Zhangjiajie

This weekend, Jose, Chris, Andrew Ni, Warren, Cathy and I journeyed south to visit the small city of Zhangjiajie and its famous mountains. Cathy, Chris, Andrew and I took an afternoon flight from Beijing to Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. Known for being the birthplace of Chairman Mao (and not for much else), Changsha was an interesting place, virtually untouched by western tourists.

From our hostel we headed out for a walk just after dark. The streets were alive, as families, rowdy teenagers, and slow-moving seniors shuffled around the warm (82 degree) streets with seemingly no goal except to be out. We saw open-air restaurants full of Mahjong-playing grandparents, their grandchildren playing badminton or soccer nearby. After dinner in a small family-run kitchen, we stood and watched some locals in an intense soccer game on a lighted field nearby. Cathy purchased some sweet mangoes and lychee from a street vendor, and after meeting up with José and Warren, we enjoyed eating fruit and hanging out on the hostel’s warm outdoor patio.

Saturday morning was an early one, as we left the hostel at 7am to catch an 8am bus from Changsha to Zhangjiajie. The bus station was an absolute zoo, and as the only westerners in the place (and the only people wearing shorts) we attracted a good deal of attention.
The bus was hot, the sticky kind of hot where you want nothing more in the world than to change your shirt. We eventually made our way out of dusty Changsha and into the countryside, where I got my first glimpses of the terraced rice paddies, plow-pulling oxen, and stunning landscapes for which southern China is so famous. From the highway I saw dozens of 4-second snapshots, 4-second windows into the lives of the people of rural China. A woman walking through a rice paddy with a large, woven basket strapped to her back, and after a moment a smiling toddler popping his head over the brim; a group of men carrying two baskets each, connected by a thick stick held on their shoulders, walking along the narrow barrier dividing two terraces of a rice paddy; an old woman hand-washing her clothes in a creek behind a small village, surrounded by mountains on three sides. The views were beautiful and interesting beyond description. Driving through the hills of Tuscany is cool… this was cooler.

Zhangjiajie is a small town, cluttered around a river in a small valley. It’s not very pretty, but the central area is filled with shops and restaurants and is in a constant state of activity. Upon arriving around noon on Saturday, we checked into our hostel, which was reached by walking through a sketchy alleyway and then taking a dark elevator to the 4th floor of what appeared to be a dirty office building. The hostel office was located in an attractive lodge-style hut that looked like it had been built on the roof of the office building as an afterthought. The roof/office offered some cool views of the city, and our rooms were spacious and bright, although there were some various sheet-cleanliness-related issues.

We immediately took a cab to the bottom station of the Zhangzhajie Cable Car, the world’s longest. The car departs from the center of the city, exits the valley, traverses a series of rice paddies and small villages, and then ascends 1,279 meters to the top of Tianmen Mountain. It may or may not have been mentioned in this blog that I am pretty afraid of heights (my last cable car experience, at Eisreisenwelt, Austria, ended with me dry heaving in the upper station). Just as I had gotten myself sufficiently pumped up and confident enough to get onto the cable car (pounding my chest and muttering phrases like Man up, Ryan, quit being such a freaking wuss), Warren, our resident Chinese-language expert, informed us that the cable car was closed on account of a French guy attempting to traverse the 7,455 meter, nearly vertical wire on foot. We were shown a poster that was advertising the daring attempt, and the guy looked like a villain from a Disney movie, which made us that much angrier at his idiotic tightrope attempt (think Captain Hook, wearing tight pants and a stupid grin).

Having been forced to call an audible, we took a 45-minute cab ride outside the city to Zhangjiajie National Forest. It’s a tourist attraction that’s starting to garner attention in the west, for one strange reason: the movie Avatar. I haven’t seen it, but apparently the Avatar world features floating, column-like mountains referred to as the Hallelujah Mountains; the artistic renderings in the movie were based on the park in Zhangjiajie. The park itself was incredible, as gigantic columns of red stone, decorated with the occasional tree sprouting out here and there, soared into the low clouds above. The park was full of wild monkeys, and it turned out that when offered a Ritz cracker, they were more than willing to come up and stand next to humans. Only having a few hours of daylight, we hiked up through the mountains to a ridge that offered incredible views of the surrounding range. The first three quarters of the hike wound through a beautiful forest, full of monkeys and exotic-looking birds. The final quarter of the journey weaved through crevasses of red rock, each turn revealing a different view of the remarkably skinny, column-like mountains.

