My father-in-law, a doctor, is near the top of the gift-giving pyramid. Basically every day of the Chinese New Year (most commonly called "Spring Festival" here), my father-in-law would bring home a trunk-full of boxes. Inside were almost anything one could imagine, from consumer goods to fresh fruit (absolutely unheard of this time of year in this part of the world as recently as ten to fifteen years ago), random household appliances (including a 12v water kettle for use in the car) to whole slaughtered animals or parts thereof (which would be boxed and kept on the deck, which acts as a freezer this time of the year).

The deck/freezer, full of animal parts.





One of the odder things that came through the door was four boxes, inside of which were four barbecued ducks, all cooked and seasoned, then vacuum packed. All you do is open the vacuum pack, rip the duck's flesh up and put it in a bowl on the table. It was pretty tasty, too, having been driven in from a famous Beijing restaurant just that day. There were candies and plants and beer and bai jiu and tea and medicine and other boxes and bags that I didn't open and didn't see as they were simply re-gifted the next day. Re-gifting, by the way, is perfectly acceptable here. I wore a leather jacket that Uncle Zhang gave my father-in-law, who in turn gave it to me, in front of Uncle Zhang and he complimented me and my father-in-law on having found it a good home.

There are many differences, too. China's religions are far less organized with far more nebulous beliefs and rituals than Western religions. Chinese New Year is a highly religious season and, as such, many of these rituals are on display.

The first such ritual I noticed was being performed by my mother-in-law as soon as I came back. She had bought several thousand sheets of shiny gold-coloured paper and was folding them up into little tooth-shaped nuggets. She had several bags of these nuggets in front of her and, when all the sheets were thus folded, she would probably have a dozen bags. As soon as she was done folding these (which took her about a week of near constant folding) she took the bags of folded gold-coloured nuggets outside and burned them to cinders on the sidewalk. The nuggets symbolized gold nuggets, and burning them is believed to send those golden nuggets to the afterlife, where my mother-in-law's ancestors would receive them and spend them.

The gold-coloured nuggets, destined for the fire.





Another one occurred without announcement one day when I entered the kitchen to find the whole family hacking away at a dead pig and cooking various meals. All of these, including the huge slabs of pig, were placed on plates before a poster in the kitchen, alongside some red chopsticks and a couple glasses of bai jiu, and left there for three days. By the end, all this food had gone quite rotten and smelled quite badly (I nearly gagged as I washed the putrid pig flesh and mouldy buns off the plates). The poster represented the family's ancestors, and the food was an offering for their ghosts.

Cutting up a pig for the spirits.



How would the ghosts know where to come to find the food, though? Easy: we left the lights on. All of them, at all hours of the day. Even at night, all but our bedroom lights were on (I suspect that my parents-in-law may have left their bedroom lights on). They also hung red lanterns on the deck to further aid the spirits' homecoming. This did make the buildings look pretty neat from the outside, as some of the pictures attached show.

However, all this light and food and burning gold presumably also attracted evil spirits. What's a good way to scare them off without scaring off the good spirits? Fireworks and firecrackers. So, for two weeks straight, basically everyone in this whole city was running downstairs and setting off explosives on the streets, in the courtyards, in the alleys, and anywhere else they could find space. The racket was positively deafening at times, rattling the window panes and startling me. No time was off limits. People would fire them off all day, and they would fire them off all night. I would get snatches of sleep in the dead of night, maybe an hour at most, which was punctuated by someone right outside my window lighting off a giant firework display or simply lighting a roll of gigantic firecrackers which were so loud you could not hold a conversation indoors while they were going off.

I walked around one night and saw people lighting these off. One guy had a giant box which he carried into an empty lawn, lit, and then ran away. I took a few steps back as the fuse reached the box. Nothing happened for a second, then the whole box exploded. No light, no shooting anything, just an explosion. The box was basically a bomb, and it left a small crater.

Walking around one night, with all the fireworks going off all over. Notice all the multicoloured windows; the town is kind of pretty this time of year.













Uncle Zhang bought some 10,000 RMB worth of fireworks one night. That's about three minivans packed full of giant boxes. We drove to a grown-over public courtyard of some kind and set them off. It was a pretty fantastic show, and gathered quite a crowd.

Photos from Uncle Zhang's fireworks extravaganza.







































Some of the fireworks were duds, and just burned to the ground.



All these fireworks leave a bunch of red paper all over. The streets are covered in it. I suppose it's biodegradable or something, because it wasn't all over the place when I arrived here in October. The larger boxes seem to have a bounty on them, as there are dudes driving little tricycle cars all over picking up the used fireworks boxes.

The remnants of fireworks and firecrackers, all over the place.







A pretty sweet old Great Wall for sale. I'm pretty sure it's just a licensed copy of a Japanese SUV.



There were also various requirements about what we had to eat or could not eat on certain days (eating pancakes after the New Year means you'll flip flop like a pancake and be miserable). On New Year's day (January 20-something, this year) it was decided that I had to wear all new clothing. My mother-in-law bought new chopsticks because a new year means new chopsticks. The various shrines around my parents-in-law's house are usually stocked with a couple pieces of fruit year-round, but at this time of year there were mounds of fruit and food, plus constantly burning incense.

The sunflower seeds made another appearance. Boxes of them were put out on the tables and, whenever someone came over, they would sit there eating them and throwing or spitting the shells on the floor. You could sweep the floor three times a day and it would still be covered in sunflower seeds.

These were most of the new (to me) aspects of the holiday season. Otherwise, I spent most of the time eating and drinking and trying to catch winks of sleep in between firecracker sessions. Most of the meals were fantastic, especially at the more expensive restaurants that Uncles Chu and Zhang invited us to. The beer and liquor were also plentiful, which was fun.

At one new year feast, I decided to drink only bai jiu. Unfortunately for me, it turns out one of the bottles of bai jiu was fake. This usually means very low quality alcohol, and it showed. Both myself and Xiao Di, a large fellow who can really handle his liquor, got badly sick and were bed-ridden for a couple days. I still can't smell bai jiu without getting nauseous, so I've been enjoying the various German imported beers my father-in-law has recently been bringing home.

Some notable drinks of the holiday. This is "Pabst WW2 General Beer." It's basically Pabst Blue Ribbon, in a green bottle.



This is an (empty) bottle of bai jiu. This one was real; the fake one was Mou Tai, one of the more expensive varieties.



The fateful night with the fake bai jiu. Oh, if only I could tell you guys not to drink it, but to use to to clean greasy bike chains or something.



Some tasty New Year's dishes.

















New Year's dumplings, made fresh, by hand. Awesome.



My wife's niece, adorable.

