Shijiazhuang

After a good night out in the village in Beijing on Saturday (hmm, I seem to be falling even further behind with these posts. Blame Mr. Black.), Phil & Rebecca, Kristy & Angie, and I went our separate ways. On Sunday morning I hopped on a bus bound for Shijiazhuang with the China 13 Corporate Service Corps team and said goodbye to Beijing. I had visited Beijing once before, in 2003, and I found this experience to be very different. My memory had Beijing absolutely filled with bicycles, and this time I saw relatively few – emphasis on “relatively.” And while crossing intersections is still an adventure, it doesn’t compare to the feeling I had in 2003 that there was a 50/50 chance I wouldn’t make it across in the bicycle rickshaw and the awe I felt when a sea of bikes would magically part every time a car came plowing through.

Perhaps the next time I visit Beijing it will have transformed again. As we drove south out of town evidence of further transformation was all around us. Texas-sized highway projects, enormous fields of rubble, high speed rail construction. And an incredible amount of cottonwood drifting between raindrops in the air. All along the highway to Shijiazhuang were rows of trees, neatly planted from four to twenty deep. They guarded the highway from the massive apartment complexes just outside of town, from the factory towns further south, and from the endless wheat fields interspersed along the way. They were infinite. I watched them through the rain and drifted off to sleep.

I awoke with a start to our bus driver laying on the horn. All I could see out my window was the side of a truck. It was raining harder now, all the windows were fogged up, and we were on the shoulder passing a pair of slow trucks, one hauling massive mechanical gear and the other highly piled crops of some sort under a tarp. A few rows behind me our Brazilian colleagues, Thiago and Carlos, were still trying to teach everyone Portuguese. I had already decided that I could go no further than “mano,” apparently short for something like hermano. My capacity for absorbing language was as waterlogged as the road down which we continued to swerve and honk.

Trees

When we arrived at Motel 168 in Shijiazhuang I felt like I was in college moving into the dorms, except that there were infinitely fewer places to store my clothes. Shijiazhuang was as foreign to an American as Texas was to a Wisconsinite. Luckily for me, Phil was busy chasing me down via train and arrived at the hotel late that night. For him it was a good excuse to come back to the town where he learned Mandarin – or at least a reasonable portion of it. A while back, when I told him I was going to spend a month in Shijiazhuang he thought I must have figured out which town he’d lived in and was making a lame attempt at a joke. His assessment of the town was slightly inconsistent with the Chinese waiter at a restaurant in Fresno who had told me it was “a tourist town, similar to San Francisco.”

So we set out to let me soak up some of Phil’s Shijiazhuang knowledge. We grabbed some food at the “boat restaurant” and then had a couple of drinks at the “stair bar.” He invited a former teacher of his to join us. We learned a lot about how one becomes a member of the Party. Fascinating. And I picked up cards written in Chinese for every place we stopped. It would be the only way I’d find my way back via taxi in the coming month.

At any rate, I was quickly settling in. The next day we would meet our clients. To add some drama before wrapping up this post, I’ll note that my colleague Sue has today posted the following: “another scary day with even more questions and problems of our customer.” What will my client be like? (Just to be clear, by now I know what my client is like, this is more of a question you might have in your head, only swapping “Dan’s” or “your” for “my” in that sentence.)

I think this is a picture of Shijiazhuang

Catching Up

A lot has transpired over the past several days. I met the Corporate Service Corps team, Kristy & Angie and I parted ways, I moved into my digs in Shijiazhuang, we met our clients, Phil gave me an insider’s whirlwind tour of Shijiazhuang before he went home to Shanghai, and I was thoroughly dominated in a late night game of ma jiang (or mahjong?). Meanwhile, I seem to have missed the point of a blog, which is apparently to report on things as they happen. So with this blog I’m going to look back on our visit to Beijing, May 6-7. Sort of like my retroactive NCAA Tourney updates, but instead of VCU causing us pain it was every single muscle in our bodies after our Cinco de Mayo Great Wall adventure.