That night we ate at a great local restaurant that was probably too classy for our disgusting, sweaty state. Afterwards, we bought sticks of sugarcane, which we had noticed some locals nibbling on. The sugarcane came in foot-long sticks, and were covered with a hard outer shell that looked like tree bark. The streets were full that night, and locals seemed quite curious to see us buying sugarcane and then being taught how to eat them by the vendor himself. We seemed to create a trend, as a bunch of old people then proceeded to buy sugarcane and eat it while standing next to us. It was a good post-dinner snack, despite Chris making his mouth bleed after biting some rough bark.

Later that night we sang awkward karaoke in a small local bar (they had 12 English songs), and seemed to rid the place of the small number of patrons that had been there before. We also visited a night market that offered all kinds of strange foods. While I stuck to a tasty stir fry-like concoction, we all tried some of Cathy’s stingray and Warren’s oddly prepared eggplant.

Sunday, we had unfinished business to take care of, and headed back to the cable car station. We were happy to learn that the French jerk had failed in his attempt to walk up the rope (he quit after about 100 meters because he got some oil-like substance on his foot. Sucker). The cable car ride was smooth and moved quickly, although it is apparently the world’s longest, at about 48 minutes from bottom to top. The ride became progressively scarier for me as it continued, and by the end, my eyes were glued to the approaching face of the mountain in front of me; I didn’t dare look behind at the ridiculously far-away ground, disappearing into the mist. On top of Tianshen Mountain are a series of pagodas and a large temple, with numerous trails and vistas of the surrounding mountains. The only point where I wussed out on my travel companions was when we approached a portion of the trail that was a half-mile long platform, attached to the side of a several-thousand foot cliff by skinny support rods underneath. I wisely said no thank you and embarked on my own hike inland towards a different part of the mountain. Perhaps Chinese tourists are less intimidated by a westerner when he is by himself, because during the following hour I was addressed and greeted by dozens of Chinese people, and was awkwardly asked to pose for pictures with many. A group or family would be walking the other way on the trail, start giggling and smiling when they saw me, nervously say hello as I passed, and then act surprised and delighted when I’d respond with a boisterous ni hao! A little boy, holding his mother’s hand, confidently waved and said Waiguo ren, ni hao! Foreigner, hello! Naturally, I responded, Zhongguo ren, ni hao! Chinese person, hello! At one point, a little girl shyly walked towards me from the circle of her family, and quietly, slowly, said “Hello…how are you?” I smiled and slowly said, “I’m good, thank you, how are you?” She seemed to ponder her response for a second, and then proudly said, “I’m fine, thank you!” She rushed back and hugged her laughing mother, and I was ashamed that this 4-year old from rural China had just exhibited a better knowledge of English grammar than I had.

After a cheap ramen lunch, we took the cable car down to the middle station. After drying the sweat off my hands and applying some deodorant, we got on a medium-sized bus and ascended ¾ of the way back up to the top, on a road called Heaven Approaching Road. Quite possibly my dad’s worst nightmare, the winding road clung to the side of a series of cliffs, all several thousand feet high and with minimal guardrails. I looked at old pictures on my camera and spoke of nonsensical things with Andrew and Cathy in an effort to distract myself from the ridiculous scenes taking place outside the windows.

After 15 of the longest minutes of my life, we arrived at the destination, the remarkable Tianmen Cave and the Heaven Reaching Ladder. The cave is a literal gap in the massive mountain, a naturally occurring hole that reaches through to the other side. Leading the way up to the cave was a set of alarmingly steep stairs, 999 in all. Had the 999 steps begun at ground level, I probably would have been nervous. Considering that the bottom of the steps was already several thousand feet off the ground below, I was somewhat horrified. I did, however, reach the top, and was amazed at how people like Jose and Warren can be thousands of feet in the air and still want to climb rocks to get higher views. I just don’t get that.