[Jader Pack]

SOME THINGS THAT BUG ME ABOUT CHINA 中國的一些煩人的事

I love China. I love traveling here, I love living here, I love the culture, I love the food, I love how even ordinary commonplace activities like buying food can result in hilarious or absurd discoveries or happenings. You never know what's coming, and it's a lot of fun.

For example, I recently stayed in a hotel. I was leaving when I decided I had to pee. I asked where the lobby washroom was, not wanting to go back up to my room. The receptionist took me behind the desk, through a door, out of the building, and down a trail to a little outhouse perched on a sheer cliff overlooking a little river (which I had a rather pleasant view of from my room). In the outhouse was a little hole in the concrete floor which obviously emptied right into the river. I will reiterate that this was a rather nice hotel in a modern city. You just never know.

There are less annoying things that I like, too. I think I've gone on about them at length here and in other threads, so there's no reason to list them all here. Suffice to say that I spend almost all my free time in China because I love it here.

Nonetheless, no place is perfect, least of all China. Some aspects of life here are annoying or downright intolerable. This post is me, listing some of the things about China that I hate.

First, I'm not an especially social person. I love a good party or hanging out with people as much as anyone else, but I also do like my alone time. In the morning, I love to just sit with my iPad and read and browse the Vortex and eat my oatmeal in peace. Sometimes I like to do that throughout the day. However, I haven't had such an opportunity for the better part of half a year. Chinese people are intensely social. If you're in the same house as someone (which is all the time), it's rude to do your own thing. You can't read, you can't watch TV without them (and if you watch with them, they talk incessantly so you can't actually watch), and you can't do anything else of that sort. You must sit with them. I look forward to bedtime when everyone finally falls asleep and I can read in bed for a half hour before falling asleep. If you try to get that alone time when people are around (which is always), they presume you're sick.

On the subject of being alone, I sometimes enjoy a quiet meal to myself, in front of the TV. I want to eat what I like, by myself, and take in a TV show or movie and relax. I haven't done so for, again, half a year. Meals are all communal. You eat when someone else says you do, you eat what they want you to eat, and you'll talk and socialize at every meal or everyone assumes you're sick and tries to feed you more. Most of the time, the meals are awesome; I'm a huge, huge fan of Chinese food. Sometimes, though, I just want a nice bowl of soup or a meal with a bit less meat. Somehow, though, Chinese people have vast memories when it comes to what you've eaten and what you typically eat. Any variation, and it's presumed you're sick. If you avoid something on the table, someone will also scoop up a big mouthful of it with their chopsticks and put it in your bowl. If you don't eat it, it's presumed you're sick. I generally choose the vegetarian dishes as I don't eat a great deal of meat to begin with, let alone the fatty, skin-covered, gristly, bony, gamey meat that Chinese people are fond of.

So, basically any variation from behaviour that Chinese people think is socially acceptable, and you're presumed to be sick. This is the worst thing that can happen. When you're sick in China, you don't eat comfort food. One day, I told my father-in-law that I have a bit of an upset stomach. He took me out to a restaurant and ordered a boiled pig's foot, complete with hoof and skin and hair, and ordered me to eat it. I choked it down but it didn't help nearly as much as a warm bed and mug of hot chocolate. If you're presumed sick during a meal (symptoms being not talking or drinking enough, or avoiding a certain dish) everyone at the table will start scooping the most disgusting food available on your plate and demand that you eat it. Refusal results in shouting.

I've mentioned that Chinese people love to put the most disgusting thing on the table right in front of you. I know "disgustingness" is relative. Chinese people, especially older women, have an incredible capacity to remember how much of what every single person ate. They use this information to determine not what you like, but what you don't like. They then tell everyone what you "don't eat," then everyone will insist you eat that one thing. When people learned that I don't eat much meat (many Chinese people, by way of comparison, eat nothing but meat, all day, every meal), they started serving all-meat meals. This would be OK by me if it were a delicious steak or something but, again, Chinese meat is basically the stuff we throw away in the west. There was a week during which time I basically went on a hunger strike and ate only rice until they finally relented. When there are vegetarian dishes, I make a point of eating so much of it that it hurts, clearing the table of all vegetarian food. This, too, is evidence of sickness on my part. My pointing out that I have no symptoms and no illness lasts for 6 months does nothing to convince them otherwise.

Chinese people often refuse to listen to such evidence. One example of this is medicine. Did you ever wonder who those ads on TV, exhorting people not to take antibiotics for colds, are targeted at? Who takes antibiotics for colds? Answer: Chinese people. Any sickness, you take antibiotics. Several different kinds, massive doses. If you don't get better, you take more antibiotics. And as you can surmise, the definition of "sickness" is ridiculous. Aside from the stuff above, I have been declared "sick" for having a slightly runny nose after coming in from the -30 cold, or for going to sleep an hour early one night, or for taking a shower once a day and coming out with reddish skin from the hot water.

Naturally, I refuse to take these medicines as they're not only not helpful, but harmful. This enrages my father-in-law, an honest-to-goodness doctor who should know better but doesn't. Incidentally, Chinese hospitals are death-traps because of the number of antibiotic resistant strains present there. People regularly die from absolutely minor infections caused by small cuts or bladder infections or what-not. This only adds fuel to the "sickness" fire, making everyone take even more antibiotics and making everyone over-react even worse to things that indicate to them that someone is sick.

There are more such silly beliefs related to sickness. They still genuinely believe that being cold causes the cold (the head and throat sickness). As such, the inside of houses are ridiculously hot, and people wear full on winter clothes even indoors, on the off chance that they'll get a draft of cool outside air and get a cold. It's probably 26 degrees inside this apartment, so I sit around wearing shorts while everyone else wears long johns, pants, wool socks, undershirts, sweaters, and toques, indoors. They tried to give me s*** and make me wear more clothes indoors, but I simply refuse to be sweltering hot all day so they gave up.

This fear of cold extends to other things. We never eat anything cold. Worse, we never drink anything cold, including beer. My favourite thing to do in the winter is put a few beers outside on the deck and get them good and cold, and drink them in front of the fire (or radiator, in China). People were flabbergasted that I wanted cold beer, and almost died of fright when they saw me step out onto the cold deck, briefly, in my shorts. That incident prompted a new round of them trying to give me antibiotics and feed me fish eyeballs and goat kidneys. I insisted on cold beer, but to this day they won't let me on the deck; someone with winter clothes has to crack open the door to reach out and grab one, and they'll only do it if I'm next to the radiator. It's ridiculous. And did I mention one of them is a doctor?