Speaking of Cinco de Mayo, upon returning from The Wall we tried to hit a Mexican restaurant for dinner but it had apparently closed down, perhaps because there seem to be no Mexicans in Beijing. Instead we went to Tim’s for Tex-Mex. At Tim’s there didn’t seem to be any Texans or Mexicans, and there were no Chinese either. We did meet a Canadian who had gone to Fresno State. But in our state of mental and physical exhaustion we could get no finer than “Europe” in deciding what other accents we were hearing in the restaurant. And the food? It met our expectations for Tex-Mex in Beijing.

On Friday we slept in before dragging our weary bodies to Tiananmen Square. It was roped off. The first time I visited Europe I saw it this way: from behind a locked door that said “closed” in a variety of languages. We could see a lot of uniformed men marching up and down some steps, and then pondered the irony of moving on to the Forbidden City since we couldn’t get into Tiananmen Square.

But by the time we’d eaten a bowl of ice cream, the taste of which can only be described as "interesting," the ropes came down. In through a security check we went, along with quite a few people who must have known this was going to happen. The square is a really big slab of concrete with a couple of big monuments on it, Mao’s grave, the biggest flat screen TV this side of Cowboys Stadium, and a dizzying array of police vehicles. They have police cars, police vans, police buses, and police mini-buses that look like clowns may come tumbling out at any moment. They have police bikes, they have police golf carts, they have police scooters, and yes, they have police Segways. And for every policeman they have 10 military personnel.

More Bluth humor

We crossed the street to the Forbidden City. After buying tickets and walking in, we looked at each other and said, “This isn’t the Forbidden City.” So we walked next door and bought more expensive tickets and went in. What struck me about the Forbidden City was that it seemed infinite. Every time you got through a gate or a hall you came to another. And another. And another. The Lama Temple the next day was the same. Temple after temple after temple – the only difference from one to the next was that the Buddhas kept getting bigger. We assumed we’d made it to the end of the Lama Temple complex when we saw a Guinness Book of World Records plaque hanging on the temple door. The Buddhas don’t get any bigger than that.

A lot of China seems infinite. The Wall. The number of steps in The Climb. People on the Hongzhou bus. The Shanghainese appetite for honking horns. Chinese history – our West Lake boat pilot told Phil that he could study for 100 years and wouldn’t be close to knowing it all. The complexity of the Chinese language. The amount of food we would order for dinner, as was the case when Rebecca treated us to a wonderful Peking Duck dinner in Beijing.

Earlier I mentioned irony, so I should probably cut off my rambling examples of infinity right here. I’ll leave you with a picture of me eating my first bowl of DAN DAN NOODLES along a Hutong on our last day in Beijing. They were wonderful, which is lucky because I didn’t want to have to change the name of the blog.

Dan & Dan Dan Noodles

The Great Wall, Part Three

The saga continues...

Not only did I make it up The Climb, but I made it clear to the Five Window Tower, beyond which was the Simatai section of The Wall, now closed for renovation according to our guides. We couldn't be sure because there were no signs, but I for one didn't need to go exploring much further in this direction. At that point Phil called Kristy to discuss our entourage.

"They will want you to buy something from them or give them money. They can be quite persistent."

"We noticed."

"Just be very clear up front that you are not interested."

"What if it's eleven towers later."

"Ah."

Once we got back to the spot where the workers were rebuilding The Climb - we took a shortcut to avoid climbing back down it - our entourage suggested we take a path to the parking lot. But we wanted to keep walking The Wall. "Ok, then you can buy our souvenirs now." It would come to a head here. We talked the bookseller and the Mongolian Farmer into an easy 33% discount for two books, but we didn't want to buy from the third companion, who was now baring her teeth at us in a metallic snarl. As she poked Kristy in the chest with her index finger while exclaiming, "I followed you!" it dawned on me that we were carrying enough cash to buy all of their books, our muscles were near total failure due to three hours of climbing, the workers who had gathered around to watch the negotiations had access to large stones and shovels, and we hadn't seen a single tourist in over an hour.