After the harrowing three-part descent that followed (stairs, bus, cable car), we found ourselves back in Zhangjiajie for another dinner of local delicacies. The city streets were once again filled with activity after dark. Our final hours in Zhangjiajie consisted of watching old women do choreographed aerobic dance routines to traditional Chinese songs, attempting to take group pictures with the timer-feature on our cameras, and engaging in a nasty round of bumper cars at an outdoor festival (the fact that the only combatants were six loud Americans attracted a very interested and boisterous crowd that oohed and aahed with each collision).

We survived a tiny local airport that looked and sounded more like a cafeteria in a large high school than any place from which to fly, and after a bumpy 2-hour flight arrived back in Beijing.

Etiquette on the Ditie

I'm willing to bet that the first person to declare that "chivalry is dead" did so immediately after riding the Beijing subway. The subways are sparkling clean, no one eats or drinks anything, and Beijing's constant soundtrack of loogie-hocking and snot-rocketing is noticeably absent.

Yet the Beijing subway, or ditie, is every man, woman, and disabled person for himself.

As a rule of thumb, the subway is always full. It doesn't matter if a massive, incredible amount of people just exited the subway car like items from Mary Poppins' purse; your car will be jam-packed. On the 4 train, which comes to Beida, there is a glass screen on the edge of the platform, so its impossible to fall in or stand too close to an oncoming train. Outside each door, a mob of passengers gathers immediately after the previous train leaves. Regardless of how much earlier you arrived at the platform than they did, rest assured that even the nicest-looking person will sidestep and squirm their way to the front and center of the mob if there's so much as a sliver of open space.

One of the more exciting things that a visitor to China can witness is the battle of wills, wits, and guts that occurs each time a subway car arrives and its doors open. It's like watching reenactments of old Revolutionary War battles. There are two solid lines of combatants: those entering the train, and those leaving it. Both will charge straight ahead, and something must give way. The passengers that attempt to leave the train obviously want to get off quickly; it's human nature, plus that's generally how subways work. Those on the outside, however, know that for a precious 3 seconds, the car will be much emptier than at any other point in their journey. In those 3 seconds, all of the seats will be taken, there will be no more partitions to lean on, and those unfortunate enough to not make it through the initial charge of riders will be left to awkwardly stand in the middle of the car. Riding in the middle, with nothing to grab on to but the heavy-breathing people around you, is something akin to surfing in a tiny inflatable pool that features 15-foot waves. Waves that smell like bad tofu.

In the mad scramble that occurs at each major station, it's not uncommon to see grown men push women and children aside. A few times I've seen young men give up their seats for elderly people, but that's it. In Boston I routinely give up my seat on the T for most any woman, child, or uncomfortable looking person; here, it just doesn't happen. My favorite is when a cute-looking young couple gets on the train, and then the man rushes to grab the last open seat and forces his girlfriend to stand. It's hilarious, and apparently, acceptable.

Tiantan, Tianjin, and tianqi

After a fairly average week in Beijing (despite the lingering cold temperatures) the weekend was a great success. We're all starting to feel as if we need to take advantage of every free instant that we've got, because, strangely, we haven't got that much time left in China.

Friday afternoon, as some friends sat in class and others continued on the never-ending quest to find cheap fake goods, I decided to embark on a solo expedition to one of Beijing's few large tourist attractions that I'd yet to see: the Temple of Heaven, or Tiantan. After a lengthy subway ride I walked to the large, leafy park where the temple sits, about a mile due south of Tiananmen Square. Upon entering the complex, I briefly expected it to be another Disney-world like attraction in China, with hordes of flag-following tourist groups and Coca Cola sponsored refreshment stands on each corner. It turned out that I was very wrong. There were some small groups of tourists near the temple itself, but in walking around the rest of the park I saw caught some of the most authentic, revealing glimpses of Chinese and Beijing life that I've seen yet. A long covered pathway that stretched for about 200 yards (in Chinese, literally called the Long Corridor) was filled with elderly locals playing dominoes and card games. I walked silently through the throngs of Beijingers as they gossiped, laughed, and sang traditional Chinese hymns. Several small groups huddled together and played old-looking Chinese instruments, and as the sun set behind the corridor, I felt like I was a world away from the dirty streets of crowded Beijing. I eventually wound my way to the center of the complex, where I snapped pictures and sat down to read about the imposing Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. A short walk away were the Imperial Vault of Heaven and the Circular Mound Altar, in the center of which sits a stone that was once thought to be the holiest place on earth, literally the center of China, Earth's Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo). The Temple of Heaven is now one of my favorite places in Beijing. The park is large enough that it seems to push away the skyscrapers, taxis, and the loogie-spitting public, leaving a romantic piece of old Beijing there to fill the void.