Speaking of people letting me do things, China's culture is extremely paternalistic. The head of the family is the f***ing head, no ifs ands or buts. He knows how to do everything, and no one else does. Worse, this is accepted by everyone. So, my father-in-law hovers around the house telling people how to cook, telling people how to use the computer, telling people how to drink beer... all of which are things he can't do at all. He refuses to let me help out with simple things on the basis that I "don't know how." The other day, I offered to help wash vegetables for dinner, and he literally said "No, you don't know how." Yes, I f***ing know how to wash dishes. I've been told I don't know how to make orange juice, cut fish, clean the kitchen, make the bed (they roll up the blanket and put it at the head of the bed here, they don't make it like we do, all ready to sleep in). They're not trying to avoid letting a guest help, they genuinely believe I'm incompetent because I'm not the head of the family. I haven't even been able to drive in Shuangcheng more than a minute or two, because my father-in-law says I could never handle Chinese traffic (I have lived here for more than 15% of my life and used to drive in Chinese traffic every single day... on a scooter). He honestly thinks his 1 year of experience driving (seriously) trumps mine.

Their TV was getting miserable signal because it was set up ridiculously (first problem, the TV volume was at 100% but the signal volume was at 5%, so the sound was incredibly noisy). He refused to let me near it while he slapped it and turned it on and off and shook the table before I finally lost patience and told him exactly what the problem was. Another day, he was driving and it had just rained, and he simply could not get the windshield to defog. He insisted on turning recirculated air on (because it blows a bit harder), with maximum cold but no A/C. I told him to turn the recirculator off, heat and A/C on, and blow it at medium strength, but he refused to listen. He left the car for a minute at a store (he refused to let me get soy milk because he thought I couldn't find it), during which time I fixed the settings. The fog was gone in the 30 seconds he was out of the car, but he still put it back to his way and later complained to my wife that I caused him to lose face (someone else was in the car).

His computer at home was an absolute disaster. He's in charge of it, and it was a virus-ridden cesspool. I offered to fix it a thousand times, and was refused each time because I (apparently) don't understand Chinese computers (they're the same as computers in any other country, by the way). I finally just did a nuke and reinstall with Windows 7 (they were using Windows XP SP1). Again, he was mad that I cost him face, though he now says he fixed the computer up nicely.

On the subject of computers, Chinese people are the worst with them. First, for some reason, every single Chinese person uses a different partition for each kind of file. They have movie partitions, document partitions, photo partitions... but then they just forget which is which and save s*** and install s*** to any of them that have space. Why not folders, I'll never know. They all use Windows XP, and it's almost always never the latest version. XP is fine, but you really should update it or you'll get viruses. They all have crazy virus and adware problems. You'll never see a Chinese computer that doesn't, at least once every minute, have an ad popping out of some corner or another and that refuses to go away without you clicking on it. Many of the ads have sound, too. Chinese programs are almost all free, but they're also almost all terribly slow and they're adware or spyware, to boot. So, more ads. They also stay open in the background so they can keep downloading stuff for you to P2P to other computers, and so they can deliver ads. They all set themselves to load on login, and they all generate ridiculous amounts of ads and activate the webcam and stuff. As a result, Chinese computers, even brand new ones, are slow. A brand new laptop of my wife's cousin's took, not a word of exaggeration, 35 seconds to open IE right after a restart. There are also so-called "hooligan" programs. These install by themselves from visiting certain websites or just by installing other software. Installing the popular spyware Sogou pinyin input method, for example, also replaces your default browser with the Sogou browser, which is IE with a skin, and constantly redirects you to advertisements instead of the page you wanted to go to. This browser, plus the 360 browser which is the same thing but for a different company, are so ubiquitous because of the way they install themselves, that many Chinese websites don't work properly without them. Chinese people not only don't know better, they actually like their computers this way. They actually click on the ads these programs present them and buy things from them. And, as I discovered, they miss the adware when it's gone.

Speaking of ads, there's Chinese TV. Without legislation telling TV stations how much content there must be per hour, Chinese TV has gotten to about 20-30 minutes of content per hour. The ads are always 2-3 times as loud as the program itself. They also play the same ad several times in a row, just in case you didn't get the point the first time. And, when whatever you're watching comes back on, there are still ads. The top left 1/8th of the screen is reserved for a giant, colourful, animated logo for the TV station. The top right 1/8th section is reserved for random ads, like web banners, that flash and leap around, making it impossible to watch TV. The bottom right 1/8th of the screen is reserved for ads related to the program; most programs have a huge, colourful, animated logo proclaiming what it is you're watching and distracting you from the actual show. The bottom of the screen has both captions for the program, and different text-only ads when no one's talking. The bottom left 1/8th of the screen has various animated ads and declarations from the station about what's on next (even though you can access that information using the cable-box's menu). So, you get a sliver of video in the middle with the actual show, which is, at least half of the time, interrupted for full-screen ads at random intervals. The programs don't even fade to black, they just interrupt people mid-speech for a four-time repetition of loud-ass ad for a cold medicine (antibiotics, of course).

Not like the TV would be worth watching anyways. Chinese TV is a vapid wasteland of musicals, operas, meaningless historical dramas, dull talent shows, miserable talk shows discussing celebrities, and mandatory CCTV news broadcasts which every channel shows. The news is actually pretty good if you can ignore the ads, but everything else is just a waste of time. Chinese censorship has basically killed any good TV, leaving nothing but the absolute dredges of human creativity. Worse, it's Chinese custom to have the TV on, ALL THE TIME. You can never just sit down and talk with someone without the TV blaring ads at you. Ugh.

Sanitation. They don't get it. Many years ago, I said to myself that I've never seen a Chinese house that's kept clean. This is still true. The kitchen is absolutely caked in grease, from the smoky oily (delicious) meals. They don't seem to believe in soap or dishwashers, so everything just gets a quick rinse with the dirty tap-water then put back in the dirty tray where it came from. Thus, all the bowls and plates are greasy and kind of smell. Chinese people spit bones and shells and stuff right on the table or on the floor without any regard for how you'll clean that up. That leaves bits of stuff all over the ground, even after a good sweeping. No one believes in vacuum cleaners, either. Why not spit these things out in a bowl?! So, the floor and table are always greasy and covered in bits of food, too. The bathrooms are always unreal. Grimy toilets, pervasive piss smell, nobody even bothers aiming for the toilet, and they always keep the door closed so it's always humid, mouldy, and the air is never fresh in there. The showers are covered in grime and soap scum, and you often feel dirtier after getting out than you did going in. I spent a whole day cleaning this apartment up once, and it was spotless when they got home. They didn't notice at first, then messed up the kitchen and dining room table severely, then said that there's no point in cleaning the bathroom or the shower because it just gets dirty again anyways. It was back to normal within three days.

OK, I think I've basically exhausted my complaints for now. I'll add some more if I think of any.


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SKIING IN CHINA 在中國滑雪

One day, the boss of the gym I work out at approached me and said he was taking a group of people skiing. I took the news home and told my father-in-law we're going skiing on so-and-so day. He flat-out refused and said it was too dangerous. This was one of those moments in China where it's not worth the fight, so we ended up not going.