Thankfully, the people were nice, and as we made our retreat along the wall only the third companion followed, making increasingly desperate offers. A book, a T-shirt, a fan. After she poked Kristy we decided on principle not to give in, and by the next tower she gave up and went home.

Though our time with the entourage was entertaining, at this point the skies seemed to open up and reveal that they are blue in China as well. We had a beautiful walk in the opposite direction over a newly renovated section of The Wall, in the end spending a total of 5 1/2 hours. Mr. Li patiently awaited our return and drove us back to Beijing.

Blue skies emerge.

The Great Wall, Part Two

As Mr. Li drove us the last stretch of the two hour trip to the Jinshanling Great Wall, we had a sense that we were in the mountains, but the sandstorm prevented us from confirming so. The sun was beginning to shine through what we imagined were clouds above when we left Mr. Li to hang out in the parking lot, packed up our water, power bars, layers of clothing and cameras, and set off for The Wall.

From the Jinshanling parking lot it's quite a climb up to The Wall, so we wisely chose to take the cableway, Angie and Kristy in car 29 and me in car 30. During the ascent I noticed a woman hiking up the hills below us carrying a bag full of goods. I suspected that she was carrying water and beer to replenish the vending posts at each of the towers along The Wall, and I began to root for our cable car to hurry up and beat her to the top. The cars were remarkably slow; many times I had to remind myself of what the sign at the bottom had said: "If the cableway is breaking down, do not be afraid." And the woman just kept climbing. She didn't look like she had done this very often but clearly she had. She was sturdy and young, and climbed as if highly motivated.

When we reached the top the views erased the young woman from my mind. As the ticket we had purchased at the bottom said, they were "Dreath-taking." The haze seemed to be dissipating and we could now see that it was indeed a great wall. Angie was taking pictures of Kristy and me when the young woman appeared at her shoulder.

"Hello."

"Oh - hi. Hey, are you the same girl I was talking with at the bottom?"

"Yes."

"Wow! You got up here quickly. That's amazing!"

"Yes, it took me 17 minutes. It took you 16," she explained in fairly decent English.

"Do you do this often?"

"Yes." There was a pause as she caught her breath and then continued talking to Angie. "You said you would like a book?"

"Oh. Well, maybe when we're done."

We stepped from the trail onto the Great Wall. It had been rebuilt at this section and was impressive, wide enough to drive a truck on it, though as we soon would learn this truck would have to be capable of driving vertically. From afar, we couldn't fully appreciate how steep The Wall is, and despite having visited in 2003 (albeit a different section), I was completely unprepared for the utter terror that lie ahead. My fear of heights is so great that when I first went to the top of the arch in St. Louis, I dropped to the floor and held on for dear life. But our walk in the Simatai direction started out pleasantly enough.

After reaching the next tower we noticed that the fast-climbing bookseller was still with us, and now an older friend had joined. The friend carried a bag similar to the first woman's and struck up a friendly conversation. It turns out that she's a Mongolian corn farmer with two children who lives a two-hour walk from where we were standing on the wall. She recommended that we walk to the "Five Window Tower," which looked awfully far away to me but was about one-tenth what Angie was lobbying for us to do. We continued, ascending and descending from tower to tower as The Wall seemed to fall into disrepair under our feet. Soon some excited talk in Chinese was followed by a third companion sprinting up and down the wall to join us. She, too, carried a bag.