Friday night was a standard night of bars and clubs.

On Saturday morning about 25 students journeyed to the 798 Art District, a portion of Beijing known for its rapidly growing art scene. Laid out amongst a series of once-abandoned factories, the district boasts dozens of tiny art stores and galleries, mostly filled with odd modern artwork. I'll admit that I personally did not understand much of what I saw on the trip, as most 'modern art' seems to go sailing right over my head (a network of interconnected, white paper-machet human bodies hanging from a ceiling as if they had been killed by some sort of communal gallows didn't really do much for me, nor did the giant steel monkey with glowing red eyes). We made our way back to Beida in the early afternoon and were happy to take a much-needed nap.

On Saturday night a large group set off for an area of Beijing called Hohai, a collection of bars and restaurants set around a lake and a series of canals. It was a cold night, and we imagined that come summer-time it will be a great place to go walk around and eat outside. We began our night at a small bar that claimed to be a "Football Bar" and had hung all manner of English Premiere League flags around the building. When some friends and I requested that they turn on the TVs to show the English soccer games that were happening at that very moment, they laughed and acted as if we had each just requested our own Aston Martin. We eventually worked our way to a live jazz bar where we heard a great band tear through a set of old Coltrane and Dave Brubeck standards. A group of the more musically-inclined of us stayed until the band quit a little bit after 1, and we decided we'd love to come back on a weeknight sometime to hear more.

On Sunday, Elizabeth, Morgan, Emma, Andrew Ni and I set out on yet another excursion with Professor Chapman, this time to a city called Tianjin, south of Beijing. From Beijing South Station we took one of the world's fastest commuter trains, that topped out around 340km/hour (that's fast. You do the math). We arrived in rainy Tianjin around 11am, and walked along the city's moderately scenic waterfront. We found a small city square where a group of elderly citizens appeared to be swinging deals and bargaining with each other; we eventually figured out that they were all parents, attempting to find suitable mates for their twenty-something year-old children. A laundry line full of potential mate-listings confirmed that we had stumbled upon an ancient version of Match.com.

After a good lunch of local Chinese delicacies, we arrived at the Tianjin Fabric Market, well-known for its high-quality, low-price fabrics. We all loaded up on materials to take back to Beijing to have professionally tailored into whatever we want, for next to nothing. I bought material for a new suit, an overcoat, and a couple dress shirts. Including the labor in Beijing, the total cost of the suit, coat, and shirts will be a little under $200 USD.

We had a great western-style dinner (on BC's tab...thanks Office of International Programs) and enjoyed another alarming/entertaining set of Chapman stories, which included:
- attempting to instigate an altercation with Boston policemen who had blocked off Kenmore Square prior to the Red Sox' World Series victory in 2007
- castigating the president of a major South Korean university for commenting on a book that he had not yet read, and
- his missed opportunity to single-handedly prevent the 9/11 attacks due to the presence of a complex terrorist network in his Boston apartment building

Whether the stories are to be completely believed we never quite know, but it's always interesting to listen. After watching Chapman wipe out on a set of icy steps (he was okay, and, in fact, jogged away) we made our way back to the train station and were back in Beijing in what seemed like no time.

Nanjing

I made a midweek decision to join up with some friends that had planned a weekend trip south to Nanjing. We took an overnight train from Beijing on Friday night, and after 8 restless hours (we couldn't get sleeper tickets, only seats) we spilled onto the platform at Nanjing station. It was just before 6am, and after waiting in a damp, dark queueing area for 20 minutes (it looked like a great place to get stabbed) we got a cab and made our way to our hostel, the Sunflower Youth Hostel. Despite the deserted streets at 6am, we could tell that our area of town would be cool, with lots of shops and restaurants and cool architecture.

Our 7-person group (Cathy, Hilary, Katie, Eric, José, Andrew, and myself) checked into our 8-person room, which featured 4 closely packed bunk beds but was clean and warm. After a few of us grabbed some jianbing for breakfast outside, we took a nap and woke up around 9:30 to a steady blizzard.