I should mention, here, that Chinese parents are intensely protective. They'd be happiest if we never left the house. Once, they told us that going shopping for groceries was too dangerous; another time they told us never to go out after dark. I have yet to drive a car here, even once, because my father-in-law is convinced I could never handle Chinese traffic, even though I lived in China and drove a scooter for a year.

The gym boss offered again a few weeks later, and my wife worked on my father-in-law until he finally relented to let us go. The tickets cost us $20 CAD a person, including rentals and a bus ride.

So, at 7 in the morning, we arrived at the gym, boarded a bus, and drove for an hour to the closest ski hill. The bus ride was uneventful, even though my parents-in-law were convinced it would skid off the road and explode into a million pieces. I slept through most of it, and chatted with other passengers for the rest of it. They were, naturally, absolutely mortified that I was wearing so little (I was wearing exactly the right amount of clothing for winter skiing). They were all wearing a half-dozen layers, the outer two of which were gigantic puffy affairs. These people could barely fit in the two-person seats on the bus, they were wearing so much. I can't even imagine how they expected to get on the chairlifts.

So we arrived at the mountain. Basically everyone goes to ski hills on buses, no one dares drive there. People are, evidently, terrified of driving when it's cold. So the parking lot was full of buses, and people would file off the buses to the rental counters, staffed with dozens of people who gave every single person their size of boots, and the exact same size of skis.

We, in turn, filed off our bus and went to the rental counter. I was a bit anxious about getting the standard skis. When the staff members lifted them out of their racks to hand them to people, they seemed to struggle with the weight. The skis, a Chinese brand I'd never heard of, landed on the rental counters with a deep metallic clank, and seemed to be made of solid steel. They were not flexible at all, and the bindings looked rather primitive.

The rental counter.



I saw that there was a small rack of Salomons of the sort I usually ski on. So, I held back and waited until the crowd had died down (this was a typical Chinese lineup in that it most closely resembled a mosh pit without the music). When I was the only person there, I asked if I could pay more to get the fancy skis. They warned me ominously, using their remarkable salesmanship, that they were too expensive and there was no difference between those and the standard skis. I insisted, and ended up paying an extra $3 CAD for the Salomons.

So, I got my boots and skis, rented a pair of ski pants (since all I'd brought was a pair of sweat pants, not expecting to ski here), and hit the slopes. There were three chairlifts, two of which were broken according to the staff. The remaining chairlift was a primitive single-speed double-seater that went from the bottom station to a mid station, then back down the other side to a back station. You could get off at the mid station or the back station, leaving a grand total of two runs open (the front of the hill, and the back of the hill). It took the rickety chairlift, a used Russian model judging by the writing visible through the rust, about 15 minutes to get to the mid station. It took about 40 seconds to tuck from the mid station back to the bottom, so I spent pretty much of the day on the chair.

Some shots of the lift.















The mid-station.



This lift, which was broken, was a one-seater, which I've never seen in my life. It was also about two feet off the ground.



Another closed lift.



The typical Chinese inability to line up was present here as well. The skiers would arrive at the chairlift and cut right to the front of the line and try to board the chairlift. To counter this, people would also enter the chairlift area and wait on the other side. As a chair would come, the people who had lined up properly, the people who had just arrived, and the people who were lining up from inside the chair area played a game of chicken seeing which two would dare go into the area where the chair would scoop them up. Invariably, other people would also enter the chair area in such a position that they would board the chair before the people who had won the game of chicken to secure the actual boarding position, forcing people to scatter out of the way of the suddenly full chair. Add to this the fact that people were riding the chair down from the mid station and about ten percent of them failed, for their own reasons, to dismount, simply riding the chair back up to the mid station. It was absolute anarchy.

About one in every three chairs that came around resulted in three people squeezing into a two-man chair (which worried me as the chairs creaked and groaned and shuddered enough holding just my weight, let alone the weight of three people), while about one in six resulted in someone getting blown off their feet and out of their bindings like a bowling pin as a chair with 2-3 people came down the lane and smashed into them. There were lift operators, but they never once stopped the chair. I inspected the red stop button and noticed that the wire leading from its panel to the chairlift motor seemed to have been cut and never re-connected. The chairlift operators basically just yelled at people, making things even worse. The T-bars that my wife rode were basically the same chaos, except I never saw more than one person on a T-bar at a time. People regularly fell on the T-bar track or failed to disembark and rode the T-bar past the artificial snow onto the grass, shouting for help as they failed to understand that the source of their problem was their refusal to let go of the bar.

A lineup at the T-bar.





How were the slopes? This part of the world has extremely dry winters, with little snow. So, most of the snow on the slopes was fake. It wasn't bad, a bit hard, but well-groomed (a used Russian groomer still bearing the cyrillic name of its former home on its side plied the snow). The slopes were comically small. This was by far the smallest ski hill, with two tiny runs, I've ever been to.

Some shots of the slopes.























Chinese skiers are all terrible. They mostly snow-plow down the runs, all of which were green dots (by my reckoning, as there's no rating system here). You get the occasional tucker, all of whom are utter menaces who refuse to yield to those downhill of them. I saw more than one high-speed collision. Thankfully, two things were true. First, I was by and away the best skier out there and had no trouble avoiding them and, second, about 75% of the people either never hit the slopes at all or did one or two runs then returned to the ski lodge to socialize. Temperature was about -20 with wind. I wore way too much and was hot, other than my face which was cold.

Under the chairlifts and gathered in spots where the wind carried things to but could not carry them out of, was garbage. People evidently ate chocolate bars and drank red bulls, then threw the garbage right off the chair onto the ground. It was like a garbage dump down there. There were also a few bottles right on the slopes. People also spit even worse than usual (each person seemed to cough a big loogie up once per minute), so I had to take care passing someone in case they accidentally horked one right onto me. That, combined with the wind, the slow lift, the treacherous lineups, and the garbage, made this a pretty mediocre skiing day. I'm very much looking forward to hitting the slopes at Banff the week after I return to Canada.

A poster at the lodge. This is one of the few areas where you can actually see wildlife, including deer. This shows that the deer aren't for looking at, but for eating.

[Jader Pack]

CHANGCHUN 長春

On February 9, I took a brief trip back to Canada. To toot my own horn a bit, I wrote the problem for the largest Canadian moot and enjoyed an all-expenses-paid trip all the way back from China, including a week in Vancouver with my parents.

The first few days after my return were spent sleeping at odd hours and gorging myself on all the kinds of food you can't get in China. Among the things I'd been missing the worst were Denny's chicken strips: you just can't get a piece of white chicken meat in China, never mind chicken meat that you can be 100% certain has no bones in it. I also had a few BC Bennies (eggs benedict with smoked salmon and onion instead of ham) and toured all of Vancouver's "gourmet burger" places (the best is the Red Onion, by a wide margin). I ordered a pizza, I had three Wendy's Spicy Chicken Filets in one sitting, went out for steak twice (Hy's Encore once, Morton's once), had several servings of pasta with baked cheese on top, barbecued a salmon with my dad, and more.