Concerned about what sort of implicit contract we'd entered into with these women, Kristy shot a quick text in Phil's direction. About this time we came upon The Climb. The Mongolian Farmer explained that it was 123 steps to the tower. The steps went straight up, and there were no walls alongside to hold onto or against which to faint. And the steps were so broken and worn out that several workers were actually in the process of replacing them. The thought of The Climb made me woozy, and by this point I'd been hiking up and down uneven steps for an hour on legs that spend their days tucked neatly under a desk in my home office. I was thankful that at least the layout of my home forced me to climb stairs to get coffee and lunch during the day.

By the time I had taken a deep breath and given myself a pep talk, Kristy, Angie, and our entourage were half-way up. Now the construction workers were looking down at me wondering what the heck I was doing. So I began to climb, counting each step to see if it was really 123. By the time I got to 18, numbers and their proper sequence stopped making sense to me. 20, 31, 9, noodles. The trees and hills to my left and right seemed to be rushing past like a swollen river, and the steps didn't look like steps at all, more like chunks of gray. I leaned forward and steadied myself with my hands.

In other words, I was crawling. Some laughter registered as I kept moving. Something was said about the horror film The Grudge. "Are you ok?" All I knew is I wanted everyone the hell out of my way. I was climbing The Wall.

The Climb.

The Great Wall, Part One

As we descended into in Beijing on Tuesday, my first impression was, "Wow, the sky is dark yellow." My second impression was, as previously mentioned, "We seem to be going awfully fast still..." followed quickly by, "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!" No, it wasn't quite that dramatic a landing, I'm just checking to see if Johnny is reading the blog. But the lack of visibility was dramatic. The local paper I read during the flight explained that the culprit for the terrible air quality over Shanghai and Beijing was an epic sandstorm raging in the Southern Xinjiang Basin. It also explained that dust is not the only ingredient in such sandstorms, as they also contain "toxic pollutants from coal combustion."

At any rate, breathing was not our immediate concern. We had been bumped to a later flight from Shanghai, which was subsequently delayed, meaning that our driver holding a sign with my name on it had given up and gone home. Without Phil or Rebecca along, we began to encounter the language barrier. Up to this point I had rigorously catalogued the extensive list of phrases we'd learned thus far: hello, thank you, how are you, you're welcome, I don't need it, I don't want it, waitress, and bottoms up. No combination of these phrases could locate our driver until we found a helpful woman at the tourism desk and called our hotel. Eric soon would be on his way with a driver. To kill some time we decided to sample the Terminal 2 Pizza Hut and quickly learned why corn never really took off as a pizza topping in the US.

The drive from the airport was a harrowing one for reasons opposite those that made Shanghai taxis such an adventure. Our driver rarely exceeded 60 km/hr (37 mph) in the left lane on the freeway. It was a good idea not to look out the back window as cars swerved around us going twice that speed. But we noticed another significant difference from Shanghai roads: very little honking. Perhaps a lingering after-effect of an Olympics politeness campaign?

I'm being told that I'm slowing us down and making us late for today's sightseeing in Beijing. This is not the first time I've been told such a thing, but it's forcing me to wrap it up before ever even getting to yesterday's trip to the Great Wall.

As mentioned above, a sandstorm was wreaking havoc on visibility and our lungs, so I was a bit concerned that our trip to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall would lack the coolest element of visiting the wall: watching it stretch endlessly into the distance. I will end with this picture and a cliffhanger (somewhat literally, as will be described in future blog posts). Will we actually be able to see the wall? Will Dan conquer his fear of heights? Will we fall prey to aggressive souvenir vendors?

The Wall is out there.

I Leave Shanghai an Older Man

Even older now that it's taken a while to post, but on Tuesday I celebrated my birthday in Shanghai and Hangzhou / West Lake. The theme of the day was "transportation." Ok, I didn't actually define a theme for my birthday, but looking back we did have some fairly interesting experiences involving transportation. And this doesn't even take into account the Shanghai taxis, which by now we had become accustomed to. The taxis generally just barge their way into any small opening that exists, regardless of lanes, which is fine because they blast their horns a few times to let you know not to hit them. So it's relatively organized chaos. We never even bumped into anyone.