Our first idea was to head to the historic mountain that overlooks the city, where this month the National Plum Blossom Festival is being held (Nanjing is apparently well known for them). We took a cab across town, and found a small ticket booth, where we were told that admission to the festival (essentially a grove of trees) was 120kuai. When converted to American dollars, this price may not seem bad (and certainly wouldn't have seemed bad to us in Week 1 or 2), but once you've lived in China for a while you get an idea of how much the average Chinese citizen spends in a day, and 120 kuai was a little ridiculous. After getting on the wrong bus in a failed attempt to reach another, cheaper entrance, we decided to call an audible. We would get it over with, we would do what every tourist to Nanjing doesn't really want to do but feels obligated to do; we went to the Nanjing Massacre Museum. It was snowing, it was gross outside, so we figured we might as well get the depressing part over with.

Depressing it was, and I'll spare you the details, but it was sad. As a much-needed pick-me-up we copped out and had an American fast food lunch before going back to the hostel to change for the night. Dinner was at a local restaurant that served traditional Nanjiing cuisine, which featured a good deal of seafood and the local specialty, salty duck. Afterwards, we walked around the area outside our hostel, which turned out to be a vibrant, exciting area full of night markets and music. We toured the Nanjing Confucius Temple, which was hosting a New Year's light display. The lights were a bit tacky, but made for some good pictures.

Later that night we went to an area of town mysteriously identified only as "1912." There we found the standard array of clubs and bars, and by around 1:30am we were ready to head back towards the hostel. After changing into some more comfortable clothes, we went upstairs and hung out in the comfortable top floor lounge, where there was a pool table, some couches, and a guitar...all the cliché hostel accessories. All we were missing was some Europeans with body odor and large backpacks. In the lounge we passed the time by manipulating a series of floor lamps to create odd lighting situations and then having a photo shoot with José's cool camera. The strange results can be seen on Snapfish or Facebook.

The next morning we each grabbed some weird breakfast from a market across the square, where Cathy enjoyed some octopus and squid. I was happy to try a piece of most anything that other people ate, but was not willing to buy one of my own...I waited for a coffee from McDonald's. Our first tourist activity of the day was the mausoleum of Sun Yat-Sen, an important political figure in Chinese history. The mausoleum sits on the side of a scenic mountain on the edge of town (the same mountain we had tried to find the previous day), and we were all too happy to be outside on what had turned out to be a beautiful Sunday.

The mausoleum was positioned at the top of a massive, gradually ascending path, which eventually gave way to several hundred steeper stairs. The building on top commands an awesome view of the mountain, the forests below, and the giant city in the distance (Nanjing is a small city by Chinese standards, but still has 7 million people and a massive skyline). We explored the gardens behind the mausoleum and found some of the famed plum blossoms we'd heard so much about. We were glad we'd saved our kuai the day before.

After making our way back down the hill, we took a free shuttle ride to the Linggu Temple, which sat just around the bend on the other side of the mountain. The "Temple" park actually consists of a number of buildings and sights, all of which are connected by beautiful paths that lead up the mountain from one to the next. There are lakes and gardens, the famous "Beamless Hall" which was built without wood thanks to a timber shortage, the Linggu Temple itself, and the fantastic Linggu Pagoda on top of the hill. We would have been happy to walk up the trails, but we found a better way; we rented electric scooters at the bottom. The scooters were hilarious, some fast, some slow. Cathy, from Brooklyn, did not know how to ride a bike and watching her struggle was quite amusing (sorry, Cathy). We scooted up the hill and enjoyed the sights and the beautiful weather, which was still warm as the sun slowly descended over the hills. We climbed to the top of the pagoda and agreed: we liked Nanjing.

Before heading back to Beijing (either by plane or train...I flew), we ate dinner in a small family restaurant. Apparently the restaurant specialty was dog, but we steered clear and ordered more conservative dishes like snail (?). It turns out that to eat snails one must suck them out of their shell; I found this gross but tried throughout the dinner. I never actually succeeded, and I don't think I'm going to be attempting to hone my skills any time soon.