Aside from that, I did a few other mundane things. I swam at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre (you don't want to go swimming, let alone in a public pool, in China), I visited Stanley Park (such places are very hard to come across in China), and so on. I also replaced my stolen iPhone 4 with a new iPhone 4S (it's FAST compared to the 4, and man did I miss having a smartphone). Basically, I lived like I usually do, but man did I ever appreciate it like I only do when I'm freshly home from China.

Problem was, after about three or four days, I started to get sick of Western food again and god damn everything else was boring. Every time I walked up the street nothing happened. Worse, I wasn't a celebrity like I am in China. Literally no one stared at me or wanted to talk to me just based on looking at me. After a few days, this anonymity got really old. The moot was rad and I think my problem was a great success, and at least there everyone knew my by my name (I signed the problem in like ten different places), but by the end of my time in Canada, I was really, really looking forwards to getting back to China.

My flight back was pretty sweet. They were offering their handful of extra first-class seats to all the passengers checking in for an extra $200, and I was the very first person there. I snapped it up immediately, and so did the family of four behind me, and they were sold out like that. I had also been saving episodes of How I Met Your Mother, House, The Office, and Top Gear, all of which I loaded onto my iPad and watched on the flight while sipping red wine (something else you can't get in China). There was even a 220v plug-in, so I could keep my phone, computer, and iPad all charged up throughout the whole 12-hour flight to Beijing.

In Beijing, the reassuring smell of coal smoke and car exhaust filled my lungs. Beijing's airport used to have free Wifi, but apparently there's a new law saying that everyone who uses the internet has to be identifiable by their real name. This probably isn't too new, but in China many of these things are enforced much more strongly the closer you get to the capital. So, I couldn't just log into the free Wifi, I had to locate a machine to scan my passport. The only functioning such machine was, oddly, on the second floor in the middle of a restaurant close to the Burger King which served Whoppers that tasted as though they had been ordered in Canada, frozen, flown to Beijing, then microwaved. I then received a slip of paper with a silly long random login and password which didn't work the first three times I tried it. About an hour after I decided I wanted to surf the web, I was finally connected to this slow and brutally censored free Wifi. Ahhh... back in China.

My five hour layover in Beijing was not bad at all. Since I was flying from Beijing to Changchun, a large city near Shuangcheng south of Harbin, on the same airline as I flew from Vancouver with, I managed to talk my way into their VIP departure lounge using the first-class ticket from the flight I had just gotten off of, which had better heating than the rest of the airport (which was frigid) and big comfy leather chairs. To my annoyance, there was also free and easily accessible wifi, so I had wasted the last hour frantically dragging my luggage around trying to find Wifi.

The flight to Changchun was miserable. Two hours. They served salty peanuts immediately after take off, then tried to divide up a litre of water (which was all they had brought) amongst all the passengers. They ran out after a couple of rows, and I had dry, salty peanut mouth for the whole flight. I thought about just rinsing my mouth out with the tap water in the bathroom, but my a**hole puckered up at the thought of getting as sick as I had in Nepal. I toughed it out.

Changchun is a rather large industrial city. There is, for example, a VW factory here. I tried to get a tour using my "connections" (關係), but it didn't pan out. I'll be back here in a month so I'll try again then. These industrial cities which sprang out of nowhere as China began to industrialize in the '90s are largely populated by people who, until a few years ago, lived on farms knowing only farming and medieval technology. They all only recently moved here, skipping hundreds of years of cultural and societal development, and found themselves in the middle of a modern life. Yes, they work 12 hour days in a factory doing HARD work, yes they're at the beck and call of their employers, and yes, their lives suck compared to ours. In places like this, I love to just find a cheap hole-in-the-wall restaurant (in the south, such places serve congee, here it's just noodles) and chat with these people. I could not find a single one who thinks their lives are worse now than they were before.

The apartment I stayed in in Changchun.









And the miserable weather outside.











Tasty homemade Chinese food, how I missed you.



A couple of funny kid's toys lying around.





These cities feel like giant experiments to me. "What happens," I can almost picture China's secretive leadership scheming amongst themselves, "When you take millions of 'rural bundles' (土包子, a Chinese derogative term roughly equivalent to 'country bumpkin') with no culture and throw them into a brand-new city with modern technology?" The results aren't so unusual to me anymore, but they're still amusing. The traffic has ZERO rules, for example. Unlike modern coastal cities, the lines on the road, the lights, the sidewalks, and all other general road rules go 100% ignored (as opposed to 10-20% ignored as on the coast). You get cars going absolutely the wrong way, people eating or selling food off little card tables in the middle of the road, horse-drawn-carts swerving through the grid-locked traffic, schools dismissing their thousands of students right onto a busy highway, semi trucks loaded to the nuts with everything you can imagine driving on sidewalks and mowing down street signs... it's anarchy.

The way these people live is interesting to me, as well. They all have modern apartments with water and electricity and such. Even though they have washing machines, they wash their clothes in the bathtub. To wash themselves, they still mostly go to public showers, especially because someone seems to have sold most people solar (black tubed, not electric) water heaters in the summer and no one thought that they wouldn't work in the winter when it's -30 outside. The kitchens in rural villages are often half outdoors and made of brick and dirt. These new kitchens are tile and steel and glass, but they're absolutely caked with food that gets cooked in the typical Chinese fashion (which leaves whichever room it was performed in looking like a food bomb went off). Most apartments have electric or natural gas stoves, but many people still buy coal (it's cheaper) and cook with that, in their own home, with the windows closed. They treat the floors in their homes like they would the typical dirt floors in their rural homes, and throw garbage on it or spit on it with abandon. Even though they have multiple bedrooms for each family member with modern beds, they still gather up a bunch of thin mattresses and thick blankets and sleep on the heated floor together, the whole family as one. And, here more than anywhere, the TV (the most modern of marvels and a sign of success for decades to these folk) is never, ever, EVER turned off.

None of this is judgmental. They really don't know what to do with all this modern stuff. That's part of what interests me so much. So I spent a week here in Changchun with some of my wife's family members, eating coal-smoky food and sleeping on the floor with everyone.