From Shanghai to Hangzhou and back we took a high-speed train that hit 355 km/hr according to the digital speedometer located above the doors between cars. That's just over 220 mph, and I think the fastest I'd ever gone on the surface of the earth up until that point. The record would be broken the next day as our China Eastern flight landed in Beijing and then desperately slammed on the thrust reversers and brakes to get us stopped, which was a unique feeling as well, but the train felt like it was just up and running. It had that levitating feeling like just before you blow over a race boat backwards. Very cool.

Once in Hangzhou we made our way out to West Lake, which received at least 5 stars in the rating system devised by one of Kristy's excited Chinese patients in the weeks prior to our trip. According to the Chinese press, on my birthday the Air Pollution Index in the greater Shanghai area exceeded 500 for only the third time since the scale was devised in June of 2000. This gave West Lake a hauntingly beautiful look that brought tears to one's eyes, as though shrouded in a thin fog. A thin fog that burns your eyes a little bit. There we hired a local gentleman to take us on his small boat around the lake. We were in luck. Thanks to the death of Osama bin Laden, he was willing to give us a special price. For the next thirty minutes we laughed quite a bit as he rowed us around several small islands while animatedly speaking Mandarin trying to convince Phil to move to Hangzhou and begin learning Kung Fu.

Achingly beautiful West Lake.

After leaving West Lake we took another great adventure: the Hangzhou city bus. I must admit I've never even been on a city bus in San Francisco, but I frequently took the bus in Oshkosh, WI while growing up. This was different. To be fair it really wasn't that different, it just had 6 times as many people on it and didn't have any signs or sounds in English. After what seemed like 3 hours gripping the bars and contorting myself into enough space to stand without hitting anyone in the face with my backpack, we were at the train station. Interestingly, we encountered no English at all between West Lake and our seat on the high-speed train home. Thank you, Phil.

So it was a good birthday. At some stage I hope to get back to individually thanking everyone who wished me a happy birthday on Facebook.

A Note on Food

I suspect that a lot of people come to this blog hoping to learn about food, or at least about bland egg noodles served from a pole by peddlers. While these people will be disappointed to learn that one of my favorite restaurants in the world is Cho's Kitchen in Selma, CA and that I've only watched one episode of "Hell's Kitchen," this post is for them.

Thus far the food has been outstanding, though we've been expertly guided by Phil and Rebecca and we've mostly been in highly developed Shanghai. One of the constraints we have is that Kristy does not eat anything that could possibly be construed as seafood. On the flight over, which lived up to longstanding stereotypes for airplane food, one of the better items we received was a plastic bowl of instant Chinese noodles. I thought they were fine. Kristy somehow discerned that "Bonito Powder" is not laundry detergent but derived in some way from fish, and therefore refused to eat them. "This is going to be a long trip," I muttered.

So it was with some surprise that I watched Kristy thoroughly enjoy the notoriously fish-laden Japanese food we had our first night in town. She had noodles. On our second day we walked through a local market and saw a lot of things we have no intention of eating, including a poor catfish being hacked apart with a cleaver in the middle of the street. We opted for Italian food that night.

But by day three we were ready to tackle some actual Chinese food. During our trip to "China's #1 water town," Zhouzhuang, we stopped at a restaurant and began to take notes on what Phil and Rebecca were saying to the waitress.

"I have no idea what they are saying."

"Me neither."

"Hey, that's a cute turtle in that tank over there."

"Hmm."

Out of the kitchen came probably the best Kung Pao I've ever eaten, along with several other tasty dishes. We drank shandies. Phil and I nevertheless felt masculine.

Last night we had more great luck with a late dinner of beef noodles. I would post pictures, but pictures of food never really come across looking very good unless shot in a Hollywood production facility. The below picture doesn't look that great, either, but it was taken near food and hopefuly at least won't make people ill.

No feet eaten yet