José, the Venezuelan, is always willing to use his basic Chinese friends in often futile attempts to win Chinese friends. These frequency of these efforts increases significantly whenever we are at a restaurant and have a waiter or waitress. After greeting his target, José deploys his go-to phrase, "the icebreaker" as he calls it: 你是不是我的朋友？ Ni shi bu shi wo de pengyou? Are you, or are you not my friend?

Corporate Team Building

Last Wednesday night I went to a soccer pitch in the middle of urban Beijing to play with 9 of my coworkers from my internship at IDC China.

Things got off to a bizarre start when my well-dressed boss and other superiors all stripped down to their tightie-whities in the middle of the field, just a chain-link fence away from the busiest and most famous avenue in all of China. Apparently when they had said "we'll change at the soccer field," they had been speaking quite literally. Nearly all of them had actual soccer cleats, and I felt a little under-equipped in my dirty Saucony running shoes and baggy black sweatpants. We began playing in a small area wedged between several pick-up games, shooting at two shoulder-high goals. I was standing in front of one goal stretching when I noticed that about 7 or 8 of the Chinese players had converged on the ball, like kindergartners at their first practice in the park. Apparently, we had started. For about 15 minutes, I tried my best to stay out of the action and to guess who was on my team (no one had bothered to tell me or answer my panicked questions). In the most politically correct way possible, I will say that in the heat of the action most of my coworkers looked about the same to me. Numerous times I passed the ball to someone I had thought to be a teammate, only to have them race back the other way and score. If my Chinese coworkers hadn't heard the English phrase "my bad" before the other night, they have now.

I started sweating about 30 minutes into the game, and took off my black hoodie, revealing a gray long-sleeve tee shirt. My boss, Luke, ran over and asked, "What are you doing? Will you put that back on?" Apparently, the entire time we had been playing light shirts vs. dark shirts and I hadn't been told. That made things easier, to say the least.

Largely fueled by my ineptitude and communication errors, our team immediately went down something like 7-0. It was embarrassing and despite promising myself that I would stay calm and not try, I started to try. Over the next hour or so, I scored about 15 of our team's 20 goals. We had moved to a larger field, and now that I was able to run in open grass there wasn't a whole lot that many of my opponents could do. I was hailed as a defensive genius, as apparently I was the first to introduce the Chinese people to the concept of man-marking. So you're saying that if you stand in front of an opponent, that makes it harder for them to receive passes and score? Brilliant!

The Chinese also seem to lack a perception of field boundaries, and it was not uncommon to be moving the ball up the pitch only to be brushed back by a pair of wildly sprinting players from the next field over, chasing a long pass.

I know that all of my coworkers know how to speak English, and they were all very kind and spoke to me in English before and after the game. During play, however, there was absolutely no English, bar one word: "Sh*t."

All in all, it was a great experience. I'm hoping it gives me the guts to be more conversational in the office, and that my coworkers will stop referring to me as Messi, the world's best player. I'm not really very good.

Pics on Facebook

Okay everyone, I've finally caved in to immense peer pressure and have posted some photo albums on Facebook. If you're my friend on Facebook, you'll find the new albums in my photo section. They're just selections of the hundreds of photos I took at each place, but you'll see some good ones. If you don't have Facebook (or are not my friend on it) you can do as was previously mentioned and send me an e-mail to request access to my Snapfish page.

THANKS!

Consistently Inconsistent

I've mentioned several times that in China, the word that keeps coming to my mind is 'paradox.' It seems like every day I make a pair of observations that are completely opposite, completely confusing. It's rapid development vs. lingering slums, it's a desire to be stylish like the west vs. being distinctly eastern, it's the rising ultra-high class vs. people who can't get clean water.

The other night I saw a young boy, probably about 4, standing on a stoop in a busy shopping street, his pants around his ankles, peeing into the oncoming sidewalk traffic. His mother looked on with approval. At times like that I wonder, 'what kind of a vulgar, uncivilized place is this? This is anarchy. I can't wait to get to America.'

About 30 minutes later, I saw a young boy, about 5 years old, literally run down a set of stairs in front of a building. He was rushing to offer his frail grandfather a steady arm as he walked up the steps. I don't think many American five-year-olds know a commitment to their elder family members quite like that; it's times like those when I think, 'wow, maybe this place has got some things figured out. We could learn a lot from them.'