Changchun is also interesting in that there's a reasonably significant population of North Koreans here. Looking at a map of China, you can see that Changchun is one of the larger cities in China reasonably close to the North Korean border with a straight road or train connection. Many people who flee North Korea into China end up here. As I couldn't find an opportunity to talk to one directly, I had to go on hearsay. Many of them come here to buy consumer goods, which they then scratch all the branding off of (especially if it's a South Korean brand like Samsung) and smuggle back into North Korea to sell. The markets here often have huge stocks of odd things to cater to such customers. For example, rubber boots are evidently in fashion in North Korea these days, because the markets were packed with card tables full of boxes of rubber boots, and North Korean businessmen (who either speak Korean or have a very easily identifiable accent in Mandarin) buying them en masse. DVD players, regular cell phones, and rice cookers were also huge, though this was also fuelled by local demand.

In the news was a story of a few North Korean "illegal economic immigrants" who had somehow fallen on the wrong side of the law and were arrested by police here in Changchun. They were sent to a prison camp just across from the NK border but not sent back, apparently due to fears that they would be immediately executed. I found it odd that this was such a big news story because the Chinese have sent back thousands, if not tens of thousands, of North Koreans knowing full well they would face brutal treatment. I later learned that they were all sent back, probably as soon as the public interest in the case died down.

Anyways, a syncing error deleted most of my pictures from Changchun that I took on my new iPhone (damn you iTunes), so pictures of this part of the trip are pretty sparse.

The train ride back was also rather uneventful. Since it's a short trip (two hours), we went with the hard seat. Getting and keeping your seat is pretty rough under these conditions. The trick is not to drink any water so you don't have to go to the toilet.








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SHUANGCHENG'S HUTONGS REVISITED 又在雙城的胡同

Since coming back to Shuangcheng, I haven't done much beyond continue working, get wined and dined by friends and family, and exercise. My next post will be concerned with various generalized topics (I'm thinking about a short write-up on fine dining in China). I also took a few long walks around Shuangcheng's hutongs. If you'll remember, hutongs are ancient neighbourhoods, and an endangered phenomenon in China. Indeed, locals joke that it shouldn't be called China but rather, chai nar (拆哪兒) which, in Chinese, roughly means "where should we demolish next?" So, here are some photos of my recent wanderings.

A typical dinner in. A week and a bit away from China and this was enough to make me salivate profusely. Mmm.



A Chinese birthday party. The elderly fellow on the right (no hair) turned 78. They sing "祝你生日快樂" to the tune of "happy birthday to you" at birthdays here. Annoyingly, though, birthdays are celebrated according to the lunar calendar, so it's impossible for foreigners like me to predict when anyone's birthday will be.





Here we are on the streets of Shuangcheng. People don't recycle here, but like many major cities, there are poor people who collect recyclables for the bounty the government puts on them. You can get a certain amount of money for a certain amount of dry cardboard, for example, which is what that fellow on the right is up to. They also collect bottles and what-not. Lord knows this place could stand to recycle a bit more.



The garbages here are constantly overflowing, which is a bit bothersome to me, especially considering how much garbage is already on the ground.



This northern part of China, called Dongbei 東北, is where Chinese communism was born. Consequently, it's one of the last places where communism is being replaced by capitalism. This is very evident in the ubiquity of state-owned enterprises and the way employees of these enterprises tend to work 2-3 hours a day and in how you can go into one of these businesses, wait 2 hours, and come out with nothing. It's also evident in the building style. Most of these old low-rises are communist built, and evidently copped their building plans from the Soviets. As a result, much of these Dongbei towns look like a page ripped right out of a USSR history book.













And there are parts of these cities that have taken on their own, distinctive Chinese flavour:







Many parts of China are still producing these old communist bikes. They seem to be solid steel or iron, built like tanks, single speed, and while they never break, they generally rust away in a year or two in this climate.





This is the inside of one of those communist-era apartments. It has a lot of very obvious Russian styling cues that I didn't take a picture of, like the rather ritzy (but poorly-made) roof decorations and chandeliers. The floor was a bunch of little pieces of wood placed in the pattern that you see, but not fastened in any way. They made a charming "plink-plink-plink" sound as I walked on them.





I posted a picture of this coal pile earlier in the thread. Back then it was a few stories high. This is all that's left after a few months. The rest is in everyone's lungs.



This is my mother-in-law's shop. I can't remember if I posted it up earlier, but there you have it. When Shuangcheng began to develop, my wife (who was a tween at the time) moved from her dirt-floored hut to this shop, where they sold wire by the meter and slept in that little raised cupboard in the back of the shop (it's about the size of a double bed in there). This was one of the only modern buildings in the area at the time, and outside was still "pastoral scenery," looking at her family photos. Now it's all urbanized and this is one of the oldest, dumpiest buildings going. They don't live here anymore, but they still sell wire (though the shop is to keep my mother-in-law busy, as my father-in-law makes a ton of dough at his work.



And, the hutongs. These ones are currently in the process of being demolished, so I got to go into a lot of the now-abandoned homes.



Those buildings in the background are brand-new. All over China, hutongs like this are making way for modern apartments as fast as they can build them. The rate of change, even in the half year I've been here, is astonishing. This city has probably increased in size by twenty city blocks of brand new buildings in that time. The Google Map view of it is, by now, astoundingly outdated (which is a HUGE problem when road-tripping in China, as printed maps are even more outdated).



This is a "kang" ( 炕 ). In the days before these newfangled apartments, Northern Chinese households all had one of these. It's a stove that you sleep on. Underneath, they would stuff coal or anything else that can burn and set it alight, then sleep on top of it with a mattress of straw. In the -40 weather, a whole family could stay warm enough on a kang to survive the night. They also kept the windows closed to keep the heat in, but that would also keep the smoke in too, which explains the leathery look of many of the older folk who live here.







This is an old fruit store, scheduled for demolition. It kind of makes me sad to see these go. They're always run by old couples who live in the store and have done the same thing since private enterprise was permitted (which, in this area, was only about 15-20 years ago). These people talk of doing business like it's a religion, and derive immense pleasure from the simple act of making a tenth of a cent selling me a couple jin ( 斤 , a half-kilo) of fruit. I always hate to think what they'll do when their stores are wiped off the map.



New (left) meets old (right).



More new (right) meets old (left).



New (on the billboard) to replace old (half demolished hut).







And just some still-standing old neighbourhoods.





An anachronism in a modern neighbourhood. This sh*tter is a split outhouse where all the sh*t just runs into a trough (on the ground). Farmers come by with horse-drawn carriages even to this day, collect the "night soil" and use it as fertilizer. I'm sure they're finding less and less of it, though, as all the apartments around have indoor plumbing, unlike the huts they replaced.



Some people doing tai-chi next to a, presumably Russian and non-functioning, fighter jet.





Most Chinese who grew up in the hutongs shudder at the sight of one of these. Fiddly god-damned Soviet electric boxes that were installed in the years when hutongs were still modern housing and were being retrofitted with electricity. Evidently, they never worked right and often killed people or caught on fire. This one appears to have been half-gutted for spare metal to sell.



You can tell who has refused to abandon their houses in the soon-to-be-demolished hutongs after Chinese New Year. All families hang those red good luck posters over their door during the New Year, so houses with new ones still have people in them. Someone (probably a construction worker) took it upon himself to throw a rock through their window and pile rocks in front of their door. If they don't get out in time, the police will take them away. It's worth noting that these people have a legal right to a new apartment in the building that will replace their huts. However, Chinese people value living right near the ground (they like to take in the earth-vapour or 接地氣 ), they value the lifestyle of the hutong (which is a lot more peaceful and simple than modern Chinese urban life), and oftentimes (though not the case here in Shuangcheng) local officials sell these peoples' apartments and keep the money, and the people get nothing. In that latter case, the corrupt local police and courts will do nothing to help them, so they must travel all the way to Beijing for recompense, which they seldom get. The courts in Beijing are SWAMPED with such cases, and the corrupt officials often "disappear" these people before they ever manage to get to Beijing.



In a year, this will probably be gone.



More stubborn hutong-dwellers, staring down the behemoth modern buildings about to overrun their home.



Near the hutongs are often law firms such as this one. They can't help as there are no property rights in China, but they can at least try to cash in on these peoples' misfortunes. This one, right next to a neighbourhood on demolition watch, is called "ancient city lawyers" which is a hint as to who they're trying to attract.



In keeping with the "stuff in China that is gone or disappearing" theme, this is a bottle of bai jiu from the '80s. Back then, it cost 1 RMB (a 6th of a cent in today's money) to buy. It's 60% alcohol, and was made in a simpler time when people wouldn't put methanol in your bai jiu to make a few extra bucks. You can't buy it new anymore, at any price. This bottle was sold to my family friend for a rather high price. It was delicious and god damn did it give me a headache.



And the future. God awful red wine from Shandong province. It's sweet like fruit juice, and it's very transparent because it's been watered down. Some things never change, though: this also gave me a splitting headache.



I've mentioned the graffiti here. It's almost all business related. People write a phone number and a short description of what they're selling. For example, fake papers or diplomas, dog meat, donkey meat, and so on. Here's one selling "coma medicine," better known as rohypnol.



And, in new China, as always, it pays to watch your step. They stopped using metal manhole covers because they all just got stolen for scrap metal, but these concrete ones tend to disintegrate. That's a 3 meter drop into street scum in there, so it's best to just avoid them all together.

[Jader Pack]

ON CULTURE 關於文化

A lot of my posts have been about how rude, un-cultured, annoying or amusing Chinese people can be. All this talk of traffic, s*** , spitting, not refrigerating food and so on rather leaves one with the impression that China is a giant country of barbarians.

I genuinely don't think that it is. It's just that all that stuff makes for good stories. The truth is, China is a highly cultured country in many ways. A lot of that culture might not be evident on the surface, especially when looking at the sort of people who, not fifteen years ago, were living in a mud hut farming rice on a tiny plot by hand.

There's also the issues of the communist revolution and the cultural revolution. The instatement of communism was a messy affair, and the cultural revolution extended that. If one were to paint a picture of the majority of China's last sixty years, it might look something like the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, with the vest and monocle and pocket watch (representing China's culture) being chased around a field by a bunch of dim-witted scavengers (representing the forces that brought communism to China and decided that everything "old" must be buried forever). Even though China is no longer communist and the powers that be have re-discovered the value of culture, many of these cultural practices have been stamped out or deeply repressed by these darkest decades of China's history.

Nonetheless, that culture still exists. To find it, one must recognize that to Chinese people, there are "inner" people and "outer" people. The former group are friends, family, etc., while the latter group is everyone else. Unlike in Western culture, there are virtually no expectations that one treat "outer" people with any sort of courtesy. This goes a long way towards explaining why so many Chinese people seem so astoundingly rude in my stories: I am an "outer" person to them. To be accurate, I still get a bit of deference even as an "outer" person, as I'm a foreigner and many people seem convinced that I have some kind of mystical powers or, at least, notice that I have 50 pounds and half a foot on most of them. Most Chinese people experience being a stranger to other Chinese people much more acutely than I do.

However, it's an entirely different story with "inner" people. Yes, the complaints I've made earlier about sanitation apply, and there are some very odd ideas about hospitality (like keeping the TV on with the volume up when you're just trying to have a conversation or sleep) but, overall, one can see that Chinese culture is alive and well if one is an "inner" person to someone there.

Since coming here, I have been welcomed extremely warmly. I have been living completely rent and expense free for nearly six months. I've been showered with gifts to the point that I've learned to be extremely careful in saying what I like because my wife's family listens for such cues then gets those things for me the next day. People are constantly dropping everything they're doing and skipping out of work to accommodate me in some way, and they never even once complain or let me know how much their hospitality is troubling them. They're not looking for gratitude, they're simply culturally-bound to be great hosts. In spite of the odd cultural differences that annoy me or make me uncomfortable, they do a very good job at this.

Perhaps you're not convinced that generosity is culture. I agree that on its own, generosity alone isn't much culture to show for a 5,000 year old civilization. Let me write of another example then: the Chinese fine dining experience.

On the face of it, Chinese dining might appear to be one step away from a table of monkeys having a food fight. People chew with their mouths wide open making just about as much noise as it is possible to make, and eat with their bare hands letting the juices run down to their elbows. They take giant bites of bony, gristly meat, sort out the edible parts in their mouths while making all kinds of faces, and spit the inedible bits out right on the table or on the floor. They shout with their mouths open causing bits of food to shoot all over and interrupt one another with abandon. Even in a simple discussion it can sound like people are in a shouting match about their mother's honour. People smoke and ash on the table or floor. When they pour drinks, they often miss or overfill the glass, spilling stuff all over the table. People will hork a loogie, suck some sauce off their chopstick then stuff that chopstick deep into a shared plate of food. People regularly get absolutely pissed drunk. The room temperature is almost always high 20s, causing many to sweat. When they've eaten their fill, males will lean back and lift their shirts up, exposing their round hairless bellies for all to see. And even though there is always too much food and a wealth of selection, one will always find others using their chopsticks to deliver unwelcome bits of food onto one's plate. One can be excused for thinking that these are a bunch of savages who have somehow found themselves in front of a table.

Nevertheless, there's a lot going on that isn't immediately apparent. First is how all those people came to be at this table. In China, bills are almost never split. So, you've got one person paying for everything. As one might expect, that's also the person who invites everyone. Most often, the inviter (and person who pays) is, socially speaking, fairly low or equal in comparison to the people who he's invited. So, you've got the poorest person paying for an expensive dinner (ranges from $5 CAD to hundreds of CAD per person) for people who earn more than him (as social status almost exactly follows how much you earn). Why? Guanxi ( 關係, or connections). The dinner is rewarded by the inviter's betters with a stronger connection, which is the only way to advance socially (monetarily) in China. I'll add, as well, that the inviter generally orders. I was once asked to participate in ordering even though I was not the inviter, and my having chosen a few dishes appears to have been so large a social gaffe that is still spoken of and laughed about (good naturedly) six months later.

This social hierarchy is generally money-based, but easily modified. For example, I don't earn nearly as much as the highest earners at the tables I sit at, but am generally considered to fit in as an equal or just below those most senior individuals. This is because I'm both a foreigner (white) and a guest. White people seem to get preferential social standing, and guests from other cities are afforded esteem that they otherwise wouldn't get. Age also sometimes elevates one's status. Aside from my guest status, I am by default considered senior to various family members who are younger, yet wealthier, than me. There are occasionally older, not very rich people at these dinners who are much higher in social standing than their earnings suggest. This is affected by exact relation to the people at the table and something else I can't place: there are poor, old, close relatives who are afforded significant social standing and others who seem without any at all. So, this social hierarchy is quite complex.

How do you tell, then, who stands where? Most Chinese people seem able to sort this out well enough on their own without any additional cues. I still lack their cultural fluency so I often ask "is this person important?" and get a straight answer. People too far below my own social status are "not important." I won't even bother to remember their names.

Besides asking, there are plenty of other ways to tell. For example, one can look to see who pours liquor or tea for who. People pour for their betters; they also stand up when pouring liquor for their betters.

Likewise, look to see who offers cigarettes to whom. People offer cigarettes to their betters. The better's response to this offer is telling, too. Cigarette brands are huge in this social hierarchy; there are packs ranging from pennies to hundreds of CAD, and the higher you fancy yourself to be, the more expensive you smoke. Accepting a cheaper smoke than you normally buy from a person lower than you is socially gracious. Alternatively, refusing that cheaper smoke then busting out your own expensive smoke (without offering one to the other person) is a mortal insult and can shut a guy up, red faced, for the whole evening.

When drinking, Chinese people almost invariably pour big bottles of liquor (sometimes shared, sometimes not) into 2-3 ounce cups then shoot it. They do this with everything from hard liquor to wine to beer. Generally, one does not drink at one's leisure, but must "gan bei" ( 乾杯, or "dry the glass!") with another person. So, you'll be sitting there and suddenly someone will raise a glass and make eye contact with you, and you must drop what you're doing or eating and shoot a glass of liquor with that person. I think anyone can initiate a gan bei with anyone regardless of social standing, but before the glass is dried, everyone invited to drink this round must clink their little cups together. Watch when this happens because people will always put the rim of their cup lower than that of their betters when clinking. For instance, if I clink glasses with my father-in-law, I will ensure that the rim of my cup is lower than his when our glasses touch. After the contents of the cup are downed in one gulp, I will then immediately stand and refill my father-in-law's cup even if he objects.

What's that about? At the end of the meal, there are plates full of food and glasses full of drink. In the West, one's plate and glass are nearly inviolate, and it can be rude not to finish what's on your plate. One puts what one wants on or in it and eats it all that's that. In China (most of Asia, in fact), this does not hold true. It is a sign of hospitality to provide a guest with more than he can eat and drink. If the common plates are empty, more food will be ordered and placed on the guest's plate even if he can't eat another bite. Same for liquor: if a guest empties his glass and the bottle is empty, another will be opened and his cup filled, even if he can't take another sip. At the outset of a meal, it is not uncommon for the host to open 2-3 bottles of beer for a guest and put them in front of him, and keep a constant queue of opened bottles before him all night. After all, once opened, a bottle is paid for, so this is done to prevent the guest from hesitating to open another bottle.

I should note that much of this seems to apply only to men. Women are not subject to these customs. As I am not a woman, I am unable to say how they establish these things or what cues to look for. I assume that among women, seniority tracks using the same criteria, or follows the people they showed up with. Where a woman wanders into these male seniority customs, she is generally treated as having maximum seniority by all other men, even their obvious betters. For example, even the most senior men will keep the rim of their cup below that of a woman who should rank lower socially when clinking glasses.

The chewing with mouth open and intentional lip smacking and other exaggerated eating noises are signs of appreciation. To a Chinese person, our way of eating quietly must appear mechanical and forced. If you're really enjoying your food, you're thrown into a frenzy eating it and you don't have time to bother eating it quietly.

Even the heat being cranked up for guests is meaningful. Heat is expensive and Chinese people have a deep pathological fear of the cold. Cranking the heat well beyond the comfort level is another sign of hospitality in the same vein as ordering too much food.

As can be seen, then, there's really a lot going on at a meal, despite the appearance of barbarism.

It's fairly common knowledge, but it bears repeating that meals are not individuals ordering what they want. The host orders a bunch of plates (generally 1.5 dishes for each person, so 10 people get about 15 dishes, each of which would be too big for one person to finish) and everyone shares them all, scooping servings off the common plates (placed on a lazy Susan) and onto their own small plate or bowl. Same is true for most alcohol (besides beer) and tea. This is considered a vast gaping cultural chasm by Chinese people, who can discuss the ramifications of ordering for one's self for half an hour.

This community in almost all actions is yet another example of an aspect of Chinese culture that has survived the past 60 years. In spite of the best efforts of the communists to change this, the most important social unit remains the family. If you need something, the state will not provide, the family will. This is even true of things like health care, since China's system is largely private (or at least pay-per-use) and health insurance is rare.

Presently, my mother-in-law's father is ill. He has had surgery in Harbin and has been in the hospital there for a few weeks. This is all paid for by the family, who can't comfortably afford the $7,000 CAD I understand this has cost. As nursing sucks here, my mother-in-law is there taking care of him. My father-in-law drives all the way to Harbin often as well. This is a massive inconvenience for everyone, but filial piety, the intense unquestioning loyalty to one's parents, demands it.

There are many other interesting examples of how culture is alive and well in China. The rituals surrounding Chinese New Year are an odd mix of new and old, but many have been in place for thousands of years. Even the most modern cynical Chinese tends to get all humble around the Buddhist temples and on the holy days. Almost everyone has a few shrines in their home and complex rituals surround the proper maintenance and paying of respects to these shrines. A lot of this culture is superstition (on the same level as clasping one's hands and praying to a god) but a lot of it governs peoples behaviour and interactions with others. It might be hard to tell based on some of the other stuff I've written, but one thing that regularly draws me back to China is the way this culture has survived and is still evident even after communism, the cultural revolution, and now this money-worshipping modern life.

[Jader Pack]

You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to upload my photos to Picasa from China.

[Jader Pack]

I forgot how many posts there are per page. 30? 35?

[Jader Pack]

Turns out it's 35.

[Jader Pack]

Here's number 23.

[Jader Pack]

Here's 24.

[Jader Pack]

Twenty... five?